In preparation for the Rock-a-thon which starts in less than 3 weeks I’ve been on a quest to catch up on all of the Rock Band songs that I’ve been missing while playing Guitar Hero, SF4 and Tekken. Last week I rented the Rock Band Beatles and made it a goal to 100% as many songs as possible (I was hoping for EVERY song) and on the first try. I also set the goal to gold star every song no matter what. In Guitar Hero gold starring a song is easy… you just have to hit 100% of the notes so it’s ok if you over strum or have a bad star path, you still get 5 gold stars. In Rock Band in order to get gold stars you must get a “very high score” while on expert, so it is possible to 100% a song and STILL not get 5 gold stars, which is a challenge that I like! The Rock Band Beatles gold star cutoff’s can be viewed here. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to research the cut off’s until AFTER I reterned the game so all of my scores are based on sight reading. (Activating Beatlemania when I thought it was appropriate not knowing what notes were coming up next)

My overall thoughts on The Beatles Rock Band… I didn’t really care for it. Now, I’m not a huge Beatles fan so I knew that this was a possability, but I actually liked a lot of the songs in the game… my complaints are mostly from the game design itself.

Positives:
-Good storyline. I like how the game follows their journey to stardom.
-Age progression. It’s a cool new feature that makes it feel more like you’re actually moving through time with them. (Metallica only had 80’s and today looks)
-All the hits. Yeah I’m not a huge fan, but all the songs that everyone loves are in that game.
-Song specific venues. Yellow submarine… that’s all I have to say. Pure awesomeness!
-Realistic achievements. The achievements are tough, but can be accomplished with a little practice. I also like how they require you to do things like hitting all HOPOs without strumming them which makes for great practice and a tough challenge.
-The ending… was epic. That was the first time I actually was happy with the ending cinematic in a rhythm game.

Negatives:
-Bad highway. It was pretty hard to see the notes especially when activating Beatlemania.
-Bright backgrounds. With the studio video backgrounds being the same colors as the fret buttons it made it extremely hard to see the notes thanks to semi transparent highway
-Distracting sequences. While I love yellow submarine I also hate it… too many things going on in the background sometimes broke my focus on the highway.
-Song length. The beginning of the game the songs were all too short, then toward the end it felt like they’d just never end. (Abbey Road Medley)
-Challenges. The challenges are simply playing every song in each chapter as a setlist. Where’s the creativity? I didn’t feel like playing the game all over again.
-Not enough hard songs on guitar. Bass seemed to be the hardest instrument as far as note tracking for the two instruments.
-1 set progression. You have to play the songs in the same order no matter which instrument you play which means sometimes you’ll play a super easy song followed by the hardest song in the game followed by another easy song. There is no instrument specific difficulty progression in the game.

I only played Guitar and Bass so I don’t have any opinions for Drums, vocals or backup vox. I also did not get the chance to play anyone online for Score Duel or Tug of War due to the fact that despite trying several times I kept getting a message like “unable to find anyone else that matched your search criteria” aka “no one else is playing this game but you”.

I beat the game in approximately 6 hours or so and that includes going back and re-doing songs if I missed just one note or if I didn’t gold star it on my first try. I gold starred EVERY song in the setlist and I got 100%ed all but 5 songs. 1 song I got 98% due to the lack of the number of notes (since I missed only 3) and the other 4 I missed just 1 note on and had an overstrum somewhere in one of those as well so I decided to just continue on with the -1. Here are pics of my scores! Next Rock Band challenge will be LEGO Rock Band if I can get my hands on a copy!