| | | Beatles-specific version of Rock Band with something like 46 Beatles songs you can play along with on vocals, drums, lead guitar, or bass guitar.
The single player apparently takes you through the band's career, starting in that little cave-like club in Liverpool and ending with trippy "studio" sessions, the roof-top concert, and so forth. My guess--haven't actually played the single-player mode--is that each concert setting has maybe six or so songs to play through, then it's on to the next one. The graphics throughout are extremely slick, with a wide array of transitions and effects used to make the semi-cartoony 3D Beatles characters look like they're in the various styles/eras/art of their songs. I found "Ringo's" slightly off-focus stare a little disconcerting, but for all I know that's how Ringo actually is.
The miniature guitar this version of Rock Band comes with is sort of a fake wood-grain thing, meant to look like Rickenbacker guitars the band used in their early days, I think. I found the fret "buttons" to have a sort of gummy feeling to them, harder to press than the sharper buttons I've used on RB and RB2 guitars--although this could just have been due to this controller being relatively new and not yet "broken in," I suppose.
I don't like the guitar parts of Rock Band anyway. :P Usually I prefer vocals, if it's a song I know, and I know the Beatles songs pretty well, but I found that the vocal pitch-o-meter didn't really appreciate the way I sort of freestyle on my interpretation of the vocals ;), and gave me low scores. I don't care about that, but I did have to be "saved" a few times, which sucks because you don't want your performance to cause the song to stop for your friends mid-way through. Stupid Rock Band! I know the song, just let me sing it the way I want to sing it.
I also found it distracting how Rock Band plays its own subdued version of the original vocals while you're doing your karaoke thing, but I guess you can adjust the volume on that somehow.
One pretty neat thing about the vocals here is that they show subtitles for everything, even the sort of off-the-cuff stuff the band would throw in on some songs, so you actually get to see lyrics that aren't usually shown in their album lyric books. You're actually supposed to do all the barking in "Hey Bulldog," for instance.
As far as I can tell, the major gameplay addition here is that you can have up to three or four (?) vocal parts all singing along, as long as you have enough microphones, and depending on the song. That would probably be pretty cool. Must pressure my friend to invest in more microphones.
Also, unlike earlier RB games I've seen, this one shows you the difficulty rating of each instrument for each song, so you can tell if bass for instance will be relatively easy or tough in a given song.
Apparently only one additional Beatles song has been released as downloadable content so far, seems likely they'll do more as it's pretty much like printing their own money. |
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