The Beatles: Rock Band

If you haven’t heard of a rather popular four-piece outfit from Liverpool, known as The Beatles, it’s possible you haven’t spent long living on this planet. For the rest of is, The Beatles: Rock Band represents the chance to fulfil a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a taste of what it would have been like to play with the biggest group on Earth.

If you haven’t played a game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero before, the idea is that you substitute a regular game controller for one that’s shaped like a musical instrument, and use it to play along to various songs. You don’t need to know how to play a real musical instrument though. Instead, you’re tasked with hitting one of five coloured buttons in time with on-screen prompts.

As with other games of this type, in The Beatles: Rock Band it’s possible to play on your own, or in a group with various friends and family members on bass, guitar, drums, vocals and so on. As you play, animated avatars perform on screen. Points are gained by hitting as many correct ‘notes’ as possible and your performance can be boosted by earning multipliers and by working the crowd into a state of frenzy. Perform badly, however, and you could find yourself being booed off stage by the audience.

Apart from featuring 45 classic Beatles tunes to play along to, this special Beatle-centric edition of Rock Band doesn’t do much to mess with the series’ successful formula. Three-part vocal harmonies have been added to the mix (assuming you have enough microphones to go round) and there are some neat unlockable Beatle-related goodies, but other than that, it’s pretty much business as usual.

It’s possible to dip in and play any song at any difficulty level whenever you like, but there are also online and offline ‘versus’ and ‘story’ modes. The story follows the Fab Four’s career chronologically, from the early days on a cramped Cavern Club stage right up to the impromptu gig on the roof of the Apple building. The latter part of the Beatles tenure involved a self-imposed retirement from playing live concerts, and the game reflects this by switching its visual accompaniments from concert-type footage to a mixture of Abby Road studio settings and psychedelic ‘dreamscapes’ – pop promo-type animations that are in much the same vein as the band’s latter day films, such as Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine. On the whole, the game’s visuals are cartoony, fun and surprisingly tasteful, with plenty of references to please Beatles fans.

Sadly, The Beatles: Rock Band: is only currently available for consoles: Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, with no current plans to release it for the PC. Depending on which version you choose, it can also work out quite expensive. For all three consoles it’s possible to buy the game in sets that come with various drum, microphone, guitar or bass controllers. The ‘premium’ edition, for example, costs £180 and comes with a replica of Paul’s Hofner bass and a Ludwig-branded Ringo drumkit, as well as a microphone and mic stand. A cheaper ‘value’ edition costs £110 and comes with a more generic drum kit and a Fender Stratocaster guitar controller, along with a microphone. It’s also possible to purchase the game on its own without any extra hardware and we found that our Xbox 360 copy was 100 per cent compatible with existing guitar and microphone controllers.

Cynics might have you believe that this is just another way to wring yet more cash from Beatles fans, but the truth is that The Beatles: Rock Band is a genuinely new way to enjoy their music. If you don’t particularly like The Beatles and have no interest in cluttering your home with expensive plastic toys, then obviously this is not the game for you. But if you’ve been looking for something different and fancy a nostalgic musical trip down Penny Lane, then The Beatles: Rock Band is definitely one for the Christmas wishlist. It isn’t a particularly hard or challenging game, but that’s not really the point. It’s a beautifully crafted, high-quality piece of entertainment that should have an enormously wide appeal to non-gamers and music fans alike, and is especially fun when played with others.