The Long and Winding Road

If you’re not familiar with Harmonix’s work on the Guitar Hero franchise and its various branchings, here’s a quick primer. Harmonix had a runaway hit with their Guitar Hero rhythm game which featured a special guitar controller, and it made Activision a great deal of money. The software was made by the rhythm game masters at Harmonix, the guitar was made by peripheral masters RedOctane, and the Guitar Hero brand was owned by publishing master Activision. MTV decided to get in on the action, so they bought Harmonix. In what looked at the time like a panic, Activision bought RedOctane. Most of us wondered what would happen next, now that RedOctane, Harmonix, and Guitar Hero could no longer work together. What happened was Rock Band.

I Should Have Known Better

When Neversoft took over developing the Guitar Hero games for Activision, there were some ups and downs. Harmonix never made a Guitar Hero game (or anything else) on a Nintendo platform, so those of us squarely in the Nintendo camp had no great love for that developer. With Activision’s backing, the skilled programmers at Neversoft made Guitar Hero III for every console, and I was there on day one. Most people will agree that Guitar Hero III was OK, but its surprising difficulty made the game more frustrating for me than fun, even on medium difficulty. I eventually ended up unloading the game, and decided I was done with such games.

There’s a reason I’m providing all this background, and it’s because this conflict, this great musical struggle between publishing titans Activision and EA, has really driven the genre in some fascinating directions. Neversoft eventually got a solid grip on Guitar Hero with Guitar Hero 5, which is, reportedly, very good. Harmonix refined their already impressive skill set with Rock Band 2. Capitalism is like that, but if we take a step back and have a look at what this has done for the consumer, we may not be pleased with what we find.

Don’t Let Me Down

A good portion of this wrestling match has been over licensing of music. Now that it’s a standard for all the music in these games to be played by the original artists, exclusives with the more desirable names could theoretically mean big sales. When it was announced that the Rock Band name would connect to The Beatles name, everyone was excited. Tired of not being good at playing toy guitars that only hurt my hands, I had moved on to singing along with music videos in Sony’s SingStar games. Beatles: Rock Band still caught my eye, but my real excitement was when I heard mention of SingStar The Beatles, a game that never existed and likely never will. I responded with anger over this licensing exclusivity, because I wanted to play SingStar The Beatles. I softened up a bit when it became clear that I could get the game and play it with my SingStar microphones. So I asked the people behind the game for a copy.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a stunning, stirring, and at times beautiful yet shallow guided tour through The Beatles’ career. SingStar: The Beatles this is not. In fact, there are a lot of things that The Beatles: Rock Band isn’t.

And Your Bird Can Sing

When I received my review copy of Beatles Rock Band, all they sent me was the standalone disc, which was fine. I had planned to review the game as a SingStar title, since there have been bundles shown of the game with the SingStar microphones for PS3. When I started the game up, it was ready to go as just a singing game, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that the game doesn’t stand up as a direct competitor to SingStar. The singing experience is much more refined, and above all much, much more challenging in SingStar. On medium difficulty, you can miss notes while singing and still score 100% in BRB. If I could do that in SingStar, I’d have a SingStar (90%+) rating on every song by now. I don’t.

Beyond the challenge, there are a number of features BRB doesn’t have that we enjoy in SingStar. This includes the original music videos, as all the performances in BRB are constructed using surprisingly distinctive, but somewhat stylized 3D Beatle character models in rendered environments. An option to watch videos of the real people would have been pretty great, and I think I would have seriously preferred it to what’s here now, even if the picture quality had been poor. There’s also no ability to record and share audio and video in the game, which is something I’ve become very used to in SingStar.

Perhaps it’s more fair, though, to compare this game to Rock Band 2. There are roughly half as many songs in it, there’s no character creation or tour mode, and absolutely nothing in the game can be personalized. In SingStar, as in Rock Band 2, each player has a name and avatar and all their records are kept by the game. In BRB, everyone on your system has the same name, and it’s the name of your system profile. You can still play it online, and leaderboards will show you how your score on a song compares to that of your friends, which is nice.

