Review Of Rock Band On The XBox 360

It's no secret that I like video games and have been "rockin' out" to Guitar Hero 3 for several months now. I have about 6 or 7 songs left to beat on hard and it's NOT going well. I can't seem to get my pinky finger working. My poor unused digit starts to ache and then it begins clicking and it's all down hill from there.

The other day i decided to go out and pick up Rock Band and see what it was all about. I started to unpack everything and began the assembly. The Guitar was the fist thing out of the box. After some assembly, I immediately noticed that the new black and white (corded) guitar was really flimsy. It was lighter than my normal "Explorer" guitar and the fret buttons appeared to be a lot cheaper. Also, the "strummer" didn't have that familiar click that the explorer had, it was more, well uh, "musy." It did have a couple of cool features, there was an effects selector to determine sounds during solos and a second set of fret keys down closer to the body of the guitar. The general feeling I got from the guitar is that IT WAS CHEAP.

The drums came out next and went together very nicely. The only thing I noticed was that the cord for the bass pedal seemed short. I tried out the drums on the training mode in an attempt to get the hang of it. After about 40 minutes of playing, the drums quit working. Yep, they just quit working. NO, not just one of them as indicated on so many discussion boards, but the entire set. No power, nothing! Well, that was disheartening to say the least.

Next out of the box was the mic. I plugged it into the supplied USB powered hub and guess what? IT didn't work. Great! I was afraid to plug in the guitar and see if that would work. What do you know, it did! I ended up playing the game with a friend for about an hour.

I have no complaints about the game play. The concept is fun, the graphics are OK, (the are better on GH3) and the music selection is outstanding. However, it seemed like you had to play a bunch of the songs over and over as you went from city to city. Now that I think about it, it's just like a real rock band I guess.

The next day I took it back to target and got my money back, even though the box said not to do that. Yeah right. Target took it back and simply asked the question, "was there anything wrong with the product?" To which I responded, "yep, 2 out of the 3 items don't work."

Today before writing this I went out in search of information about the Rock Band peripherals and it seems that the quality is suffering across the board. Initially, I was thinking that I got a lemon, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Evidently there is a 3rd party vendor getting ready to launch some peripherals. I may wait for those.

Bottom line - It's not worth it, YET! I will probably go out and get the game by itself and maybe an extra guitar, but that's it for now. Give it some time and you should be able to build your band set with some quality pieces from other manufacturers and have tons of fun with 3 other friends. It should be worth the wait.