MTV Games Rock Band Special Edition for Nintendo Wii

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nice too that the song packs end up slightly cheaper than downloading each song individually.

But... I find it downright criminal that the Guitar Hero and Nyko after-market guitars are incompatible. Its never been a secret that the GH and Frontman guitars act like custom nunchuck attached to the wii-mote. Heck, people have made their own by taking a nunchuck apart and building their own guitar shell. No, for this to occur, the Rock Band developers had to specifically disable the ability to use a wii-mote for anything but use along side the microphone. This wasn't a clash with Activision like with the PS3 incompatibility, this is directed straight at the consumer to force people who want to play a full "band" to buy yet another item from them. Thats unforgivable.

MTV Games Rock Band Special Edition for Nintendo Wii

...

played real-live guitar, bass and sang in bands for over 25 years now (geezzz, I'm not really THAT old) and I've actually played real drums before. The Rock Band drums, although different in size and placement than an actual drum set, feel very good and respond nicely to being played correctly to the beat/notes of the song, etc. I was suprised at how well playing the drums matches up with the song correctly in the game as you play right on the beat... and it certainly gives me my "drum fix" without getting too hard if I don't want it to be. Playing the drums in Rock Band definitely give you a good feel of what it is really like to sit behind a drum set and play an actual drum beat... mechanically (the coordination of your hands and kick drum foot) and spatially (the movement between drums). As a result, you'll find that playing the drums feels a lot more "real" than playing the guitar does. However, there's nothing wrong with the guitar play in Rock Band, and it is almost identical to Guitar Hero gameplay. The singing via the mic is great... everyone wants to be a singer! You have to try to sing on pitch and articulate the lyrics correctly to get the best scores, but you don't have to be very close to perfect except in the harder difficulty modes. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the mic and singing part of the game works. The mic also doubles as a tambourine or cowbell during non-vocal parts of the songs - which you have to tap along on the mic according to the beats that come up where the singers words are usually displayed (i.e. in most cases, you don't sit around doing nothing while the rest of the band is jamming through a solo part or whatever - you have to keep on jamming too!).

The difficulty is very well done... "Easy" mode is truly easy regardless of instrument. The "Medium" mode is good for those who've played this kind of game... I played the entire game on Medium (guitar) from the get-go and did pretty well, despite my limited knowledge of many of the songs and lack of any extended practice with Guitar Hero. My daughter has been working on guitar parts in "Hard" mode (she's already surpassed me) and it's definitely "hard", using all 5 buttons on the guitar with only 4 fingers to press them, and there are some fast phrases with multiple simultaneous notes and tricky patterns. This is true of Hard mode for guitar, bass and drums. I've been playing the drums on Hard difficulty... it can be really tough, just like the real songs, which have some incredible drum parts and can be truly difficult. "Expert" mode is just that... it's EXTREMEMLY hard. You'll have to practice extensively to have any chance of completely a song on "Expert". For singing, the difficulty setting controls how accurate you have to be with articulation and pitch. If you can sing, and you know the song well, it's actually going to be easy for you to score well even at Hard difficulty.

The difficulty makes sense for the drums and vocals. At the harder difficulty settings, you have to play/sing more of what the real band plays/sings in the real songs. For the guitar parts, it really just gets into trickier patterns of button presses (with two or three-button simultaneous presses being more common), with strumming rhythms that tend to match more closely to the song. But that's not a limitation of Rock Band in particular, it's a limitation of playing guitar with 5 buttons - it's just doesn't capture the feel of a true guitar with 20+ frets and 6 strings. Despite that fact, the guitar/bass gameplay in Rock Band is still a lot of fun.

The best thing about the game difficulty: each player in a band can choose their own difficulty independently of the rest of the players (in multiplayer mode). I can play drums on Hard mode while my wife sings on Easy mode and my daughter plays Bass on Medium. We can do well TOGETHER, at our own maximum skill level for each song to test ourselves. If one player has trouble and fails, the other players can "save" the failed player and bring them back in. It's a very ingenious feature to keep with the "having fun together" spirit of the game! And that's what you'd expect for a Wii game in general - keep everyone playing together and having fun.

Also, I feel that these games, in general, are a good learning tool for music skills. They require different levels of coordination and rhythm, and a keen sense of rhythm and timing. If your kids like these games and excel at them, it's quite possible that they could have the mentality, endurance and basic skill set needed to take on a real instrument and take their musicianship to the next level.

