Rock Band on a handheld. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only skeptical about the idea. After playing the demo a while back, I found that it seemed not too bad, but I wasn’t convinced to purchase it. Finally I gave it a rent and played it quite a bit.

So, does the Rock Band formula still work in a single-player handheld game? Read on and see!

Developer: Harmonix Music Systems
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Date of Release: June 9th 2009
Platform: Sony PSP

Genre: Rhythm
Players: 1

Song list
A rhythm game is only as good as its soundtrack, so let’s check it out!

AFI – “Miss Murder”
All-American Rejects – “Move Along”
Audioslave – “Gasoline”
Black Tide – “Show Me the Way”
Freezepop – “Less Talk More Rokk”
Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”
The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”
Lacuna Coil – “Our Truth”
Lamb of God – “Laid to Rest”
Modest Mouse – “Float On”
Queens of the Stone Age – “3′s and 7′s”
System of a Down – “Chop Suey!”
Tenacious D – “Rock Your Socks”
3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite”
Alice in Chains – “Would?”
Blink 182 – “What’s My Age Again”
Foo Fighters – “Everlong”
Judas Priest – “Painkiller”
Lit – “My Own Worst Enemy”
Lush – “De-Luxe”
Mighty Mighty Bosstones – “Where’d You Go?”
Nine Inch Nails – “The Perfect Drug”
Nirvana – “Drain You”
The Offspring – “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘em Separated)”
Pearl Jam – “Alive”
Smashing Pumpkins – “Today”
Social Distortion – “I Was Wrong”
Soundgarden – “Spoonman”
Weezer – “Buddy Holly”
Billy Idol – “White Wedding Part 1″
Bon Jovi – “Livin’ on a Prayer”
Dead Kennedys – “Holiday in Cambodia”
Motörhead – “Ace of Spades”
The Police – “Message in a Bottle”
Siouxsie & the Banshees – “The Killing Jar”
Boston – “More Than a Feeling”
Jackson 5 – “ABC”
Jethro Tull – “Aqualung”
Kansas – “Carry on Wayward Son”
Rush – “The Trees”
The Who – “Pinball Wizard”

There’s some good songs in there, of course, but if you’ve played previous Rock Band titles, you’ll feel like the song list is a bit familiar… That’s right! It’s mostly songs from Rock Band 2! Or songs that are DLC for the console versions. There are a FEW Unplugged exclusives (Miss Murder(though this one is in guitar hero), Kryptonite, ABC and I’m missing a few), but for the most part it’s old stuff. And it’s only 41 songs in total, so it’s a bit on the small side.

I also have a few complaints about the DLC. First, the price. The songs cost the same as on the consoles. I would’ve thought the price would be a slightly lower, since the songs are mostly dumbed-down (when it comes to the notes), and again most of the DLC is from the console versions.

A bit of variety on the song list side would’ve been really nice, instead we’re left with a dumbed-down list from the console versions of the game. Not that the list is bad… some of the songs are lame *coughblink182cough*, but there’s some fun entries in there for sure, which should have enough variety to interest a lot of people.

Looks and sounds
Graphically, the game has a similar style to the console versions. The characters are the same, pretty much, with the exception of having a lot fewer clothes to pick from. Also, the stages look okay, but there’s pretty much no cool light effects and smoke and stuff. As for the animation, it sucks. The characters on stage move like robots, it’s really not smooth for the most part, especially the drummer. And their animations are random jumbles of randomness. It’s not rare to see a character playing his instrument when there’s no music, or the singer dancing around when there are no sounds at all.

As for sounds, well… it ALSO sucks. Or maybe I’m just weird. The sound changes the volume depending on the track you’re on. So if you’re on the bass track, the volume for the other tracks goes down while the volume for the bass track’s volume goes up. I understand what they tried doing, of course, but when you’re constantly switching tracks it just sounds a bit chaotic. Also, the vocal track, now controlled by buttons instead of singing (which is fine), sounds really lame if you miss notes or are in another track when notes are passing in the vocal track. That makes the voice break up randomly and doesn’t sound really good or natural. Using headphones is pretty much a must. The constantly varying volume is still a problem, but definitely not as bad, and it just sounds a lot better.
Other than that I have no real problems with the sound in the game.

Gameplay
The basic layout is the same as previous rock band/guitar hero games. Notes are coming down, and you have to press them when they get to the bottom of the screen. The big change here is that all the instruments only have 4 buttons instead of the usual 5, and vocals are button-controlled as well. No strumming button required, only pressing them as they come down is needed. The buttons you’ll be using are Left and Up on the D-pad, and the Triangle and Circle face buttons. Aso, pressing X activates Overdrive.

The big change here though is the fact that you play as the whole band. What you have to do is complete streams in an instrument, and when you complete a full stream without missing a note the instrument will play itself for a little while. When it’s doing that, you have to press L or R to go to other instruments and do the same thing. Fully playing a track adds 1 to your multiplier(which maxes out at 5). If you screw up a phrase, you have to get the next, and that goes until you get it right. You lose from your “life bar” every time you miss a phrase. Also, as you play one instrument, notes might start appearing in other instruments. If you don’t get done with the instrument you’re on, the other instruments with notes in them will start losing of their “life bar” as well(though they won’t break your combo). So getting most of the phrases right is quite important Sometimes you also get a solos, so all the tracks will play themselves other than the one with a solo. And no need to worry about switching to that track since it will do it automatically.

Like in the console versions, you occasionally get series of white notes. If you hit a whole stream of them without missing, it gives you energy. Getting 50% energy (requires 2 white note streams) or more you can go in overdrive. That will “revive” every instrument you might have failed, double you multiplier (or gets it up to 11 if you multiplier is maxed) and makes all instruments recover some of their “life bar” over time. Proper use of overdrives is definitely needed to get good scores in this game.

Difficulty-wise the game ranges from stupidly easy (easy and medium difficulty), to not too bad (some hard difficulty songs), to quite tough (some other hard difficulty songs), to really damn hard (some expert difficulty songs). I also feel like the scoring to get more stars is pretty strict. Like the console games, the number of stars you get is fully determined by score, but damn some of the songs require high scores for 5 stars. If you screw up just a few phrases you can’t expect to get more than 4 stars, even with good overdrive use.

Overall
This is a fun game. It lacks the multiplayer element from the first console versions, but it’s a competent rhythm game. It’s actually quite similar to previous Harmonix games (before they released Guitar Hero) Amplitude and Frequency, which also had that “multiple instrument tracks” thing going on. Not as visually appealing as those, but it’s interesting enough.

For people who want a fun rhythm game on the go, Rock Band Unplugged is a good choice.

Pros/cons
Pros
- Very interesting gameplay
- Since each song requires to play all the instruments, there’s actually some good variety of gameplay for each song since each instrument will play a bit differently, and it always keeps you on your toes
- Still fun despite losing the multiplayer aspect of the console versions

Cons
- Annoying volume changes when you change tracks
- Lame animation
- Song list mostly Rock Band 2 songs, or Rock Band DLC (same with DLC)
- DLC prices too high

The Save Factor
With a starting price of $30, the Save Factor for Rock Band Unplugged is:

$25

jobocan Games, Handheld, psp, Review