Today I finally caved in and bought Rock Band. Not the full kit though, just the standalone game only. I already have a guitar, you can use a headset as the vocals mic, and I’m not really that interested in the drums right now. They’ll be available separately at the end of this month anyway, should the urge ever hit me.

The guitar parts play pretty much exactly like Guitar Hero, unsurprisingly, with only a couple major differences: solo sections are specially marked off and your percentage of notes hit is tracked within that section and gives you a bonus based on how well you do, and at the end of some songs is a freestyle section where you can go wild on the frets for bonus points, as long as you hit the final notes correctly.

The other major differences are in the higher-level character management. Instead of choosing a built-in character, you create your own. Playing songs well unlocks clothing and instrument options, you can buy a lot more at the shop, and you can edit artwork onto some items a la Forza, so there’s quite a bit of customization potential. Each character you create is tied to a specific instrument type though, so you can’t switch between guitar and vocals with the same character.

There’s a single-instrument single-player solo career mode, and that’s what I spent most of my time in tonight, getting past the first four guitar tiers on medium. It started off really easy, but towards the end the difficulty was about on par with medium in GH2, and easier than GH3. The chosen songs work fairly well, though a couple seemed out of place in terms of difficulty. I still managed to five-star all but one of them though, and even hit 100% on a few, which I still haven’t done on any in GH2/3 on medium yet. Unfortunately there’s no bass guitar career, just lead, but at least you can choose bass in the quickplay mode whereas in GH it’s relegated to co-op and practice only.

There’s also a ‘world tour’ mode that’s supposed to be a bit deeper than the plain solo career mode, but it’s mainly meant to be used with multiple people playing and doesn’t work online, so I haven’t bothered with it yet.

There’s already plenty of downloadable songs out for Rock Band, but unfortunately a lot of them are covers. I wound up buying only three of them: Limelight (gotta have any Rush, even if this one is a cover), Buddy Holly, and My Iron Lung. The latter two were harder than the career songs I’d done so far, but Limelight was fairly easy.

I also tried vocals for a bit, doing the tutorial and a couple songs on easy, and it just confirmed one thing: I should never be let within ten feet of a microphone. I’ll stick with guitars for now.