More about the team effort: previously myself and other members of the staff have experienced losers on Xbox Live attempting to show off during multiplayer and bringing the duo down due to their sloppiness and ridiculous egos. At least with Rock Band, if someone in your band sucks and is sitting in the same room as you, you can beat them with your mic., guitar, or drum sticks. You want your band to succeed, so all of the members have to be equally capable and choose a level of difficulty that is the actually feasible for them to execute.
However, if one of your band mates blows a solo or just blows a passage in general, they fail. Luckily, if one of your other band members is so kind, they can bring the loser back into the game. Three strikes and you’re out, so use those saves wisely. If your band mate sucks enough to fail the third time, then you’re screwed. Once one of the band members is totally blocked out, your band will most likely fail the song completely. It is important for all of the members to make it through the song in order to make it to the next playlist.
Characters in Rock Band are completely customizable. Everything from clothing to hair, face shape, and so on is available for customization. As I mentioned earlier, success with your band enables you to download and/or buy more options.
Now to the instruments: the $169.99 bundle is a sweet deal because it includes one guitar, set of drums plus sticks, microphone, and the game. You can buy one additional guitar for a team of four to play together. The included guitar controller is similar to the one for Guitar Hero, although it feels more like a real guitar. Without even looking at the brand name I said that the guitar looks and feels like a copy of a Fender Stratocaster, and low and behold… it has Fender Strat tattooed to the headstock. The extra buttons near the top end of the fret board (solo buttons) are really not as scary as they look; unfortunately Rock Band’s guitar parts are much less challenging than Guitar Hero’s.
The drums feel nice, and a light tap is enough to trigger a drum beat. The kick pedal works okay, but is pressed to the floor with a little difficulty. Since you have to beat the kick pedal to the floor to get it to engage, playing really begins to take a toll on your right leg after awhile. Lastly, the d-pad and 4 buttons on the Xbox version of the controller work like crap, so I had to smack the d-pad several times to get anything out of it.
The microphone works great and looks like a real audiotechnica microphone. It picks up the player’s voice really well and seems to register diction decently. No complaints here.
