Developer/Publisher: Backbone Entertainment/MTV Games & EA
Genre: Music/Rhythm
Price: $39.99
Verdict: Any “music simulator” concerns aside, Rock Band Unplugged is a solidly fun rhythm game for the PSP.
Pros: Great interpretation of the Rock Band concept on PSP
Cons: Feeling of disconnection between the music and what you’re playing; mediocre sound quality
The first thing to realize when you play Rock Band Unplugged is that you must leave your biases at the door – this game isn’t attempting to ‘simulate’ playing a musical instrument at all, and makes no effort to feel like it. This is a game that has set out to approximate the Rock Band experience on your PSP, and the victim in this conversion was any feeling of playing a musical instrument. This is especially apparent when playing the singing parts – there’s just absolutely no connection between what you’re playing and what is supposed to be happening. I think it would have worked better if for some songs, you had the option to play rhythm guitar or electronics parts instead of the vocals, as this would’ve felt a lot better than playing vocals. My suggestion is to get over this and to just enjoy the game for what it is instead of what you expect it to be.
At the beginning, Rock Band Unplugged’s gameplay may be baffling – the individual instrument sections make plenty of sense, you play along with them and try not to mess up, of course. It’s the instrument switching that is the new wrinkle, as you have to manage all 4 instruments. The goal is to successfully play phrases of each song (like the vocal section ‘phrases’ of singing in the console Rock Band games) in order to get them automatically playing and to raise their health back to the top so they won’t fail out. As you complete a phrase successfully, you then have to switch to a new instrument and start playing where you see the bouncing multiplier arrow in order to start playing a new phrase and to increase your multiplier so you can get high scores. You also pick up Overdrive, which doubles your multiplier, helps you survive during tough sections of songs, and rescues instruments if they fail out, just as it always did. There are also times during songs where you will play just one instrument as part of a solo, and what’s cool is that these aren’t always just guitar solos, you’ll also get drum and vocal solos to play as well. With these sections, you just have to not fail out while playing them.
The gameplay succeeds as being a unique way to bring Rock Band to the PSP – playing phrases of songs to get an instrument playing on its own works and makes the game very challenging, as points where you might just be passable on the console version will cause you fail and you really have to be careful to nail all the notes in the phrase as mere survival will not suffice here. The controls generally work well – by default, L and R switch note tracks, left, up, Triangle, and Square play each of the notes, with X being used to activate Overdrive. The problem I had with the controls was that there was at times a disconnect between what I was playing and how they were played on the system. This is especially problematic with chords where you have to play 2 or 3 buttons at a time and you have to get used to them being on different hands, and while this is probably just a skill you have to develop, it still just never felt natural at all. Rapidly alternating notes seemed especially difficult in the game, especially for guitar and bass parts where on the console version they’d be hammer-on/pull-off parts that would be otherwise pretty simple, that become much more difficult than they should be in this version.
Most of your time playing Rock Band Unplugged will be spent in the Tour mode, which functions identically to Rock Band 2′s World Tour mode – you create a band, you earn money and fans, can hire managers, and you go around playing songs and setlists in various locales – nothing new here. You’ll hate this format early on, as you’ll get well acquainted with the beginning tracks as you wind up playing them over and over again as you start to get to the later songs. As for the tracklist, a lot of it is a retread of Rock Band 1 & 2′s setlists including a few songs so far only released as DLC and a few songs new to the series , including 2 absolutely killer songs that need to be in the console version now – “Rock Your Socks” by Tenacious D and grunge’s finest hour, “Would?” by Alice in Chains. Those 2 songs’ inclusion in this game alone made me excited to play it. Overall, the setlist is solid, although I would’ve appreciated more songs that were new to the series. One thing that disappointed me in regard to the sound was that it seemed subpar for what we’ve come to expect from the Rock Band series. While part of this may be because developers Backbone Entertainment are not as familiar with audio production and manipulation as Harmonix are, and also due to the lesser available space on the PSP UMD versus even the 360 DVD-9, it was still disappointing to hear just how ‘off’ and compressed the songs were.
So, the important question is whether or not Rock Band Unplugged is worth it. Well, it’s almost impossible to fairly judge this game based on the Rock Band license – the name comes with certain expectations that this game just simply was not designed to provide. But that does not mean that this is a bad game at all – it’s a unique method to utilize the concept of playing a rock band without actually feeling like you’re playing the instruments or having the camaraderie of playing with friends. As a rhythm game on its own merits, it’s a unique idea and deserves a look for PSP rhythm game fans even ignoring the Rock Band license’s expectations. It’s fun and a neat concept with solid execution, and for fans of the Rock Band platform, Backbone did a great job of staying true to the style and creating an experience that is immediately familiar. If you come in expecting a music instrument facsimile, you won’t find much to enjoy, but if you come in expecting a solid rhythm game that takes best advantage of the platform it’s on for a Rock Band game, it’s a quality pickup for your PSP.
Popularity: unranked [?]
