Woahwoahwoahwoah woah. Big misnomer at the start, right there. Ignore the name, ignore the boxart, ignore the setlist on the back featuring the likes of Boston, The Who and Motorhead. Rock Band Unplugged is not a Rock Band title. At all. It just isn’t a Rock Band game. Go into your local gaming store with anything other than this in mind might put you off, and we don’t want that because it’s a brilliant game.

Got that lodged in your brain? Understood? Brilliant. Let’s crack on with this then, the SG Review of Rock Band Unplugged.

Unplugged, of course, refers to the system on which you’ll be playing this rhythm action title: the decrepit old PSP, free from the ties of your mains-wired home console. I’ll get this out the way at the start: this is the first must-have PSP game I’ve seen in ages, and the first game to inspire me to take my PSP outside my house for the first time in months.

The game, developed by Harmonix in co-operation with handheld specialist Backbone Entertainment, can trace its roots back to Harmonix’s first rhythm games FreQuency and sequel Amplitude, which both appeared on the PS2.

Largely – and unfortunately – ignored by the gaming community, both games revolved around hitting jewels representing elements of a song – beats, vocal syllables, guitar plucks – on their representative “tracks”, building a song up element by element until you reached the end. It was brilliantly addictive and despite Amplitude’s mainstream soundtrack – which featured the likes of Run DMC, Pink and P.O.D. – both games were a commercial failure.

Blast from the past: Amplitude, Harmonix's second music game.

Since then Harmonix has gone on to create Guitar Hero and Rock Band, leaving their original baby to be confined to the vault of gaming history. Until now anyway, which is where Unplugged steps in.

Unplugged revolves around the same idea of hitting out beats across multiple track albeit within the Rock Band universe. This means the setlist is classic Rock Band, the visuals and layout are classic Rock Band and the game itself is essentially a portable Rock Band title.

But it’s not: this is just to give the concept some familiarity to the many who haven’t experienced FreQuency or Amplitude. There’s no playing with friends in a band here; you’re completely solo, and you have to hit out all of the elements – bass, drums, vocals and guitar – by yourself.

Alrighty, Harmonix 101 is over. Hop over the page to see how it plays.

Tweet This Post

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2 3