Rock Band

by MTV Games

Product Features

• Comes with guitar controller, drum controller, microphone, USB Hub and game software
• Over 40 tracks to play with - Including acts like Metallica, Bon Jovi, Stone Temple Pilots and the Ramones! Learn to play songs spanning all genres of rock.
• Guitar controller utilizes a five-way FX switch that allows flanger, wah-wah, echo and chorus effects
• Drum controller features four pads, a kick pedal and real drum sticks
• Microphone can be tapped against your hand to play percussion instruments, such as tambourine and cowbell

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0016HM45K
• Product Dimensions: 29.8 x 15.2 x 11.2 inches ; 10.4 pounds
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: June 22, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (213 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,601 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #24 in Video Games > Wii > Rhythm > Musical Instruments

Product Description

Platform: Nintendo Wii | Edition: Special

Amazon.com

Tap into your Rock & Roll fantasy as you pick your axe, form a band and tour for fame and fortune, all while sticking the rock credo of learning your instrument as you go in Rock Band.

For those about to rock!

Jam solo if that's your thing. View larger .

Or try multiplayer action. View larger.

Step to the mic. View larger.

Or go Bonzo on the skins! View larger.

Developed by Harmonix, creators of the blockbuster Guitar Hero franchise, Rock Band is an all-new platform for gamers ready to take on the challenges of the Rock & Roll lifestyle. Instruments available to players are guitar, bass, drums or vocals as they hit the road as either an aspiring superstar solo act, or for the first time in game genre history take on the true collaborative and challenging nature of music as they form a band and jam together in multiplayer action from home or around the world. Either way players will need to master their stage presence through the various game modes and poli sh their rock chops via the unrivaled Rock Band song list if they hope to make it out of the garage, into the clubs and finally on to the main stage.

* Rock Band Special Edition for Wii includes: guitar, mic, drum kit peripherals plus software.

Extensive Game Modes.
Rock Band delivers four music games in one - challenging rockers to master lead guitar, bass guitar, drums and vocals through the five separate game modes.

• Tutorial Mode: Master the basics! No need for experience. Pick your weapon of choice and ascend from beginner to rock god.
• Practice Mode: Perfect your tune! Breakdown any part of any song at your preferred speed before hitting the main stage.
• Quickplay Mode: Instant fix of fun! Jump into any unlocked song for some quick jam time either on your own or with other players.
• Solo Tour Mode: Take it on the road! Pack up your instrument of choice and set out on the open road for a fun and challenging single player career.
• Band World Tour Mode: Conquer the world! The journey to rock stardom takes you from small town bars to world-renowned venues. Earn fame and fortune along the way to secure rock star necessities.

A Song List That Goes to Eleven!
Built on unprecedented deals with top record labels and music publishers, the mix of remastered originals and covers that make up the epic Rock Band song list puts players in the shoes of legendary artists from day one. In addition to the 45 tracks listed below, Rock Band will also feature 13 songs ranging from a variety of established bands to up-and-coming independent artists that can be unlocked as you play through the game. Track list includes:

• Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter"
• Aerosmith "Train Kept a Rollin'"
• The Who "Won't Get Fooled Again"
• Boston "Foreplay/Long Time"
• Mountain "Mississippi Queen"
• The Police "Next to You"
• David Bowie "Suffragette City"
• Black Sabbath "Paranoid"
• Blue Oyster Cult "Don't Fear the Reaper"
• The Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"
• Deep Purple "Highway Star"
• KISS "Detroit Rock City"
• Molly Hatchet "Flirtin' With Disaster"
• The Outlaws "Green Grass & High Tides"
• Sweet "Ballroom Blitz"
• Rush "Tom Sawyer"
• Bon Jovi "Wanted Dead or Alive"
• The Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go"
• Faith No More "Epic"
• R.E.M. "Orange Crush"
• Iron Maiden "Run to the Hills"*
• Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly"
• Metallica "Enter Sandman"
• Nirvana "In Bloom"
• Stone Temple Pilots "Vasoline"
• Weezer "Say It Ain't So"
• Smashing Pumpkins "Cherub Rock"
• Radiohead "Creep"
• Beastie Boys "Sabotage"
• Hole "Celebrity Skin"
• Garbage "I Think I'm Paranoid"
• Soundgarden "Black Hole Sun"
• The Hives "Main Offender"
• Queens of the Stone Age "Go With the Flow"
• The Strokes "Reptilia"
• Jet "Are You Gonna Be My Girl"
• OK Go "Here It Goes Again"
• Nine Inch Nails "The Hand That Feeds"
• Pixies "Wave of Mutilation"
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Maps"
• Red Hot Chili Peppers "Dani California"
• Coheed & Cambria "Welcome Home"
• Fallout Boy "Dead on Arrival"
• The Killers "When You Were Young"
• New Pornographers "Electric Version"

Product Description

Rock Band Special Edition - includes software wireless guitar drums mic

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

123 of 127 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great game on its own!!!, July 12, 2008

By 

E.C. (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Wii Rock Band Special Edition (Video Game)

Although I've been a heavy shopper of Amazon for years, I've written very few reviews - mostly due to laziness. But after playing with Rock Band for just over a week, and noticing a lot of the negative reviews, mostly due to comparisons to versions of the same game on other platforms, i felt i really ought to provide some of my feedback.