Getting Better

There are things here I wish SingStar would adopt, too, like a pitch meter and the scrolling lyrics option. In SingStar, you are given very little indication of where your voice is relative to where it’s supposed to be in many cases, and the lyrics of a song are invisible until it’s time to sing them, so it’s easy to screw up if you’re not ready for what’s coming. Get right on that, Sony.

Harmony is handled differently in BRB than it is in SingStar. When more than one person is singing, if you choose to do harmony, BRB doesn’t distinguish the voices by player. What that means is, one of you can sing the low harmony while the other sings the melody or high harmony, and then you can switch within the same song. The game doesn’t seem to care whether you’re singing the right Beatle’s part throughout the song, and it really kind of feels more lazy than forgiving. I’ve read that the original Rock Band had much less forgiving vocals even than Rock Band 2, so this may instead be a concession to the audience.

Come Together

While I intended to approach the game from the perspective of a hard core SingStar fan, I was given more opportunities when just days after BRB arrived, I received a set of Rock Band 2 instruments to play with the game. I got to work assembling everything and was pleasantly surprised at their construction, as I had heard such bad things about the Rock Band 1 instruments that I expected the worst. Armed with a set of instruments, I set about discovering that BRB is not about the singing at all, but rather about the whole band experience. For me, in fact, it seems to be all about the guitar, because it turns out I can’t drum my way out of a wet paper bag.

I tried some online Quick Play and found the experience to be reasonably tight. There’s no online play in SingStar, but BRB lets you link up with other players and play through the songs on the disc however you like. An online community to share and rate audio and video, as in SingStar, would be nice for BRB.

Yer Blues

Both games have downloadable content, but Beatles Rock Band only works with Beatles DLC, and vice versa. So you can’t play any of your existing Rock Band DLC in Beatles Rock Band and you can’t play any of your Beatles Rock Band DLC in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. This stands in stark contrast to SingStar, because even while playing SingStar Queen, you can play any of your DLC, and you can swap to your SingStar Queen disc from any other SingStar PS3 game and play those songs in that environment without issue. Even Rock Band players got to bring their Rock Band songs into Rock Band 2 if they had a code and five dollars. Beatles buyers don’t.

Further, you can’t mix and match your Beatles or their venues. While progressing through the Story mode in the game, you play sets of Beatles songs in controlled venues. The Beatles change over time through their career. John grows long hair, Paul grows a beard, they change costumes, things like that. There is no way in the game to take the suited, bowl cut Beatles and have them sing Yellow Submarine on a rooftop. Every time you sing a particular song, it will be the same set of four Beatles, and they’ll be in the same venue.

Naturally, it’s not exactly the same thing. Every time you sing one of the songs off SingStar Queen, you’re going to have exactly the same experience. It’s the same song, with the same video. The difference here is that this is a standard for SingStar, but it’s not for Rock Band. It’s clear that such restrictions must be a concession to Apple Corp, the publisher behind The Beatles’ music. I expect that concession to such demands is why we’re seeing Beatles: Rock Band rather than Guitar Hero: The Beatles. One has only to look at the legal struggles between Kurt Cobain’s estate, No Doubt, and Activision to understand what happens when such agreements are not tied up with very solid legal language.

Tell Me Why

That’s what it all comes down to, though. Beatles: Rock Band gives us the general Rock Band mechanic with Beatles music, which is great. I don’t expect people will say the game should never have been made, and honestly whenever you bring out something as influential as The Beatles, not everyone is going to be happy with the result. The key problems with the game are the limitations on what you can do with the music, characters and venues, as well as a short song list (just 44 tracks) out of the box. All these issues would have been much more acceptable at a lower price point, than the $60 we’re looking at right now.

Would we have preferred a song list twice this length, with all the existing limitations, at an $80 price point, or even $100? It’s hard to say. Is it reasonable for us to let EA, MTV, Harmonix, and Apple Corps off the hook on this one? As consumers, we see $60 as a maximum this generation. Rock Band 2 came out with 80+ songs from a multitude of artists and publishers at $60 and everyone got paid enough. How is it that a short compilation of one artist’s music, when tied to their likenesses and carefully assembled venues, warrants the same price point?