So that's the good stuff... the game is definitely FUN, the hardware works well, and you can feel like a real drummer and singer if you get into it on the harder modes. It's a blast playing it with the whole family, going on a simulated "rock and roll tour" together.

The main let-down for me is the song selection. I'm not sure why some of the songs were chosen... they're either somewhat obscure, or B-sides, or just downright off the wall. I can say that I've *heard* many of them on the radio or whatever, but for a game with a limited song list (63 in this game), they should be choosing songs from the "cream of the crop" of rock and roll which have undisputed popularity. There's no Led Zepellin, Beatles, Doors, AC/DC, Cream, Def Leppard, Santana, ZZ Top, Allman Brothers, Journey... instead there's some pretty obscure stuff like Nine Inch Nails, Maps, Radiohead, Weezer, The Killers, etc. Also, the song choices for the bands that are popular is lacking in particular cases. I realize they can't please everyone, but there should be a base-line that is "popular classic rock hits" in my opinion. Get a list of "Top 100 Rock Songs Of All Time" or similar and use that as a basis. Save the other genres for add-on packs for the specific genres... different "flavors" of "rock and roll", etc.

Don't get me wrong, it can still be a lot of fun to play the songs you don't know on the various instruments, and likely, the kids aren't quite as "biased" as their parents might be about the song content, but it's not very fun to sing songs you don't know. If you just plain don't LIKE a song, you still have to play through it successfully to unlock the rest of the songs. Some of the obscure ones can contain some "raw" lyrics that you might not know about because you've never heard the songs... so keep that in mind when evaluating the game for the kids. They might have added a feature to "lock out" songs so you don't have to play them (or if you wanted to censor them for your kids), but they probably figured the ones they chose are pretty "tame"... and they are for the most-part.

Another let-down is the omission of the capability to buy the songs you WANT online with the Wii version.

Maybe that will change eventually, but the game is so fun, it's really only the song selection that's holding it back from being truly GREAT for me, which is why I only gave it 4 stars overall.

The "Track Pack 1" product is also somewhat of a let-down for the same reason. There are 20 songs for $30, and many are just "obscure" (Who cares about another obscure "Weezer" song anyway?). Also, for some reason, it's a separate disc that is essentially a new game with only 20 songs to play, completely separate from the original game, rather than what you'd expect - 20 new tracks to add into the original game so that you can perform from a repertoire of 83 songs instead of 63.

MTV Games Rock Band Special Edition for Nintendo Wii

...

played real-live guitar, bass and sang in bands for over 25 years now (geezzz, I'm not really THAT old) and I've actually played real drums before. The Rock Band drums, although different in size and placement than an actual drum set, feel very good and respond nicely to being played correctly to the beat/notes of the song, etc. I was suprised at how well playing the drums matches up with the song correctly in the game as you play right on the beat... and it certainly gives me my "drum fix" without getting too hard if I don't want it to be. Playing the drums in Rock Band definitely give you a good feel of what it is really like to sit behind a drum set and play an actual drum beat... mechanically (the coordination of your hands and kick drum foot) and spatially (the movement between drums). As a result, you'll find that playing the drums feels a lot more "real" than playing the guitar does. However, there's nothing wrong with the guitar play in Rock Band, and it is almost identical to Guitar Hero gameplay. The singing via the mic is great... everyone wants to be a singer! You have to try to sing on pitch and articulate the lyrics correctly to get the best scores, but you don't have to be very close to perfect except in the harder difficulty modes. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the mic and singing part of the game works. The mic also doubles as a tambourine or cowbell during non-vocal parts of the songs - which you have to tap along on the mic according to the beats that come up where the singers words are usually displayed (i.e. in most cases, you don't sit around doing nothing while the rest of the band is jamming through a solo part or whatever - you have to keep on jamming too!).



