Dragon: A Parable

Next Wednesday evening the History channel is showing The Beatles on Record, which neatly fills the last hour of Rocking Wednesday. If there's anyone who hasn't already traveled away for Thanksgiving at that time and likes the Beatles they should totally come over - if you get here before 10 PM there will also be Beatles RockBand to enjoy :).

Tonight I went to the A Hard Day's Night/Beatles Rockband Competition event at the Somerville theater (and I apologize to everyone for not making more people aware it was occurring). It was entirely made of awesome - Hard Day's Night was great on the big screen and the competition was a huge barrel of fun - people in costume and everyone singing along and cheering and it was just great. I entirely sucked on the bass when it was our turn to play Here Comes the Sun (and by "our" I mean maru_mari and fennel), but that was OK, I got to belt out Helter Skelter during the free play afterward. fennel won MVP by virtue of his awesome drumming (both on stage and in his seat) and his awesome shoes. But the best part was after it was all done and I went up to ask the Harmonix folks about the availability of the drum kit outside of the collector's edition (unfortunately not so much). When I said sadly "yea, I really wanted the Beatles sign on my drum kit" they gave me one! Because they're people-shaped packages of awesome! I swear, my eyes were the size of dinner plates when the dude handed it to me. Also us non-XBox360 people are going to be able to get All You Need is Love in December, which pleases me greatly. Oh, and they had all of Sgt. Peppers available for play, because that is coming out on November 17th (mark your calendars, Rocking Wednesday folks, because you bet your booty I will have it when it comes out :).

So yes, today was made of awesome. Now here's hoping the coffee and ibuprofen I just took stave off the migraine that I noticed was incoming as I was walking home (after everyone else had already gone their separate ways).

From ladypolitik, this pretty much sums it up:



If anyone wants to come over and play let me know, we'll work out a time for it. Because every Beatles fan should play this game at least once.

OK, I have to get this out of the way.

OMGOMGOMGTHISGAMEISSOAWESOMEYAYSQUEEEEEEE!!111!!!!eleventyBAZILLION

Alright, now I'll be coherent.

The best part is all the songs (EDIT: except one) are there without needing to play through the game. Instead, playing through story mode (which goes in chronological order rather than by difficulty) gets you photos from the Beatles Archives at Apple (no, the other Apple) with captions that are made of trivia goodness. Plus when you gather enough photos you get random goodies like the audio content and a slow scroll of the liner notes from the first Beatles Christmas Album in 1963. So us Beatles fans get something quite worthwhile out of playing story mode, but if you happened to, say, invite your friends over to play the day you got the game you can still play anything you want. Everyone wins :).

There's also been minor adjustments to how gameplay works. Instead of a freestyle section for setting off the drum Beatlemania (that's Overdrive to my Rockband peeps) you just have to hit a single flashing green beat - that way you don't have random drum crap in the middle of your favorite song. Also Beatlemania adds pretty patterns to the background of your playfield but doesn't change the color of your notes - a very welcome change. Other eminently practical changes include a countdown if you come back from a pause and the ability to adjust lefty/righty mode from the initial selection screen (which means it tells you what mode you're in *before* the song begins - I assure you, that is wicked useful).

The only thing I'd change is allowing for players to solo the harmony line - I'd like to be "solo Paul" by playing the bass and singing harmony on songs where John is primary singer, for example. EDIT: Turns out you can indeed do just this in sections where there is both a primary and a harmony line. So my wish has been granted :).

Thus far, this game has lived up to my expectations, which considering how high they were is pretty impressive :).

ETA: There are amazing scenes before each chapters in story mode that are transitions amongst digital pop-up art and animated drawing of photos and album covers that do the real story-telling of each set of songs. Actually, all of the art in this game is amazing - not only is it wonderful in and of itself, but it gets the feel of the Beatles (by era and overall) just right.

ETA2: Also, I'm really glad I couldn't help but switch to mic partway through because the post-concert-era songs are along the lines of "we start in a recoding studio, then as the song gets going we enter the world of this song, and in the silence at the end we return to the recording studio", which is entirely too cool to not watch.

A copy of Beatles Rockband awaits me at my pre-order location of choice, right in time for Rocking Wednesday! So Come Together right now tomorrow evening at 7PM at my place (email/comment for directions) - I've Got a Feeling this game is only Getting Better With a Little Help From My Friends.

(and yes, every song mentioned in this post is in the game itself ;)