Think For Yourself

It’s indisputable that there is nothing in musical history quite like The Beatles. It is my opinion that even with the limitations imposed by Apple Corps, the game still provides plenty of enjoyment for those who love this music, and my wife and I are crazy about the music. I can’t stop playing “Here Comes the Sun,” even though the guitar work kicks my ass. What’s here looks and sounds great. It’s fun playing through Story mode and watching the Beatles evolve over time. It’s exciting to think that, eventually, we might be able to play any Beatles song we want, Rock Band style, even if we have little control over the circumstances.

Your enjoyment of Beatles: Rock Band will come down to just a handful of things. How troubling are the limitations to you? How much money is the software worth? If you accept the limitations and feel that the music is worth it anyway, go for it. It seems to me that those who have the most trouble with this game are those who expected more out of it due to having played Rock Band and Rock Band 2. The best thing to do is learn as much you can about what the game is, and what it isn’t, and make a decision from there.

The End

If you’re looking for SingStar The Beatles, you haven’t found it. If you’re looking for a The Beatles track pack for Rock Band, you haven’t found that either. Still, it’s Rock Band, so the mechanics are solid. The songs are great, they’re fun to play, and a lot of care has gone into what little is in the design. I find the game very enjoyable, and I think most Beatles fans will, even if they might prefer the price come down a little before they take the plunge. I give the game 3.5 out of 5.

Tell Me What You See

Since so many of us on Aeropause have been playing The Beatles: Rock Band, we decided to collaborate on this review. This is especially important because I have next to no background with Rock Band before this. To that end, here are the opinions of some of the other writers on the site.

Joe Fourhman says:

The game over-promised and under-delivered. When Harmonix first announced a Beatles game, they were deliberately cagey about what the game would be. I seem to recall them promising something totally different from Rock Band, which, in the end, seems to have been a red herring designed to make us not expect interoperability across all Rock Band versions. And then the game just ends up as the absolute nicest version of Guitar Hero Aerosmith that you could imagine!

I know there’s a lot of defense talk that says the game is best-loved and perhaps even intended for NEW gamers, not established Rock Band fans. I say nuts to that. Even if you just walk in having never played one of these before, when you compare the features of Rock Band 2 for $60 to the features of Beatles: Rock Band for $60, BRB comes up short. Way short. You’d have to be a Beatles superfan to not see the disparity. At the least, Beatles should have arrived at $50. Unless the Beatles is your most favorite group ever, you’re not getting as much for your $60 as with RB2, and the hooks plainly aren’t there to keep the game viable in the long term. Sure, tons of people love the Beatles, but will they love the career-spanning setlist that includes some truly left-of-center song choices? There are so many well-loved tracks that could have been included to get that list up to a number more in line with other games, and instead Harmonix chose to gimp the list and ding us for DLC (which is arriving at a glacial pace.)

Which brings up another point: whose fault is it? All fingers point to Apple Corps. Not being able to change venues, not being able to use the whammy, not being able to trade songs and DLC back and forth. BRB suffers from upper-level management syndrome, and Harmonix had to bow because, well, it’s the Beatles. I’d let them off the hook for the whammy bar and a few other misses, but taken in total, the game has far too many petty restrictions on it.

One of the world’s greatest bands should have received one of the world’s greatest games. I’m glad that the bonus photographs/movies, character animations and cutscenes are so well done, because if those had sucked, you’d be looking at one giant Beatles cash-in turd.

I asked what the game needed to improve things, and he added:

Swappable DLC is a given. The Beatles songs should have been exportable to RB2, even for another $10 fee. Future Beatles DLC should have been compatible with all Rock Band releases. Should have had at least 60 songs (RB2 had like 80).

The lack of whammy and drum fills is minor, but seems like a petty concession to Apple Corps. Really, the Beatles are the one band in the world that we dare not improvise over?

DLC songs do not appear in the career mode. So all those Trophies that are based on career mode can only ever be accomplished by playing the same 40 songs over and over again, no matter how many new songs you buy.

I would have liked the ability to mix and match the Beatles avatars and venues. I think the bizarre psychadelic stew of Young Paul and Guru George and TV Ringo and Hairy John would have fit right in with the dreamscape angle. Why on earth am I forbidden to play Sgt Pepper on the Ed Sullivan stage? Again, the slavish adherence to the actual Beatles career just ends up dropping features that we take for granted in other games. George and Ringo at least were big Monty Python fans… and prankster absurdity was a big part of the Beatles vibe. So why does this game play it so safe?

