Rock Band: Beatles is a video game by Harmonix, the latest in their Rock Band series, released with the assistance and oversight of Apple Corps. It is groovy and psychedelic.
Groovy describes the music; psychedelic describes the accompanying visuals, which should surprise exactly no one. It's not complete — notable songs missing, hopefully to be offered for sale later, include "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Eleanor Rigby", "Nowhere Man", "I'll Follow the Sun", "Magical Mystery Tour", and "Yesterday". (In fact I can confirm that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is intended to be offered for sale via the various online distribution channels on either October 20 or November 20 of this year.) A complete list of the songs that are included is here, courtesy of Gamespot.
I'm not terribly fond of the guitar included with the game: the keys near the head don't rebound to full extension the way a Guitar Hero controller's do. It's difficult to tell when one is actually pressing the keys as opposed to pressing blindly on the solid plastic below them. (I played briefly with a GH-style controller at the game store where I purchased it, and did much better than with the Rock Band guitar.) One could probably argue that this makes it more like playing an actual guitar, but if I cared about that I'd just learn to play, y'know, an actual guitar. Gripe, grumble.
As for the vocals: it is, I suppose, nice to have concrete, objective data concerning just how badly I sing. (This apparently being "very badly indeed".) I've noticed that my score goes up measurably when I just sing 'Aaaah' rather than the lyrics, so probably at least part of my problem is a failure to project properly: the white-noise of unvoiced stops and fricatives is registering as much on the vocals-measurement as does the portion of my vocalization with a meaningful primary frequency. (The fact that I have a tin ear composes`{::}^1` the other nine-tenths of my failure.)
The drums I fail at not so much due to a lack of rhythm (DDR is good for a few things!) as because of a lack of off-hand (or rather, off-arm) coordination.
Still and all, it's 1:47 in the morning as I type this, and I've spent the last I don't-know-how-long pretending I have something vaguely like musical ability. On a scale of 1 to 1, I'll have to rate it a gas. ^_^
`{::}^1` Pun only vaguely intentional.
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