The Beatles: Rock Band E3 report

The Beatles: Rock Band has featured prominently at this year’s E3, getting a major spot at Microsoft’s conference, even though only individual songs are going to be exclusive to the Xbox 360 version. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr even showed up for the big conference, though they didn’t appear to be entirely sure exactly what “video games” are. Anyway, despite Harmonix’s continual efforts to claim that this is a new and different Rock Band, the gameplay and instruments we’ve seen are very similar, but a little better looking than Rock Band 2. The big gameplay addition is vocal harmony, allowing three people to use their own microphones at once, along with guitar or bass, if they want. They all get their own parts, and when done well, it sounds really cool. Chances are, you’ve already been singing backup sometimes while playing guitar anyway, so that’s pretty cool. The instruments all feel basically the same, but are just a little more polished than the Rock Band 2 instruments.

The most exciting thing so far is actually the leaked intro video , which goes from neat to absolutely awesome, following The Beatles’ career through some great-looking animation. No details on the campaign mode have been released yet, and there’s some promise there for interesting gameplay, but as for the rest of the game, it’s just Rock Band. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Beatles fans on the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 can get their fix on 09/09/09, costing $60 for just the game, and $250 for all the instruments.