The title of this article is misleading. This is actually more of a love letter to Rock Band.

For years I was a Guitar Hero freak. I don’t want to say that I was the first person I know to own Guitar Hero, but yeah, I’m saying that. Very l33+. I spent hours in the basement shredding up a storm, eventually moving to expert and finishing Guitar Hero I and Guitar Hero II. Then, a misstep. An adventure in money grabbing widely disliked by the Guitar Hero community known as Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80s. The game was a harbinger of the downfall of Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was a disappointing experience. A lot of the game was a rehashing of previous incarnations of the game and that’s not a bad thing. The bad things came in the form of boss battles as well as the increased difficulty. Boss battles are annoying diversions from actually playing music in the game and the increased difficulty makes the final ten tracks in the game utterly unenjoyable. All that being said, the game was one of the best selling of 2007 so really, ‘downfall’ is a relative term.

Ah, but then came Rock Band. With it’s high price tag I thought twice about buying it…well…not really. When it was announced that the game would be delayed by at least a month in Canada, we considered driving down stateside to pick up a copy. Ultimately, we ended up waiting and got the game sometime in early January. To be honest, we haven’t really put down the game ever since.

Without writing a full out review, it’s sufficient to say that the game is best played in multiple numbers. Having a skillful guitar player in Julie, I was free to explore the drums. I should point out that I can actually play the drums and the skills are absolutely transferable, unlike the guitar where your actual skills on the axe have no bearing on your ability to be a guitar hero. Our band, the Space Invaders, have traveled the globe and pleased millions of fans.

Why then, with all this love lavished upon Rock Band do I say it stinks? Well, it’s not so much that the game stinks as it is that I stink after I play it. Drumming on hard or expert means a fair amount of physical exertion. Perhaps “Rock Band Stinks Up The Basement” would be a more complete title but I guess I’m going for shock factor. I challenge anyone to not work up a sweat while playing ‘Go With The Flow’ by Queens of the Stone Age or ‘Reptilia’ by The Strokes. It’s a great workout and I think WiiFit will have a lot to live up to.

The best part of Rock Band is that the game seems infinitely expandable if you’re willing to shell out the dough for the downloadable songs. Guitar Hero has missed a huge opportunity in this area to rake in the cash. They rarely release any downloads in comparison to Rock Band’s solid offering of three songs a week, sometimes six. Even when you do purchase songs for Guitar Hero, they are afterthoughts to the game’s already predetermined setlists whereas Rock Band integrates the songs into the random setlists as well as the ‘make your own’ setlists. Recently, Rock Band added a patch that created an in-game music store that allows you to preview tunes before you buy them. Presumably, this is only going to help increase the game’s already sextuple platinum download status.

Things are not perfect in the land of downloadable content for Rock Band, at least not for those of us north of the border. More on that in my next post…

If you actually follow the link to our Space Invaders profile page, you may notice that it lists me as the drummer, and Chris as the guitarist. That’s because that was the configuration we started out with. It became apparent very quickly that as far as drumming goes, Chris is just better than me. A lot better. So in the interest of getting better scores, more stars, and playing on higher difficulties, we switched roles. One of my only complaints about Rock Band is the limitations they place on you when it comes to changing your band roster. Once you create a character, and make them a drummer, they are a drummer. They cannot sing, or play guitar. Ever. Also, the “band leader” must stay the same. I keep hoping that eventually they will patch this, but so far no luck.

I have always been a fan of rhythm games. I used to be sort of obsessed with DDR, so Guitar Hero wasn’t a big leap for me. I really enjoyed the first game, but after that I sort of lost interest. Mainly because I wasn’t good at it, but also because I just didn’t like the music. Guitar Hero was too metal for me. Especially as the game progressed. Higher difficulty = more metal. Rock Band really mixes things up as far as tracks go. Metallica and Iron Maiden are offset by Boston and the New Pornographers. Not to mention the seemingly limitless supply of downloadable songs.

As the official guitarist of Space Invaders, looking at it from purely a guitar point of view, I believe that Rock Band is more fun than Guitar Hero. Half the reason I stopped playing Guitar Hero was because it was too hard. When they started throwing the orange button at me in GH, the rest of the song was already so difficult that I couldn’t adjust, and learn how to move my hand. Rock Band takes things a little slower, letting me ease into it a bit. Now I say orange button schmorange button. Not that Rock Band doesn’t have it’s tough songs. I still fail out of Green Grass and High Tides every time, even on hard. I wouldn’t dare to try it on expert yet. But unlike GH, I can see that maybe I will get there in the future.

ps – Chris isn’t kidding, he gets really sweaty playing Rock Band. This could partly be caused by the fact that he plays the Rock Band kit like a real drum set. At the end of Reptilia, we have to brush off the wood splinters. No joke.