The Beatles: Rock Band Review [360]

Do You Want to Know a Secret? I’m not the world’s biggest Beatles fan, probably because I only really listened properly to the band perhaps four or five years ago. My parents were fans, certainly, but for some reason the Fab Four didn’t get much airplay in our house when compared to other music my parents and my brother listened to. The first fifteen or so years of my life gave me an eclectic mix ranging from Dave Dobbyn and ELO to AC/DC and Rage Against the Machine, before I started picking up bits from friends. Hell, I only listened to Led Zeppelin properly a few years ago, for which you are encouraged to mock me in the comments.But I digress. The Beatles never featured particularly highly, for whatever reason, although my musical education has gotten broader and broader over recent years. The Beatles: Rock Band is, for me, the culmination of my Beatles education. (Fear not – fawning though that sounds, I have integrity; you Can’t Buy Me Love and all that.)Turning on The Beatles: Rock Band is a bit like having a brilliant Birthday. There’s spectacle and noise, and great music, and you’re constantly given presents that make you want to Twist and Shout. We’ll take each of those in turn, but first, if you’ve somehow managed to avoid the Guitar Hero/Rock Band phenomenon – entirely possible, as if any game is going to bring the uninitiated in, it’ll be this one – this is the latest in a series of games that have you play along to popular music on a variety of plastic instruments. If you sing, it’s much like karaoke; if you’re on guitar or bass then you hold down fret buttons and click a strum bar; if you’re on drums, then you smash drumsticks against plastic pads, all in accordance with the “notes” on the game screen. A variety of difficulties, tutorials, and even a mode that prevents you from failing out of a song if you’re performing badly mean that players of any skill level can have a good time – particularly if inhibitions are gone due to, say, alcoholic beverages.The opening cutscene, which goes through pretty much every phase of the Beatles’ career, sets the tone, and the reverence for the subject matter continues throughout. There’s just a constant barrage of nice touches that make you smile. The start and end of songs (the loading times, basically) are marked with archive audio of the Beatles tuning up or discussing how the take or performance went. For completing songs in Story mode – which goes through the band’s career chronologically, from the Cavern to the Abbey Road rooftop performance – you’re rewarded with photographs complete with flavour text discussing relevant facts about the song, and archive footage, all pulled from the Abbey Road archives. These things are lovely. None of it feels arbitrary and it does in fact feel like you’re being rewarded for having a good time, as well as helping you get into the theme. More of this sort of thing, please.These little touches extend all the way through. Wary as I am of saying this. considering the number of improvements made in every Harmonix game after Guitar Hero, the company is Getting Better. Harmonix is approaching absolute mastery of the rhythm-action genre. Every aspect of the gameplay itself feels slightly tighter than even in Rock Band 2 – vocals seem more forgiving of vibrato at higher difficulties, which makes singing on Expert a joy rather than the perfection-demanding chore that certain songs were in Rock Band 2. Harder to quantify are the drums and guitar, which have minor, almost indefinable improvements that I can really only explain as “feeling” better.The slavish devotion to the source material comes at a cost, however. Drum fills are gone, replaced with a single green glowing note to activate Overdrive, because anything else would be modifying the original song. The same is true of guitar in that your whammy bar no longer has an audible effect. These changes are understandable, certainly, but even though they don’t make a big impact there’s still a sense of loss.Happily, for every small problem, there are countless things that left me astonished. The dreamscapes are first and foremost in this. The last half of the game is set after the Beatles stopped touring, leaving us with a recording studio that would provide a dull backdrop to 20-odd songs, but a way around this has been found with the studio fading into a variety of beautiful environments and animations that mirror the song’s progression and lyrics. Of particular note are Yellow Submarine and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / With A Little Help From My Friends, which take the theme and run with it to spectacular levels. The latter in particular opens with the Lonely Hearts Club Band playing to a huge audience in beautiful fields with some lovely visual references to the song, before fading into a hot-air balloon for With A Little Help From My Friends. Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows has an amazing psychadelic background that perfectly fits the song itself, while the hypnotising guitar of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and its sudden cessation at the end of the song are wonderfully represented, at that end, by a jarring backdrop – and that for a backdrop that technically isn’t even one of the dreamscapes.{PAGE TITLE=The Beatles: Rock Band Review Page 2}The other major addition is that of the harmonised vocals. If you have three microphones – and don’t forget that Lips microphones will now work – then, assuming you can rig them up with mic stands (impromptu or otherwise), up to three players can sing at a time. Amazingly, the UI for this isn’t too complicated; if the song in question supports three vocalists then three different-coloured bars appear on the vocal window, with lyrics for the solo underneath and the harmony above. Playing guitar and singing to a song you know is joyous, and I’ve Got a Feeling that a lot of people are going to be happy that this ability is so heavily illuminated.All of the old features are still there, though. If I Needed Someone then the full internet options are present, as are friend leaderboards at the end of each song telling you how you compare with your friends Back in the USSR, but – even moreso with the addition of harmonised vocals – local multiplayer is where it’s at. If you and the Boys decide to Come Together to give it a go, it’s unlikely anyone will be disappointed with the instruments as let’s face it: barring one or two exceptions, the majority are enjoyable to guitar or drum along to, there are plenty of good basslines (which, I admit, I’ve been caught playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps), And Your Bird Can Sing.It feels like almost every design decision is correct, right down to the 45 song tracklisting. While that might seem a bit short these days, with even the first Rock Band title sporting over 60 in Europe, it feels to me more like a welcome return to form. There aren’t many dud songs on there, and it means that there’s plenty to occupy you until the DLC comes out while not overwhelming you in music. You’ll play everything at least once and you’ll find your favourites. That said – considering the involvement and support of the surviving Beatles and the clear desire to create a product for the fans – it’s disappointing that McCartney and Starr didn’t take more of an active role in the game itself. Would it have been too much to ask for the pair to perhaps voice the tutorials? As it is, there isn’t so much as a Hello Goodbye, and once you notice this it’s a tad disconcerting. Hm.Anyway, to Get Back to it: when you heard about The Beatles: Rock Band, did you perhaps wail “Don’t Let Me Down?” You needn’t have worried. I’ve been playing Eight Days a Week, even relaxing with it after A Hard Day’s Night, and I Feel Fine. While it’s not necessarily the Revolution of the genre that was promised (as early interviews and reveals had Harmonix claiming it’d be quite different to Rock Band), it’s still a Helter Skelter of superb songs and stunning dreamscapes, with perfectly rendered Beatles and an Octopus’ Garden of genuinely fascinating rewards for the time you spend with it.It’s a genuinely loving tribute to the band and I find it hard to believe that even someone who only listens to the odd song could fail to be enthralled. If you don’t like any Beatles songs then you’re probably not going to get too much out of it, sure, but anyone past that – whether a die-hard Beatlemaniac who knows how to Dig a Pony, or simply a Day Tripper who wants to sing along to I Am the Walrus – is going to find Something to love here. It’s a Ticket to Ride a roaring train of Beatles experiences, and in The End, that sums it up: as good a game as this is, it’s really an experience that should be undertaken by anyone with an interest in the band.