Rock Band is owning me.

I haven’t even touched another game since I got it a couple weeks ago, and I’m completely okay with that.

So far in the Band World Tour mode, Colette and I have been playing in our band called Pommes Frites; her on guitar, me on drums, both of us decked out in our white and pink outfits. Sort of a White Stripes, but with two other members, pink instead of red, and a quality drummer (or so I consider myself).

With the announcement that Rock Band 2 is coming in September, it looks like we got into this game at just the right time. By the time we unlock all the in-game tracks in Rock Band and start to tire of them, the sequel will hit shelves, throwing another 50-ish tracks at us to tackle. Including the DLC tracks we’ve already picked up (I think about 20), that’ll put us to over 100 tracks to play on 4 different instruments. It’s insane, the potential size of this platform. I already envision them needing better sorting tools to pick a song quickly in Quickplay mode. Right now I’d like to request a feature for version 2: please let us load all of the in-game tracks onto the 360’s hard drive, so we don’t have to keep swapping discs to play each game’s songs. When I pop in the Rock Band 2 disc, I want to also see all of my downloaded tracks plus the original Rock Band ones. Please.

So let’s get to my most recent thoughts. The drums are the best part of the game, hands down. Better than guitar in any of the Guitar Hero games, and better than vocals. Maybe it’s because out of all the plastic instruments you can play, the drums most closely mimic actually playing drums. Or maybe it’s because I’m a rhythm guy, who knows. I definitely have an affinity for songs with lots of drumming in them. I’m to the point now on drums where I can hold my own on Hard mode in most of the simpler songs, but I’m still challenged plenty with Medium on the advanced drum songs. But the difficult ones are so much more satisfying. Any of the songs by Smashing Pumpkins, Rush, Boston, The Who, or The Police are still to painful for me to play on Hard, but a blast on Medium.

Colette’s still ripping up her dual-instrument skills on guitar/mic. I have no idea how she can play that. I tried drumming while singing Sabotage, and I almost failed out on the drums. Maybe she can use one eye to look at the words and one to see the note track. Chameleon style.

So we got Rock Band as a wedding gift from Justin (decisive winner of the Most 3lit3 Wedding Gift contest). We spent just about all of our indoor time at our mini-honeymoon condo on the beach playing Rock Band, with Colette singing and guitaring, and me either guitaring or drumming. This being my first dabbling into the rhythm game genre, I thought I should write out some initial thoughts.

First I’ll talk about what I like:

Almost every aspect of the game is phenomenal. The first time I saw anyone rocking out to this game, I thought “damn all that stuff looks chincy, the guitar looks worse that the Guitar Hero ones and the drums will break in no time. Also it’ll get boring once you play all the songs.” Not so. The drums actually feel great for a “revision 1″ product. Future peripherals in Rock Bands 2 or 3 will be even better. And the track list is varied enough to provide lots of different options, and replaying them is only as annoying as your dislike for the specific song. For me that means there are only a few I generally avoid. Playing each instrument is pretty fun, but the funness rises an order of magnitude with each new person playing. 4-player bands are incredibly exciting, especially playing something like Tom Sawyer with everyone at least on Medium difficulty.

Now for something more negative:

The design of the Band World Tour mode is poor at best. It’s a blast when you want to do what the game wants you to do. However, when starting a band, whatever instruments you start with and whichever person is the leader are all settings that are stuck that way for eternity. I suppose it’s slightly more comparable to a real-life band that way, but mostly I find it completely annoying. Having to constantly sign in and out or switch bands in order to play a different instrument is just a pain. Can’t I just do whatever I want? The lack of a real “party mode” is basically inexcusable to me. When playing with new players just trying the game out (even on easy), if they fall out of the game, it’s game over for everyone. They need to have a party mode with no “fan approval” meter, or whatever it is, so that when a newbie is playing drums, they’re free to play without feeling like they’re losing the whole time. We also need better support for a single Live account to be able to sing and play guitar/bass/drums at once. Colette’s too good for one instrument!

We got in lots of game time over the past couple weeks. I’m getting pretty decent at drumming, but I think I’ve hit a difficulty wall: I can pretty much own every song on Medium, then I get owned the second I tread into Hard mode. Guess I need to practice my Fisher-Price drumming skills.

My favorite songs to play so far: the Rush songs, Gimme Shelter, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Weezer songs.

Last week’s gaming activity:

• I bought LostWinds on WiiWare and completed it in about two and a half hours. I had a great time with this one. Really simple, Zelda-like puzzles and fun platforming with the Wii Remote. My arm did get tired, though, pointing it at the screen for like 3 straight hours.
• Picked up Boom Blox over the weekend. Colette and I played some competitive “block throwing” for a while. Tons of fun. We also dabbled in the “jenga” mode a little bit last night, but not too much. And talk about tired arms… this game puts Wii Sports to shame in the arm-workout department.
• Played a few more missions in IV. I’m slowly chipping away to the center on this one. However, as Shawn from GWJ also mentioned, I’m kinda ready to be done with GTA. It’s not that I don’t like the game (I think it’s incredible). It’s just that after all the hours I’ve put into it, the core it still feels like another GTA game, which I’ve played 3 times already. The story is getting a little better, but I still maintain it’s nothing spectacular. Multiplayer is the only true “evolution” of this franchise.

This week: Boom Blox-aholism, Twilight Princess (that’s right, I still haven’t finished it), and maybe Penny Arcade, Episode 1?

The skate. demo just went up on Xbox Live Marketplace a couple of days ago, and last night I had my first chance to try it out. Probably unlike most folks following this game, I’ve seen next-to-nothing of it as far as videos or screenshots, just a few little clips on ad banners and such. So I got to go in with no real expectations. My first impression is that it’s hands down the best skating game ever made… maybe even the best sports game ever made (and by “best” I mean “most fun to play”). The clever Flickit control scheme allows you to do all ollies, nollies, and flip tricks by flicking the right analog stick in various different patterns. I love the fact that doing a nollie trick just means performing the mirror image maneuver you’d do for a normal ollie trick. Manuals are done by tilting slightly back or forward on the right stick, so it’s fairly simple to manual into and out of tricks, but not like Tony Hawk’s “press down when you hit the ground” simple. Grinding entails ollieing onto an edge or rail, the character grinds or slides on his own depending on the direction you’re facing.

I guess all these new features really tell us is that a very analog type approach to gaming can work amazingly well, especially in a somewhat open-ended sport like skateboarding. It allows the player to sort of craft a series of tricks that feels more like an accomplishment, and is actually doable in real-life as well… simple runs like kickflip-nosegrind-kickflip-out actually look impressive. We’ve been inundated for the past 10 years with Tony Hawk games, where nothing is impressive in the least. It’s just a giant two minute long combo. The whole game becomes points and multipliers instead of skateboarding.

The open environments are cool, but not necessarily innovative. But as far as this genre goes, I think an open world is a must-have. The challenge system shows promise, too. You skate up to various characters in-game and they assign you a challenge to complete, like manual-flip trick-manual, or to do a certain combo under a time limit.

I’m eager to get my hands on this full release. I just hope I don’t get bored in this game as quickly as I normally do with sports games.