Rock Band Hands-On--The PS2 Edition

Harmonix's multiplayer rhythm hit Rock Band has been setting hearts aflame nationwide for a few weeks now. That is, at least, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. For all you would-be bandmates who haven't ponied up the cash for one of those consoles yet, take heart: Harmonix and Houston-based partner developer Pi Studios have been working on a PlayStation 2 version of the game. This version will let you get a vocalist, guitarist, bassist, and drummer so that you can pull silly rock-star poses and play through dozens of hit songs all in the same room. We had a chance to whip through a few songs in the PS2 game to see how smoothly it's translated to lesser hardware.

Unfortunately, a number of the modes from the 360 and PS3 versions of Rock Band have been removed from this port. Chiefly, there's no online head-to-head play, which will also preclude the possibility of future downloadable content (though that's not surprising, given the PS2's lack of standard mass storage). The band world tour mode has also been scaled down considerably. In the next-gen versions, you create a band and then tour from city to city, amassing cash, gaining new fans, signing record deals, playing in battle-of-the-bands challenges, and so on. On the PS2, you can still play a four-player career game, but you'll simply progress linearly through each tier of songs, as you would in a Guitar Hero game or one of the single-instrument solo tours in Rock Band. That also means the character creator is gone, so you won't be able to customize your own rock dude or dudette before jumping into the world tour gameplay.

The good news is, aside from those missing modes, this looks like a faithful port of the next-gen version of Rock Band, from what we've played so far. All 58 of the songs in the released version will be included in the PS2 edition. The game will support a 480p widescreen display mode, and we were surprised to see that the game's superbly stylish visuals haven't taken a big hit in fidelity on the PS2. The wildly imaginative venues are still in here, as are the various filters and visual effects (things like film grain, black and white, slow motion) that make the game's concert footage so believable and snazzy. We didn't perform an exhaustive analysis of the graphics, but at first glance, we really didn't see a big reduction in the detail on the character models and backgrounds--though the gamer is lower resolution and consequently a bit fuzzier--so this should remain quite a nice-looking game in the final analysis. Because there's no character creator, the developers have created pre-fab bands corresponding to the different genres in the game--punk, metal, and emo, for instance. You'll see the corresponding genre-based band in the background depending on what song you're playing.

The PlayStation 2 game will be $10 cheaper than its big brothers, meaning that the bundle--including game, microphone, guitar, drums, and USB hub--will come in at around $160, while the stand-alone game will hit at around $50. Most surprisingly, the PS2 bundle will include the exact same pieces of hardware used for the PS3 game, including the USB wireless receiver dongle that allows the wireless guitar controller to work. So if you get the PS2 bundle now, then snag a PlayStation 3 at some point in the future, you could pick up the PS3 version of the game by itself and keep playing with the instruments from your PS2 bundle.

Rock Band is slated to ship on the PlayStation 2 on December 18, so look for a full evaluation of the boxed product soon.