Speaking of the vaunted dreamscapes, most of them are just cheesy video effects. Not enough are full blown videos. The dreamscapes were pitched as something that would help justify the game’s loss of standard Rock Band features… and only a handful are truly cool and well-thought-out productions. Same deal with the supposedly “never before heard” audio snippets that play between tracks during the Abbey Road sections. Boy, what a joy to hear a reel rewinding and John mumbling something.

Although the animated open and close is just unbelievably beautiful. Even the animation industry veterans over at CartoonBrew.com were drooling over it. And I do like the photo galleries and unlockable rare videos. So those bits held up their end of the bargain.

Joe Haygood says:

After  I played through The Beatles: Rock Band, I was in conflict.  On the one hand, we had a game that featured some of the best tracks from one of the greatest bands ever, all in one place.  But with all of that, I felt a bit hollow inside.  The Beatles: Rock Band is a solid game, but it was, in my opinion, marketed to the wrong audience.  This is a title that ends up being a great starting point for anyone that has not been involved in the Rock Band series of games.  But if you are like myself, that has amassed a couple hundred DLC titles over time, you will feel that the game ends a bit too quickly, and gives you an “okay, now what” feel.

Good Points:

I did appreciate the look of the game.  Gone are the stylized cartoony figures that were there in the two Rock Band titles.  Instead we get rather good models of the Fab Four.  Throughout the game, all four Beatles fit their historical time period, either with or without beards, moustaches and mop tops.  There is some posturing from the characters that sticks with out as well.  I missed it on the first playthrough, but now I see the little mannerisms that add so much to the personality of the on-screen avatars.  Very good character sequences.

Most of the song selection is top notch.  Normally, a Rock Band or Guitar Hero title will have a huge list of songs, but you only want to actually play about a dozen of those songs.  There are 45 tracks available here, and most are really good, and solid hits in their own right.  Sure there are a few duds, but the hits outweigh the B-sides here.

Harmonies are pretty fun to play, if you get a group that is willing to harmonize.  We had a game night, and it was a ton of fun when we harmonized properly, and it helped our score.  It is the first game to really try to pull this off, and it works fairly well.  For that matter, all of the instruments play well, and the game does get rather challenging on some of the harder difficulties.  I for one thought this would be a cakewalk on Expert, but it was actually very challenging.

Bad Points:

The game is woefully short.  While there are 45 songs, this is the era of musical rhythm games one upping themselves on number of tracks.  It also does not help that a lot of the early songs are short in length, and repetitive.  This is not a fault of the game necessarily, but just that songs in the early 60’s were not usually long in length.

Some of the hyped special features were really let downs in the long run.  Remember all of those great “inside the studio recordings” we were going to get access to in The Beatles: Rock Band.  Well they ended up being very small segments in the beginning of a set list, while the list was loading.  Not exactly what it was made out to be.  There is probably ten to twelve seconds of audio before we are prompted to play.  Also, while there were some great pictures of the band, it was nothing to write home about at times.
In comparison to Rock Band it just ends up falling short.  At my house, we played it for a game night after I bought it in a store, but people never asked to play it at the next two game nights.  When I asked about it, I was told that Rock Band was more entertaining.

DLC links into game rather haphazardly.  I can only attest to this via the one DLC song that was available while I was playing the game.  DLC does not link into the campaign, which means these tracks can only be played in quickplay mode.  It would have been nice to see work done to implement them into the main storyline somehow.

The Beatles Rock Band is a good game.  It can be a fun game for the right audience, but in no way, shape or form, is it a great title.  That still sticks with Rock Band 2.  Casual players that have never got into Rock Band will love this game, as will hardcore beatles fans.  Others might want to look the other way.

If I was scoring it – 3 out of 5.

