First thirty: The Beatles: Rock Band (PS3)

By Stephen Munn | October 31, 2009

The Beatles: Rock Band is a pretty polarizing game. While nobody seems to see it as a bad game, the limitations on it that isolate it from the rest of the Rock Band product line have created some amount of frustration among those who’ve fallen for that Rock Band magic. Then, there are those of us who’ve never played Rock Band, have stopped playing Guitar Hero, and instead are hopelessly hooked on SingStar. This is where I fit in.

You see, part of the appeal of The Beatles: Rock Band is you don’t need to buy the instruments if you don’t want to play them. If you have a pair of SingStar microphones, you’re totally set. You can play The Beatles: Rock Band like it’s a SingStar game, with some minor adjustments. Well, maybe not so minor. OK, so I’m still trying to get it to work exactly right, but I think it’s my own fault.

The issue I’ve been having is that I get a lot of feedback over the microphones, but if I turn the sensitivity down enough to eliminate it, the mics can’t pick up my voice when I’m not shouting. I figure it’s something with my speaker setup, and I’ll keep playing with the settings before I throw down a review, but I had to mention it because it’s annoying me.

If you look at this as SingStar: The Beatles, it’s very exciting. But then, that’s not what it is. It has a pitch meter, which SingStar really, really needs to get. Also unlike SingStar, it doesn’t have actual music videos in the background, instead going for nicely put together 3D mannequins of the band members. I expect videos for all these Beatles songs would be hard to come by. Then, there’s the price point. At $60 with none of the hardware, this is a full $20 more expensive than SingStar Queen. On the other hand, SingStar queen has about 15 fewer songs. On like the sixth or seventh hand, you can play your SingStar DLC on any SingStar game you want, and swap discs with only a minor inconvenience while the game is loaded. You see how it goes back and forth?

My review copy of The Beatles: Rock Band shipped without any instruments, but I’ve been told a box with the Rock Band 2 instruments will appear in time. I’ll be back with you then.