TWIG – Geek Gamers – Rock band: Beatles

The Beatles. They’re one of the only bands that truly deserve their own sentence and now they’re one of the only bands that deserve their own game. Beatles Rock Band was released this year in September and has had quite the impact on the world of gaming and pop culture in general. The kind of impact only The Beatles can have. Everyone has a different opinion on The Beatles and anything as culturally significant is going to have people that love it and people that hate it, but the fact remains that if something is this important it has to have a lot of people that love it and the dominant sales of The Beatles Rock Band have proved this theory. It’s been almost 50 years since The Beatles as we know them started back in 1962 and even now they have proven their significance and domination of the global market, but now in a new sector of the entertainment industry, the video game sector, and why not? Only the boys from Liverpool can take something like video games, an industry that no one had even dreamed of during the 1960’s, and make it their very own.

One of the things that makes The Beatles Rock Band such an interesting game is that it’s an almost educational experience. You’ll play through the Beatles entire career from their humble roots in a Liverpool club to the infamous rooftop concert. You’ll learn when certain songs were recorded, who sings which song and even how challenging their respective instrumentation might have been. You’ll discover first-hand just how much more talented Paul was compared to Ringo and through various unlockable photos and video clips you’ll learn more about the Beatles than you ever knew before.

There’s something quite surreal about being able to play as such living legends too. It’s different from the regular version of Rock Band where you can have a large, African American man in a gas mask singing a No Doubt song, here everything is about Authenticity. You play as The Beatles themselves in custom animated “dreamscapes” and re-created concert experiences. You even get to experience the band’s changing style as the game progresses. You’ll remember how stupid Paul looked with a full beard and how at one point every member had a moustache for some reason and so on. Nothing compares to being able to sit down, grab a guitar and pretend that you’re George Harrison or John Lennon in front of a crowd of adoring teenagers. It’s something everyone’s imagined at least once and now you get as close as ever to achieving your dreams thanks to modern-day video game innovations. Even the dreamscapes are shockingly similar to what was probably going through the Beatles minds when they were writing and recording these songs while consuming certain mind-altering substances. In fact, my only major complaint with this game is it didn’t come with nearly enough songs, considering the Beatles gigantic catalogue of classics. I could name a dozen chart-topping Beatles tunes that don’t feature on the game and that’s unfortunate, but luckily there is a solution.

That solution is the advent of something fairly new to the world of video gaming, downloadable content. Console gaming and internet use are now almost synonymous and downloadable content or DLC for short is invading the world of gaming by introducing download exclusive songs, levels, characters, weapons and so on to the video games that we all know and love. Thanks to this solution, whole Beatles albums are now being released to be played on your console. Let’s face it; if you own Beatles Rock Band, you have no excuse to not be picking up this content, especially when you can play Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety from start to finish. C’mon people! It’s freakin’ Sgt. Pepper! Rolling Stone Magazine named it the greatest album of all time and for good reason. Right now, Sgt. Pepper, Abby Road and Rubber Soul are all available for download to add to this already stunning game. The amazing thing about the various DLC songs is how much they integrate into the game, the studio banter that play before the song starts is still there, it still tells you when it was recorded and each song comes with either a new dreamscape or is integrated into a concert setting if it was, in fact, played at said concert. It feels like the new material could have come with the game. It works wonderfully and if you consider yourself a hardcore gamer and a hardcore Beatles fan, you can’t miss this experience that takes a game that was already great and makes it even greater. My only complaint is that once again, it would be nice to get more, and I can only hope for more in the future. The Beatles have so many amazing albums, it would be wonderful to see Please Please Me or Revolver or (my personal favourite) The White Album released as downloadable content, not to mention all the songs that were only ever released as singles such as Love Me Do or Hey Jude. I’d love to see more individual non-album tracks thrown into the DLC mix for fun.

I can’t really complain though, I mean playing through the over-15-minute-long medley at the end of Abbey Road as one long, uninterrupted song (and yes, it even includes Her Majesty) is an experience like no other and as I was saying earlier, it’s an almost educational experience. There were times that I thought that John or Paul were singing something when Beatles Rock Band showed me that it was really George or Ringo, etc. You gain an appreciation for this music when you’re really playing through it rather than just listening to it. The only other way to gain this kind of appreciation is to go out, buy a guitar and learn the songs in real life, but for everyone else there’s Beatles Rock Band, from Harmonix, EA, MTV Games and Apple Corp. Thanks guys for making something that takes a wonderful band and makes them even more wonderful. I can only hope for more DLC support in the future, but until then I’ll follow the sun. For This Week in Geek, I’ve been David “Double D” Denis. We’ll talk later.