I don't own an XBOX or a PS3. I wish i did - but.. i'm too cheap, and my kids are still too young (3 and 7) for the type of games that are popular on those systems. I've settled for the Wii. Although we've been quite happy with Wii Sports, none of the other games have really kept our interest beyond a couple of days. (granted, i've only attempted to purchase games that would appeal to both my 7 year old and all the adults around - that's pretty hard to do)... until now. Rock Band has to be one of the best "team" oriented games I've played in a long time. Its a game that has kept friends of ours over very late trying to pass the various songs. More importantly, its a game that both my 7 year old and I can play together at the same time. (she sings, and i'd play the drums..).. And to be able to complete a song together is really cool.. Its "team" oriented because you're only as good as your weakest band member.. and when the weak band member falls behind, the best band member has the ability to "save" him/her..otherwise, the team falls..

Since I've never played the Xbox or ps3 version, i have no idea what i'm missing.. but what i do get, i absolutely love! So, if you are a single console owner like myself, i think this game is a must have - its the best party game since Wii Sports.

I only hope that the equipment stays functioning for a long time as we've given it a good workout so far..

93 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rock Band is FUN!, September 8, 2008

By 

EddieRay (DE USA) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Wii Rock Band Special Edition (Video Game)

I'm a musician in my early 40's, so Rock Band for the Wii was a no-brainer... when my daughter asked for it for her birthday, I couldn't help but get it for her (despite the somewhat daunting price for a "video game"). She'd been playing Guitar Hero every since she got the Wii for Christmas and I knew she'd get our money's worth out of it, regardless, with the guitar-playing aspect alone.

First, the equipment is top-notch and the reason for the price, thus, becomes obvious. We had no problems with the equipment whatsoever... everything just worked. The strum-bar on the guitar is the only thing that feels a bit "fragile", but it seems to work fine and seems to be holding up. The Guitar Hero strum-bar seems more rugged but also works a bit differently, with a noticable "click" when you use it... so this is potentially just paranoia on my part. If you're used to the Guitar Hero (Wii) guitar, you'll know what I mean when you try the Rock Band guitar.

The gameplay is excellent. I've played real-live guitar, bass and sang in bands for over 25 years now (geezzz, I'm not really THAT old) and I've actually played real drums before. The Rock Band drums, although different in size and placement than an actual drum set, feel very good and respond nicely to being played correctly to the beat/notes of the song, etc. I was suprised at how well playing the drums matches up with the song correctly in the game as you play right on the beat... and it certainly gives me my "drum fix" without getting too hard if I don't want it to be. Playing the drums in Rock Band definitely give you a good feel of what it is really like to sit behind a drum set and play an actual drum beat... mechanically (the coordination of your hands and kick drum foot) and spatially (the movement between drums). As a result, you'll find that playing the drums feels a lot more "real" than playing the guitar does. However, there's nothing wrong with the guitar play in Rock Band, and it is almost identical to Guitar Hero gameplay. The singing via the mic is great... everyone wants to be a singer! You have to try to sing on pitch and articulate the lyrics correctly to get the best scores, but you don't have to be very close to perfect except in the harder difficulty modes. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the mic and singing part of the game works. The mic also doubles as a tambourine or cowbell during non-vocal parts of the songs - which you have to tap along on the mic according to the beats that come up where the singers words are usually displayed (i.e. in most cases, you don't sit around doing nothing while the rest of the band is jamming through a solo part or whatever - you have to keep on jamming too!).

The difficulty is very well done... "Easy" mode is truly easy regardless of instrument. The "Medium" mode is good for those who've played this kind of game... I played the entire game on Medium (guitar) from the get-go and did pretty well, despite my limited knowledge of many of the songs and lack of any extended practice with Guitar Hero. My daughter has been working on guitar parts in "Hard" mode (she's already surpassed me) and it's definitely "hard", using all 5 buttons on the guitar with only 4 fingers to press them, and there are some fast phrases with multiple simultaneous notes and tricky patterns. This is true of Hard mode for guitar, bass and drums. I've been playing the drums on Hard difficulty... it can be really tough, just like the real songs, which have some incredible drum parts and can be truly difficult. "Expert" mode is just that... it's EXTREMEMLY hard. You'll have to practice extensively to have any chance of completely a song on "Expert". For singing, the difficulty setting controls how accurate you have to be with articulation and pitch. If you can sing, and you know the song well, it's actually going to be easy for you to score well even at Hard difficulty.

The difficulty makes sense for the drums and vocals. At the harder difficulty settings, you have to play/sing more of what the real band plays/sings in the real songs. For the guitar parts, it really just gets into trickier patterns of button presses (with two or three-button simultaneous presses being more common), with strumming rhythms that tend to match more closely to the song. But that's not a limitation of Rock Band in particular, it's a limitation of playing guitar with 5 buttons - it's just doesn't capture the feel of a true guitar with 20+ frets and 6 strings. Despite that fact, the guitar/bass gameplay in Rock Band is still a lot of fun.