Vikki says:

I should start out by admitting that I am a Beatles fan. Big time. I grew up with Beatles music, was completely immersed in it, and when I found out about this title I just about lost bladder control with my excitement. As much as my tastes have changed as I’ve grown and as much as I enjoy the eclecticism of the GH and RB franchises, I’ve always been frustrated by setlists that, whilst expansive, had me playing the same dozen songs over and over again. And whilst we’ve been treated to act-specific titles before – Van Halen, Aerosmith etc. – well, those titles could hardly be called ‘treats’ for me. Personally speaking, I’d rather be skinning my ass with a cheese grater than playing nothing but Aerosmith songs. Harsh but very true, unfortunately.

But then the B:RB was announced and I was suddenly a happy girl. Trailers and sneak-peek setlists hit the web and I once again lost control of my bladder. The game looked slick and sexy and whilst I didn’t like all that I was hearing, I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, we’re talking about the Beatles, dude.

On the OhNineOhNineOhNine the game hit my doormat and I took the morning off work to put it through its paces. I needn’t have bothered. A few hours would’ve sufficed.

It is unequivocally and undeniably short. It is TOO short. And with a back catalogue as glorious as that of the Fab Four, there is absolutely no excuse for the game to be touting such a short play-through time. It’s frustrating – and painfully obvious – that the Higher-Ups held back a load of additional tracks to generate more cash by way of DLC, but even taking that into account, it still doesn’t excuse such a short set. We could’ve been treated to double the number of tracks and there still would’ve been a healthy choice of DLC to play with. Not cool, Harmonix/Apple Corps – not cool at all.

Shortness aside, what is offered up to play is spectacular. Along with the obvious choices – A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, Ticket to Ride, I Want To Hold Your Hand etc. – there’s a delicious selection of album tracks – Helter Skelter, And Your Bird Can Sing, Dear Prudence etc.- that are a delight for die-hard fans. But we’re missing classics (where is Yesterday? Eleanor Rigby? Hey Jude? Let It Be?) and I don’t think anyone’s yet satisfactorily explained why they’re missing, leaving us to surmise that they too will be dumped into the cash cow that is DLC.

That said, the graphics are beautiful, stylish and unobtrusive, and it’s wonderful to see how the guys change as their career progresses and the unique mannerisms we know so well captured so perfectly. I do agree, however, that Harmonix missed a trick by not including the option to run the original videos in the background, and the ‘studio exclusives’ were craptastic to say the least. The lack of DLC crossover doesn’t bother me; when I play B:RB I’m interested in the Beatles and pretty much nothing else, so the fact I can’t play Can’t Buy Me Love whilst RB 1 is fired up is irrelevant to me.

I think the problem here was the imbalance of hype over substance. Had the gears of the publicity machine not been so thoroughly up its own backside, and had press hyperbole and gamer anticipation not been greased so liberally, this game could’ve come out and knocked us dead. As it was, a great game has been sullied by over-expectation.

For me, it’s a 4 out of 5. But if it hadn’t have been the Beatles, I think it would’ve been an a-ok 3.

What is it?

The Powermat is an electronic appliance that you set on a surface and plug into the wall, then use to charge your small electronic devices. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to compare it to, and I think I’ve got it: it’s a power strip. Imagine a power strip that doesn’t have any holes in it, but is capable of charging up to four of your devices simultaneously without using their charging cables.

That’s right, it doesn’t use the charging cables. This sucker is wireless. Well, sort of. There’s the wire that plugs it into the wall, of course. And if you don’t pick up a custom receiver for each of your devices, you’re still going to need to connect the universal receiver (called a Powercube) that comes with the Mat to your non Powermat-enabled device, using one of the many adapter tips, to the device using a wire. The reasons you’d do it this way are pretty compelling, and I’ll get to that.

Powermat sent along two of their Powermat devices and three of their dedicated receivers for me to try out, so I’m going to take you through exactly what these are and why you might consider picking them up.

Powermat Home and Office Mat

This is the flagship Powermat device. It looks like a surfboard, really. Smaller than a surfboard, though, so maybe a Smurfboard. There’s a port on the back for the power cable and a USB port that you could use to charge devices that charge using a USB cable. I guess that’s another wire. There are three connection zones on top of the Powermat, each marked with a small circle in the center.

