I’ll admit it I’m over the Music Band thing; I think the folks at Harmonix and Red Octane have gone about as far as you can go with this genre. There was a brief moment last year when Harmonix rekindled my love of plastic instruments with their amazing, loving work on The Beatles Rock Band; their follow-up is an odd choice – Green Day? Really? That’s a band significant enough to warrant it’s own Rock Band game? Ok. Come on, where’s Prince Rock Band? Or U2?
Once I got past the idea of a Green Day Rock Band, I had to actually listen to Green Day. The game arrived in my mailbox the night before I went to NY, while there I had Green Day on the brain so I checked out their new Broadway show American Idiot and thought, yeah, maybe a Rock Band game wouldn’t be such a horrible idea. I now like Green Day, I don’t think they are god’s gift to Rock like critics and hipsters make them out, but I like it.
I came back from New York ready to fire it up. I’m now playing Rock Band on Hard level because the Normal mode is just too easy and I don’t feel like I’m actually playing the songs in that mode. In Hard mode a lot of the Green Day songs are surprisingly “easy,” because most of the guitar tracks consists of power cords played fast, so once you get the pattern I got 90% of the tracks at 90% and above by the third or fourth try, sadly, not a perfect in the bunch.
Michelle Plays Boulevard of Broken Dreams
As with all music game reviews whether you like a game is based solely on whether you like the track list or not, there are a lot of great tunes here, the epic 9 minute Jesus of Suburbia has so many mood and tone switches that it’s one of the coolest Rock Band Tracks I’ve played in a long time, I love the sublime stuff like Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Are We The Waiting, Give Me Novocaine, the straightforward Holiday and even American Idiot. I was really put out by the fact that they didn’t include 21 Guns as part of this 47 song set list. I mean seriously, how can 21 Guns not be included?
All of the standard Rock Band modes are here including Career mode (which I skipped this time), Training Mode, No Fail Options full Online Play, etc. You can also export the entire playlist to other Rock Band Games for $10, which I did, because I like having everything on one disk. My Rock Band 2 track list is OUT OF CONTROL I have over 300 tracks BEFORE adding the 47 Green Day songs.
While I like playing these tunes, this game has no reason to exist. Everyone who wants a music game probably has one already, there’s no reason this couldn’t have been done with 3 or 4 full album downloads. Almost all of the tracks come from three Albums – Dookie, American Idiot and their latest 21st Century breakdown. Green Day Rock Band is now available on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
Final Grade B
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 6.20.2010