Rock Band Exclusive - Rock Around the World
Harmonix's music monstrosity will offer the most engrossing career mode in a rhythm game yet, as we found out in our exclusive look at the band world tour mode.
The world tour mode will chart your progress from garage-band nobody to rock god.
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, hairstyle (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 a crucial one, of course.
Once all four players have birthed their rockers, the game will look at everyone's selection of hometown and determine a starting city for your group. The list isn't limited to American rock hot spots, 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 hometown. 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 package, or sponsored events that will feature major contributions from some of the game's licensees, like Fender.
Rock Band Quick Links
Summary | Reviews | News | Previews & Features | Images | Videos | Downloads | Answers | Hints & Cheats | Forum | Check Prices
- GameSpot Score9.0Editors' Choice
Check Prices: $16.5 – 99.99
| GameStop | $19.99 | SHOP › |
| Circuit City | $69.99 | SHOP › |
| Amazon.com | $18.99 | SHOP › |
Content you might like…
-
Rock Band 2 Updated Hands-On - Exclusive Single-Player and Multiplayer Details
We get our hands on Harmonix's Rock Band follow-up for an encore performance.
- Aug 19, 2008
Users who looked at this article also looked at these content items.
Images
Related Unions
- MTV Games, Electronic Arts
- Harmonix Music
- Rhythm / Music
- Release: Nov 20, 2007 »
- ESRB: Teen
Games you may like…
-
Rock Band 2
(X360) -
The Beatles: Rock Band
(X360) -
Guitar Hero 5
(X360) -
Guitar Hero World Tour
(X360) -
Guitar Hero III
(X360)
Users who looked at content for this game also looked at these games.
See More Similar Games
221 Comments