The Powermat comes with a universal receiver called a Powercube, which is a little white square with a wire on it with a mini USB port on the end. Also provided is a selection of adapter tips, which plug into that mini USB port and allow you to connect just about anything. The only things in my home I could find that wouldn’t connect was my DualShock 3 (despite its having a connection that fit) and my Game Boy Advance SP. I don’t know why the DualShock 3 won’t charge, but it’s hard to give them a hard time for not charging my GBA SP. I mean, my Sega Game Gear won’t connect either. No, I don’t have a Game Gear.

To charge a PSP, you find the adapter tip marked “Sony” and connect it to the wire on the Powercube, then connect it to the PSP’s power connection, then place the receiver on one of the three connection zones. You need to put this together in that order, or it won’t activate, because the system “handshakes” with the receiver when the physical connection is made between the receiver and mat. When you bring the receiver near the mat, you can feel a magnetic tug which guides it into the right position. If you don’t feel the tug, you’re not in the right area. If you have your eyes open and the lights are on, it’s pretty easy to get it in the right place. It might take a few seconds if it’s 2am and you can’t see because you’ve been playing PSP for three hours straight. Why did I feel so strange saying those last few sentences?

In addition to this magnetic pull, you can get audio and visual feedback from the Powermat, or you can turn those off by pressing buttons on the back. A high-tech sounding chirp, ascending when it starts to charge and descending when it’s finished, can be set to low or high volume or off. A white light, which comes from under the mat’s forward edge, can also be enabled or disabled. When I first charged my phone using the Powermat, it kept chirping and flashing at me every couple of minutes. I found that the issue was caused by my phone, which has given me trouble with power management for months. By turning off the phone before charging, I was able to fix the problem, but if I didn’t want to do that I could have turned off the sound and lights.

The Powercube is what I use to charge my PSP and cell phone. The Samsung adapter in the kit fits my Samsung Gravity, and the Sony one fits my PSP 2000. There’s an Apple adapter for iPods and iPhones (but don’t set these directly on your magnetic Powermat, folks) as well as several other tips to cover DSi, DS Lite, LG, and Micro USB. Just about anything else should be covered by the USB port on the back, or even the MiniUSB port that’s on the Powercube when you don’t put a tip on. It’s not a bad range of compatibility. The kit even includes a little case to hold some of your tips in (though they won’t all fit, so I put the ones I didn’t need back in the original box), which looks like the Powercube, and it even clings magnetically to the surface of the Powermat, which is cute.

Now, the real advantages of the Powermat, considering that without a dedicated receiver, you are using a wire to connect everything anyway, may not be immediately clear, so let me cover a few of those. First of all, I went from a power strip with six plugs in it to a single plug going straight into the wall. I have a pile of chargers that are no longer sucking power from the wall 24 hours a day regardless of whether something’s plugged in. When the Powermat finishes charging a device, it turns off and the device stops drawing power. This makes it far more efficient than any of the cheap power adapters that came with your device. The documentation claims that there are devices that will charge faster with the Powermat because of its more efficient power management, and I believe that. Using the Samsung charger that came with my phone, I tend to find my battery nearly dead by the end of the day. The first time I charged it with the Powermat, it charged in less time and then stayed almost fully charged all day, which caught me completely by surprise. It did the same thing every day thereafter.

The rest of the advantages are completely cosmetic. There’s no arguing that a Powermat looks a hell of a lot cooler than a power strip, which makes you happy to move that task from the floor to the night stand. The Powermat for Home and Office retails for $99, and comes with the Mat, AC adapter, the Powercube with eight adapter tips and tip storage box. You can find it here.

Powermat Portable Mat

The portable model of the Powermat functions the same way the home and office model does, including all the same components, such as the Powercube universal receiver. They key difference is the form factor. Rather than being a Smurfboard, it’s built more like a chain. Broken into three segments with 180º hinges between, the portable Mat folds into a small space, and can even be used while folded up if you’re only charging one device. It comes with a carrying case, complete with magnetic clasp, which holds both the Mat and its AC adapter, which is really very cool. It’s clear these people are very fond of magnets, and who isn’t? This model doesn’t look as nice as the other, but its portability, and the fact that it comes with a case, is nothing to dismiss.

The Powermat Portable Mat comes with everything the Home and Office model does, plus the carrying case as shown, for $99. You can find it here.

