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If you thought Guitar Hero made you feel like a rock god, wait until you get your hands on Rock Band. Our hands-on impressions.

Going into E3, I knew that there was one game that I had to play no matter what. Harmonix’s new rhythm behemoth, Rock Band. So imagine my disappointment when I arrived at Barker Hangar on day one and found that the only guitar peripherals on the floor were for Guitar Hero 3. It turned out that Rock Band was in fact being displayed at E3, but only by invitation at the EA suite and I unfortunately had not received one. Thankfully the people at EA were nice enough to squeeze me in on day three and I managed to finally go hands-on with my most anticipated game of 2007.

When I first stepped on to the stage, I figured I would start off with the guitar since I am a fairly confident Guitar Hero player. However, due to the fact that they were offering free Rock Band t-shirts to anyone that could score a 90% or higher, I decided to play it safe and start off on hard mode rather than expert. As I picked up the Fender Stratocaster replica guitar controller, there were a couple of things that I immediately noticed. The first was that the buttons felt somewhat different than what I was used to from the Guitar Hero controllers.

They were less profound didn’t protrude as much as the Gibson SG or Explorer guitars from Guitar Hero 2. The strum bar on the other hand stuck out far more than I was used to and was thin at the middle, but then circular at the top. This made it much easier to hit if you wanted to strum with two fingers as though you were actually playing a bass guitar. The final difference I noticed was that the whammy bar looked and felt much more like a normal whammy bar would. It was much bigger and felt more solid than any of the whammy bars on the Guitar Hero peripherals.

The song that was chosen for my first run through was “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who. Not a hard song by any means, but it is an endurance test with a song length of about 9 minutes. After a fairly long loading period (The rep told us that they would definitely shorten the load times by release,) our song started and the first few notes started trickling down my fret board. I fumbled around a little trying to get my fingers on the right buttons because, let’s face it, I was a little nervous with all of these people watching and because it does take a little getting used to the feel of the Stratocaster. After a couple of botched notes however I found my rhythm and began to show the song the respect that it deserved. Unfortunately I took a little bit too long getting used to the game and I ended up getting in the 80% range, which unfortunately meant that I had not earned my T-Shirt. At least not yet…

One of the things about Rock Band that must be experienced to truly appreciate it, is how fun and exhilarating playing the game with a full band and audience is. Most of us will never become rock stars, but Rock Band makes you feel pretty damn close to one under the right conditions.