It’s no surprise that someone would try to latch on to the popularity of The Beatles Rock Band. It was pretty much a universally liked game among generations of players.
And even if you only use the game as a karaoke machine, which you can do since it only requires use of a Logitech USB microphone, there was a sweet wonderful innocence about it. Who doesn’t know the words to Beatles songs and who didn’t like singing them again and pretending to be the Fab Four, even a bad imitation, for a few minutes?
Would a similar format work well with another band? Green Day gave it a shot with Green Day Rock Band. Really, though, it doesn’t.
Green Day’s not the first to have their own music game. Everyone from Aerosmith and Metallica (Guitar Hero) to even Queen and ABBA (Singstar) have had their own, not to mention all the compilation games. We haven’t played the Guitar Hero games, but the Singstar games used the real artists videos.
Green Day Rock Band doesn’t have the story mode that The Beatles Rock Band does in which you travel through the Beatles’ career. Instead, you play through Green Day gig locations from various years, earning Cred, awards and trophies. There’s a certain amount of fun missing in the paint-by-numbers methodology used.
The graphics are OK, but The Beatles Rock Band is better and again more charming. Similar to The Beatles Rock Band, you can collect trophies by playing songs well.
As for technical aspects of game play, Green Day Rock Band is almost a copy of The Beatles Rock Band. The use of harmonies that debuted in The Beatles Rock Band is also in Green Day Rock Band. The 47 songs on the disc are augmented by downloadable content, as was the Beatles’ game.
One thing we were hoping to see was some even slight improvement over the Beatles’ game that might give some hope for the Beatles’ game in the future. We didn’t find any. Green Day Rock Band is almost a straight pullover of the The Beatles Rock Band system.
In the battle of the Rock Band music games, at the least, the Beatles did it first and did it better. No surprise.
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