Rock Band Exclusive - Rock Around the World

By now, you know plenty of reasons to get excited about Rock Band, the upcoming multiplayer rock extravaganza from MTV Games and the godfathers of rhythm action at Harmonix. There's the full, simultaneous band experience featuring guitar, bass, drum, and vocal gameplay. There's the elaborate array of realistic instrument peripherals that makes the gameplay happen. There's the promise of entire legendary rock albums becoming available for download in the weeks and months after Rock Band's release. Now if you'll let us get all late-night-infomercial-salesman for a minute: "But wait, there's more!" We pulled a handful of eager GameSpot editors into a room full of Rock Band peripherals to check out the new and fully revamped Band World Tour mode, which goes so far beyond the career mode in Harmonix's past Guitar Hero games that it's practically a different game entirely.

Before you can hit the local club circuit and start winning over your loyal base of fans, each member of your band will need to create a rock avatar with the appropriate degree of sneer and swagger. So you'll first pick a name and home city, physique, hair style (including mohawks, dreads, mullets--you get the picture), and all the requisite colors of eyes, hair, personal effects, and so on. The most important choice, though, is attitude. You can pick between rock, metal, punk, goth, and so on, and the effects on your dude or dudette are subtle but immediately noticeable. Go with the punk attitude and you get a good Sex Pistols lip curl going on. The goth choice turns your character's visage downward for proper floor-gazing. It's a superficial choice but also a crucial one, of course.

Once all four players have birthed their rockers, the game will look at everyone's selection of home town and determine a starting city for your group. The list isn't limited to American rock hotspots, either--in addition to such notable cities as New York, Boston, Seattle, and LA, you can go international and start in places like Berlin, Stockholm, and Rome. There will be three venues in each city--small, medium, and large--and they'll be tailored to the local style and culture of each city. For instance, San Francisco has Alice's Free Love Cafe, the Quarter Hole, and finally the Bay City Theater, and you'll get to move up to playing progressively bigger and more elaborate venues as your career explodes.

Before we get to the World Tour progression, let's talk performance numbers. Guitar Hero established the five-star rating system that fans have come to know and love, and that core performance indicator will still tell you how well you did at the end of every song. But Rock Band will actually keep a cumulative tally of those stars at all times, which will tell you at a glance how much of the career mode you've made it through. Then there's your fans. You'll actually know at any given time how many people you've won over, which can certainly be gratifying as you advance through the career mode and see that number continually increasing. Naturally, the more fans you have, the bigger the venues you'll get to play.

But those fans are fickle, and that number goes both ways. If you play poorly and blow too many shows, you'll start losing fans, which not only makes your shows look emptier, but will also limit your ability to play at bigger venues, regardless of your former popularity. (Hey, Def Leppard ain't pulling 'em in like they used to, either.) Harmonix refers to this system in risk-versus-reward terms, since you stand to lose as many fans as you can gain at a given show, especially the bigger shows. If you're going to play a big arena gig, you'd better have your set list down cold--your fledgling career can't stand to alienate that many people at once. If you're trying out new material, better to do it at the local watering hole where you won't scare off too many people if you flub it.

So your band is formed and you've rented out a practice space in your home town. Here's where Rock Band diverges from the old Guitar Hero formula. You'd probably expect each city and each venue to simply represent a tier of unique songs that you can only progress beyond by completing all those songs. (We did.) But the Band World Tour is far more open-ended and interesting than that. Each venue instead represents a tier of activities that you can undertake, from single-song performances to mystery set lists, which can throw any of the previously unlocked songs at you back-to-back. Later in the game, you'll find more specific challenges, such as a punk marathon that requires you to properly play every punk song in the game, or sponsored events that will feature major contributions from some of the game's licensees, like Fender.