Games of the Generation #10 - Rock Band 3

You got the touch

At the end of the day, videogames are power fantasies. That's not meant as a slur, but rather as an endorsement of what so many people find so compelling about them. While a lot of media is escapist, only in games do you get to truly feel a part of the experience, because even to the smallest extent you're the one guiding the narrative and interfering in the flow of the story. What Harmonix Music Systems set out to do with Rock Band  then was not so much create the perfect rhythm game, but rather to craft the perfect rock star fantasy simulator.

It's all about those instruments. They've been criticised for being overblown toys that are a waste of space, but people who say that are missing the point. The reason they're so essential is precisely because they're overblown toys, props to act out your own school-play level musical debauchery. If Rock Band were just about pressing buttons, then it might be the same mechanically, but all the fun, all the investment, all the marvelous let's-pretend charm of the experience is gone. 

This alone is why it's the greatest five-slightly-drunk-people co-op game ever. The essential silliness of the whole exercise requires you to complete abandon your dignity, but there's infinite consolation in doing it together as a group, watching your mates stumble over the chorus or hammer the drums so hard the kit begins to move away from them. That you can do it to the soundtrack of some of your favourite songs only sweetens the deal.

Why then 3 over the genre defining original or the coming of age 2? The addition of the keyboard is a neat one sure, but what really matters here is the culmination of all the work Harmonix did over the previous installments, as well as the revolutionary Guitar Hero games. So you've got a super slick interface that allows easy jumping in and out, profile switching or just freeplay. You've got an addictive tour mode where everything you do and play feeds into your progress. And most importantly, you've got the benefit of the deepest library of music ever put into a videogame, drawn from Harmonix's extensive DLC catalogue, the first two games, track packs and the marvelously silly LEGO Rock Band. With hundreds of tracks, from rock to metal to country to comedy, each play session is as much mixtape assembly and singalong as it is rockout time.

As the generation ends the music game lies dead and buried, smothered by Activision's greed and a general disillusionment with the gimmicky nature of the games. That shouldn't detract however from the skill and spirit which went into crafting this, the pinnacle of the genre and one of the greatest multiplayer games ever made. And hey, any game which lets me live my childhood dream of performing Stan Bush's 'The Touch' is a-ok in my book.