The best thing about the game difficulty: each player in a band can choose their own difficulty independently of the rest of the players (in multiplayer mode). I can play drums on Hard mode while my wife sings on Easy mode and my daughter plays Bass on Medium. We can do well TOGETHER, at our own maximum skill level for each song to test ourselves. If one player has trouble and fails, the other players can "save" the failed player and bring them back in. It's a very ingenious feature to keep with the "having fun together" spirit of the game! And that's what you'd expect for a Wii game in general - keep everyone playing together and having fun.

Also, I feel that these games, in general, are a good learning tool for music skills. They require different levels of coordination and rhythm, and a keen sense of rhythm and timing. If your kids like these games and excel at them, it's quite possible that they could have the mentality, endurance and basic skill set needed to take on a real instrument and take their musicianship to the next level.

So that's the good stuff... the game is definitely FUN, the hardware works well, and you can feel like a real drummer and singer if you get into it on the harder modes. It's a blast playing it with the whole family, going on a simulated "rock and roll tour" together.

The main let-down for me is the song selection. I'm not sure why some of the songs were chosen... they're either somewhat obscure, or B-sides, or just downright off the wall. I can say that I've *heard* many of them on the radio or whatever, but for a game with a limited song list (63 in this game), they should be choosing songs from the "cream of the crop" of rock and roll which have undisputed popularity. There's no Led Zepellin, Beatles, Doors, AC/DC, Cream, Def Leppard, Santana, ZZ Top, Allman Brothers, Journey... instead there's some pretty obscure stuff like Nine Inch Nails, Maps, Radiohead, Weezer, The Killers, etc. Also, the song choices for the bands that are popular is lacking in particular cases. I realize they can't please everyone, but there should be a base-line that is "popular classic rock hits" in my opinion. Get a list of "Top 100 Rock Songs Of All Time" or similar and use that as a basis. Save the other genres for add-on packs for the specific genres... different "flavors" of "rock and roll", etc.

Don't get me wrong, it can still be a lot of fun to play the songs you don't know on the various instruments, and likely, the kids aren't quite as "biased" as their parents might be about the song content, but it's not very fun to sing songs you don't know. If you just plain don't LIKE a song, you still have to play through it successfully to unlock the rest of the songs. Some of the obscure ones can contain some "raw" lyrics that you might not know about because you've never heard the songs... so keep that in mind when evaluating the game for the kids. They might have added a feature to "lock out" songs so you don't have to play them (or if you wanted to censor them for your kids), but they probably figured the ones they chose are pretty "tame"... and they are for the most-part.

Another let-down is the omission of the capability to buy the songs you WANT online with the Wii version.

Maybe that will change eventually, but the game is so fun, it's really only the song selection that's holding it back from being truly GREAT for me, which is why I only gave it 4 stars overall.

The "Track Pack 1" product is also somewhat of a let-down for the same reason. There are 20 songs for $30, and many are just "obscure" (Who cares about another obscure "Weezer" song anyway?). Also, for some reason, it's a separate disc that is essentially a new game with only 20 songs to play, completely separate from the original game, rather than what you'd expect - 20 new tracks to add into the original game so that you can perform from a repertoire of 83 songs instead of 63.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Buy for Xbox 360 or Play Station instead., November 16, 2008

By 

Josh Foot "Phil" (NC) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Wii Rock Band Special Edition (Video Game)

Rock Band for Wii overall is a fun game, but if you also own one of the other consoles this game comes out on, I would recommend getting it for that system. It's not that the one for Wii isn't fun, but it doesn't include some things that the other console releases have. Here are some of the pros and cons.

PROS:
*Rock Band has a great variety of songs
*It has four instruments, allowing for the whole family to play.
*It has a great variety of old and newer songs, so some older people might enjoy the selection.
*The guitar is wireless, giving you more room to "rock"
*The instruments are very durable
*The guitar's strumming bar is smoother and makes much less noise than the Guitar Hero guitar.

CONS:
*The game is very hard to calibrate with your TV, so the picture is usually very delayed which can be very annoying
*The tour (campaign) mode is very dull, unlike the other console releases where you choose your venue and tour the world.
*You cannot buy guitars, songs, characters, costumes, or anything else in this game. There is not even a Guitar Shop, nor do you earn money in Tour mode (unlike the Xbox 360 and Playstation versions).
*You cannot change your guitars or characters, and you cannot change between different venues in any modes (unlike the Xbox 360 and Playstation versions).
*The drum set is very loud and annoying, causing it to drown out the music (can be changed if you buy the drum dampers which apparently make the drums softer when you hit them).
*You cannot download songs online, unlike the other releases.

Overall, Rock Band for Wii is recommended if you don't own an Xbox 360 or Playstation, but if you do, I would recommend not buying the Wii version.

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