Portable Rock Band!

The great thing about music games, Rock Band and Guitar Hero and their imitators is that they give you the ability to feel like you're playing music even when in reality all one is doing is playing away on small plastic guitars. Despite this there is little denying that the games are fun, addictive and above all profitable. So how to transfer the concept to the handheld market?

The companies have certainly tried, Rock Band launched Unplugged for the PSP with a simple button mashing system while Guitar Hero launch On Tour for the DS with an included peripheral and mimics the fret buttons on the plastic guitar. Both seem fun, neither are actual representations of playing an instrument

Now comes Rock Band for the iPhone. The game doesn't reproduce the feel of the instruments either but at least it doesn't try to. Instead it takes the four available instruments (guitars, drums, vocals, bass) and modifies them to play on the touch screen, notes continue to flow from top to bottom but to play the note the only requirement is to touch the fret button that represents that note. In the case of the vocals there is no actual singing, instead the vocals flow like notes that the player must hit as they pass.

Here's the predicament: should they have tried to reproduce instruments or did they take the correct route? On the one hand I don't want to look like an idiot playing my phone like a guitar or singing to its microphone but on the other hand...I sorta do. The thing is, however, that had they done full on instrumentation instead of tapping notes less people would be inclined to buy or play the game. There is also no doubt that it would not have been a very good game. Not to say that Guitar Hero On Tour and its peripheral suck, its just that thats not the way its done on the iPhone.

The game does have the feel of a Rock Band game. The menus and interface are very similar to the console version and includes some great tattoo inspired images drawn up exclusively for this game (thankfully they dont reek of Ed Hardy douchness). It comes with 20 songs none of which feel like filler. There's some Smashing Pumpkins, Blink 182, Foo Fighters as well as some classics from Lynyrd Skynyrd and other bands. The list is robust and varied enough to keep it interesting but if they're not enough the in-app music store offers two song packages for $1.00. Thats fifty cents a song! cheap!. Hopefully it will be updated weekly and include some free songs (it had two free songs on launch). Super Power (or whatever its called) is included and triggered by tilting the phone, bass groove comes back, unison bonuses are there too.

There are some negatives that need to be addressed: firstly the game cannot be played on the horizontal screen, trying to play on hard vertically is somewhat impossible, especially when trying to maneuver through combined notes with both thumbs. There simply isn't enough space. There is also no character creation or even character selection, it seems that the characters take a back seat, there is only one screen with four characters, one for each instrument. When actually playing most of the screen is taking up by the notes, leaving only about 1/5th of the screen for video of the band playing. Unlike the console version (and for obvious reasons) the video is not unique to the song, instead there are about three different videos which play randomly. This isn't such a big deal as its impossible to actually pay attention to it when playing.

At $10 it might seem like an expensive game but lets keep in mind that other hand held versions of rhythm games retail for much more than this. Overall its a solid, entertaining game, with endless possibilities thanks to the music store and the ability to update seamlessly via the app store. There is multiplayer but its limited to local bluetooth and I don't know anybody that's going buy this game and the person I share apps with simply doesnt care so I wont be taking advantage of this feature. Same goes for the facebook integration but this doesn't matter.