(My camera is a piece of crap, sorry)
Well, I did say I missed Rock Band at the convention, but I didn't miss it on the University of Pennsylvania campus. They had a truck set up near the main bookstore with some Rock Band demo units in the back and with a stage in front where you could make a fool with yourself. There were cameras and some recording equipment out there as well, and according to some signs I saw, they were looking to record some participants for this MTV contest or something. I didn't really care about the specifics, to be honest. However, I did care about the game, and while I didn't get the chance to play it (curses!), I did spend some time watching people monkey around with it. I'm sure none of this will be new to people who've been keeping up with the game, but hey, I haven't, and maybe you haven't too!
Well, it looks like a fun game: you get a bunch of friends together, have them pick out a song to play, and get them to hammer on a bunch of plastic instruments. The guitars themselves are modeled after Fender Stratocasters, and they look pretty cool overall. The buttons aren't bright colors like the Guitar Hero controllers, either, so they look slightly more realistic, if that even matters. I was also surprised to see that the drum sticks were authentic and not plastic at all. While you will be playing on plastic instruments, they certainly don't look like toys, which is a pretty good thing.
The demo on display only had five songs to choose from. I don't know how many times "Black Hole Sun" and "Wanted Dead or Alive" were played when I was there, but it sure seemed like a lot. You can select the difficulty level separate from each instrument, which I thought was helpful, and the menus seemed pretty easy to navigate as well. As for the game itself, it's pretty much what you'd expect: the instrument players hit their notes/beats in time with the song according to what's on screen, and the singer does his or her best to stay and pitch and sing the lyrics. All of it seemed pretty accurate and easy to work with. When one person screwed up a lot, only they dropped out of the song; everyone else kept playing. At the end of one playthrough I witnessed, there was a jam session of sorts, with the players just madly mashing on their instruments and and the singer belting out whatever was lodged in his throat. It was a kind of bonus round, really, and it looked like a good way to cool off after a long song.
But once I continued watching people play, I came to a realization about who this game might be for. Guitar Hero, I think, leans heavily towards a lot more "harder" rock and some classic rock, particularly with metal songs. In Guitar Hero III alone you've got Slipknot, Iron Maiden, Dead Kennedys, Smashing Pumpkins, Dragonforce, and White Zombie, for example, with some stuff like the Rolling Stones and Santana on the side. While I'm seeing a lot of the same bands and even a few songs in both games (hey, both have "Mississippi Queen" and "Cherub Rock"), I'm also noticing some "lighter" stuff in Rock Band as well - Boston, Rush, the Police, and the aforementioned Bon Jovi. This is not to say any of these bands are bad or anything, I'm just saying the the song list in Rock Band seems to have a wider appeal than the one in Guitar Hero III does. Check them out and see what I mean.
Granted, I'm not a big music nut, so my analysis could be way off, but Guitar Hero seems to be aiming for mainly the hard rockers and the metal heads, while Rock Band is definitely going for a wider demographic. I suppose part of this has to do with the fact that there's a singer thrown into the mix. I imagine your throat would get pretty raspy if you tried to sing some of the harder metal stuff in Guitar Hero. But this title is also getting published by EA, who does often appeal to larger groups of people, and Harmonix, the developers of the game, admitted this themselves: "We'll be covering a great breadth, from metal to classic rock to Southern rock to everything in between." If this isn't a sign that they wanted Rock Band to appeal to a wider audience, I don't know what is. Maybe that'll give Rock Band a certain niche to stand out in.
Not sure about the price tag, though. $170 is less than you would expect for a full game, three fake instruments, and a microphone, but I'm not sure how well it'll go over with your average consumer. We'll see come this holiday season.
