Rock Band demo. Wow!

Saturday night I got a chance to see Rock Band in action at one my local BestBuys. I’m very impressed.

My wife was a percussionist a few years ago and she was able to start playing the drums on hard immediately. I found the guitar portion to be exactly like the Guitar Hero games. My brother was with us so we were able to have a 3 person band and it was amazingly fun. None of us was brave enough to try singing.

The onscreen band members all looked very unique but left me wondering if they’re default characters from the game or an example of what’s possible with the custom character creator. If it’s the latter, then this could be one of the best character builders ever.

So, has anyone else tried it?

I haven’t tried it but I’m wondering how the singing works. Does the game know you are singing the correct lyrics? Or can you just sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the game doesn’t care about or score the singing?

According to the Wiki article the microphone will have “phoneme detector that will pick up the individual vowels and consonants”.

It should be fairly accurate given the state of voice recognition software these days. Heck, my Nintendo DS has a microphone that can interpret voice commands accurately through my drawling accent.

Very cool. I’ll just have to hand out ear plugs when I sing.

Has anyone gotten any official word on what shortcomings the PS2 version of Rock Band will have versus the next gen systems? I don’t think we’re going to be upgrading from our PS2 in time for the release of the game, but I want to know if anything critical is going to be missing.