I give both Powermats, the Home and Office and Portable models, a four out of five. These are really fun, cool, fascinating technology. They work very well and it’s remarkable how much attention to detail went into not only their design, but even their packaging. The manuals go into great detail, quantifying the advantages of the efficient tech, particularly to the environment. Despite all this, The Powermat by itself, without any of the receivers that are sold separately, lacks the hook that the Powermat promises on in its ads. You can’t charge devices simply by setting them on the Mat, and you won’t be able to unless the manufacturers start including the receiver tech in their devices.

Powermat Receiver Back for Nintendo DSi and DS Lite

Now, you’re probably thinking the same thing I was thinking when I saw the first Powermat commercial on TV. It’s something along the lines of, “how the heck is this thing even possible?” Well, the way it works is with magnetism. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts of the technology, but the pad and the receiver communicate, determining the proper way to charge the attached device, and then do so.

Powermat will only work with Powermat enabled devices. That means they either need to be connected to the Powercube (which would be a Powermat enabled device) or you need to buy an additional receiver that is custom made for your device. Powermat makes these receivers for four flavors of Blackberry (with more on the way), two kinds of Nintendo DS, and three options for Apple iPod and iPhone, with a 3GS on the way. The Blackberry receivers are battery doors, while the DS receivers slide unobtrusively onto the back of your DS. Your Apple choices vary as well, as there’s a dock as well as cases that fit over an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Having a dedicated receiver on your device lets the Powermat reach its full potential. Leave it on your device all the time, and all you need to do is set it down on the Powermat to charge. Your device doesn’t need to be turned on, but if you want it to be, you can do that, which is great for those of us who tend to suspend our games by closing our DS. Of course, I expect if you did this, the battery would eventually fail, because once it reaches full charge, it won’t start charging again unless you lift it up and set it back down again.

The Receiver Back for DSi is great. It’s large enough to get a solid grip on the DSi without dramatically increasing the weight. If you have a soft case with some give to it, as I do, the system will still fit inside with the receiver on it. The receiver back doesn’t get in your way while you’re playing, either. Unfortunately, the wrap-around design on both the DS Lite and DSi receivers tends to obstruct some things. On the DS Lite, it makes it hard to get at the power switch for turning on and off. The DSi’s power button in on the face, but the volume control buttons become a little bit of a challenge to get at. It’s not really a problem as much as something to get used to, but the receiver is right up against the power switch on the DS Lite, which makes operating the switch a pain.

Powermat’s Receiver Backs for DSi and DS Lite are $29 each. I’ll give the DSi and DS Lite Receiver Backs a 4.5 out of 5. Combined with a Powermat, this is really neat technology that it genuinely convenient and, perhaps as important, it looks great doing it. Unfortunately, that obstruction to the power switch on the Lite model is really bothersome. You can find the Lite model here, and the DSi model here.

Powermat Receiver Dock for iPod and iPhone

Powermat’s Dock for iPod and iPhone is a small white square with the familiar iPod connector on top and an adjustable support to keep the device standing upright. This support is necessary because iPods have come in all shapes and sizes over the years, so one size certainly wouldn’t fit all. Be aware that this won’t work with iPod Shuffle. This effectively futureproofs the dock as well, unless of course Apple suddenly decides to discard their connector style as they did years ago when they abandoned the firewire port on iPods. It’s a very simple, lightweight design. As with other receivers, you connect your device to the dock and then set the dock onto the Powermat.

Powermat’s Receiver Dock for iPod and iPhone is $39. I rate the Receiver Dock a 4 out of 5. It works well and the sliding support is a very smart idea, but the price point of $39 seems a bit high when compared to the value of the DS Receivers, which seem physically like much more solid peripherals. You can find it here.

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.

At 2am yesterday I was finishing up playing some Dragon Quest V when the game dropped this bomb on me. Seriously? Don’t cock up the proceedings by trying to look all dapper or anything? Cock up the proceedings? Really?

One of the simple pleasures of the Legend of Zelda games is the bottle. These things can hold magical wonders of all stripes, but nothing, for my rupees, tops the fairy. Capture a fairy in a bottle, and when you fall in battle, the fairy escapes and revives you. How many times has my ass been saved by a fairy in a bottle over the past two decades? Let’s just say, “many.”