The difficulty is very well done... "Easy" mode is truly easy regardless of instrument. The "Medium" mode is good for those who've played this kind of game... I played the entire game on Medium (guitar) from the get-go and did pretty well, despite my limited knowledge of many of the songs and lack of any extended practice with Guitar Hero. My daughter has been working on guitar parts in "Hard" mode (she's already surpassed me) and it's definitely "hard", using all 5 buttons on the guitar with only 4 fingers to press them, and there are some fast phrases with multiple simultaneous notes and tricky patterns. This is true of Hard mode for guitar, bass and drums. I've been playing the drums on Hard difficulty... it can be really tough, just like the real songs, which have some incredible drum parts and can be truly difficult. "Expert" mode is just that... it's EXTREMEMLY hard. You'll have to practice extensively to have any chance of completely a song on "Expert". For singing, the difficulty setting controls how accurate you have to be with articulation and pitch. If you can sing, and you know the song well, it's actually going to be easy for you to score well even at Hard difficulty.



The difficulty makes sense for the drums and vocals. At the harder difficulty settings, you have to play/sing more of what the real band plays/sings in the real songs. For the guitar parts, it really just gets into trickier patterns of button presses (with two or three-button simultaneous presses being more common), with strumming rhythms that tend to match more closely to the song. But that's not a limitation of Rock Band in particular, it's a limitation of playing guitar with 5 buttons - it's just doesn't capture the feel of a true guitar with 20+ frets and 6 strings. Despite that fact, the guitar/bass gameplay in Rock Band is still a lot of fun.



The best thing about the game difficulty: each player in a band can choose their own difficulty independently of the rest of the players (in multiplayer mode). I can play drums on Hard mode while my wife sings on Easy mode and my daughter plays Bass on Medium. We can do well TOGETHER, at our own maximum skill level for each song to test ourselves. If one player has trouble and fails, the other players can "save" the failed player and bring them back in. It's a very ingenious feature to keep with the "having fun together" spirit of the game! And that's what you'd expect for a Wii game in general - keep everyone playing together and having fun.



Also, I feel that these games, in general, are a good learning tool for music skills. They require different levels of coordination and rhythm, and a keen sense of rhythm and timing. If your kids like these games and excel at them, it's quite possible that they could have the mentality, endurance and basic skill set needed to take on a real instrument and take their musicianship to the next level.



So that's the good stuff... the game is definitely FUN, the hardware works well, and you can feel like a real drummer and singer if you get into it on the harder modes. It's a blast playing it with the whole family, going on a simulated "rock and roll tour" together.



The main let-down for me is the song selection. I'm not sure why some of the songs were chosen... they're either somewhat obscure, or B-sides, or just downright off the wall. I can say that I've *heard* many of them on the radio or whatever, but for a game with a limited song list (63 in this game), they should be choosing songs from the "cream of the crop" of rock and roll which have undisputed popularity. There's no Led Zepellin, Beatles, Doors, AC/DC, Cream, Def Leppard, Santana, ZZ Top, Allman Brothers, Journey... instead there's some pretty obscure stuff like Nine Inch Nails, Maps, Radiohead, Weezer, The Killers, etc. Also, the song choices for the bands that are popular is lacking in particular cases. I realize they can't please everyone, but there should be a base-line that is "popular classic rock hits" in my opinion. Get a list of "Top 100 Rock Songs Of All Time" or similar and use that as a basis. Save the other genres for add-on packs for the specific genres... different "flavors" of "rock and roll", etc.



Don't get me wrong, it can still be a lot of fun to play the songs you don't know on the various instruments, and likely, the kids aren't quite as "biased" as their parents might be about the song content, but it's not very fun to sing songs you don't know. If you just plain don't LIKE a song, you still have to play through it successfully to unlock the rest of the songs. Some of the obscure ones can contain some "raw" lyrics that you might not know about because you've never heard the songs... so keep that in mind when evaluating the game for the kids. They might have added a feature to "lock out" songs so you don't have to play them (or if you wanted to censor them for your kids), but they probably figured the ones they chose are pretty "tame"... and they are for the most-part.



Another let-down is the omission of the capability to buy the songs you WANT online with the Wii version.



Maybe that will change eventually, but the game is so fun, it's really only the song selection that's holding it back from being truly GREAT for me, which is why I only gave it 4 stars overall.



The "Track Pack 1" product is also somewhat of a let-down for the same reason. There are 20 songs for $30, and many are just "obscure" (Who cares about another obscure "Weezer" song anyway?). Also, for some reason, it's a separate disc that is essentially a new game with only 20 songs to play, completely separate from the original game, rather than what you'd expect - 20 new tracks to add into the original game so that you can perform from a repertoire of 83 songs instead of 63.