Sometimes those little fairies talk too much, and you just want to cram them into a bottle! Fortunately, they don’t seem to mind it much, and still have the good nature to completely heal you when you set them free. This fairy in a bottle necklace is so cute though, you’ll never want to let it go!

Check out the shop’s other items, including a hilarious Metroid eating Pikachu, or for those of us who’ve spent years paying off Tom Nook, the Animal Crossing leaf. AC fossil and pitfall icons also available, not not as cute.

Source: Zelda Bottled Fairy necklace at Etsy

Maybe it’s the conspiracy theorist in me, but this almost seems as though it was planned. I wonder how many click-throughs Sony’s getting for this, entirely by accident. Is anyone else seeing this, or do I need to check my settings?

People have been crying for years about how Tails is an extraneous character, and if this sighting at Wal-Mart is any indication, Sega may have let him go. You see, in the Genesis era, he was shopping exclusively on Fifth Avenue. When his people weren’t shopping for him.

No matter how long I look at this picture, I just can’t make sense of it. Was he in costume for something, and forgot to take it off? Is it a prank, to see if anyone notices?

Source: People of Wal-Mart

I kind of missed the party when the PS2 was big, so I made sure to grab myself a launch-model PS3 when it was announced they were being discontinued. Since then, I’ve picked up a number of great PS2 games in an attempt to get a grip on just what everyone who had that system last generation was enjoying.

Once such game I’ve snapped up recently is the critically acclaimed Dragon Quest VIII. As a long-time fan of the series, I’ve been through a lot of the games. I played I and II to completion on the NES, III on the Game Boy Color until I got hopelessly frustrated, and IV to completion on DS. IV was great, and it made me decide to pick up VIII.

Now, I’m about four and a half hours into what I can already tell is a very lengthy game, and overall, I’m very happy with what’s been fixed. The slow, redundant blow-by-blow that takes place with every menu action in and out of battle has been tidied up, most notably when you hit multiple enemies at once. Battles, in fact, are much faster than they were before, and very exciting. The music is phenomenal. The graphics… well, let’s talk about that.

Somebody needs to tell me why there are only a couple of games on Wii that look better than Dragon Quest VIII, which is a freaking PS2 game. I can even name those games: Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3. This is ridiculous. This game looks amazing. I’ve spent the past two weeks immersed in another fantastic game, Prince of Persia on PS3, picking up all the light seeds and trophy whoring, and I accept that it’s a game that is going to out and out flatten anything we will ever see on Wii, and perhaps even whatever Nintendo tosses onto store shelves next generation. But Dragon Quest VIII? On PS2?

The other thing that’s driving me crazy is that with all the advancements made in Dragon Quest VIII, we still can’t read the signs from any angle but straight-on. That is just crap. Again, I expect this garbage from Zelda games, but not Square-Enix.

I should have sent this one to Sad Chao.

Not enough Okami out there for you to not get around to buying yet? Take heart, because Capcom’s moderate seller rolls on, as this newly introduced footage of an upcoming Okami game for Nintendo DS has appeared. Don’t you just want to pick that puppy up and give her a hug? I know I do.

Note that the music in this trailer was added by a user after the fact. The actual footage released seems to have no audio.

What’s amusing about this is that everybody knew, even in 2006, that this game had the mechanics of a Nintendo DS title. What I don’t know is if the almost certain non-involvement of Platinum Games, the studio which know holds all the raw talent involved in the creation of the orginal shockingly long PS2 RPG, dooms this title from the start.

Source: Capcom via MTV Multiplayer Blog

Blizzard announced another class for Diablo III, the monk. You might recall the monk being in the Hellfire expansion to the original Diablo. This newer version of the class boasts a handful of impressive skills that seem to have come straight out of a kung fu movie, like exploding palm, seven-sided strike, and way of the hundred fists. Check out this great video from 1up, and tell me if you don’t think this game is looking better all the time. Not to say I wasn’t already crazy about the title. Once you’ve done that, check out the official page (linked above) for short videos of all the skills announced.

I think I’m going to have to buy a PC video cable so I can run this game on my plasma TV from my wife’s Macbook Pro. Even the tiny snakes moving around in the desert are awesome!

Source: 1up