When I saw the initial trailer for Green Day: Rock Band, my response was "Great. Where's Rock Band 3?"
I'll admit, I'm not a massive fan of Green Day (American Idiot was one of the most overplayed songs of my teenage years), so I was a bit sceptical about this. Partly because I don't really like Green Day, but also because most of their songs aren't actually terribly challenging to play on the guitar or bass. The drums always sound quite crazy though, purely because Tre Cool's a nutter.
Look at him there, mentalist...
But after seeing how good a job Harmonix did with The Beatles: Rock Band, another group that I wasn't a huge fan of, and seeing that they'd made Green Day themselves look a lot more human in the latest trailer, I'm now hoping this'll turn out to be good. Harmonix haven't made a bad game yet, and hopefully this won't buck the trend.
The mechanics of the game haven't changed much from the previous Rock Band titles, each player choses the instrument of their choice from guitar, bass, drums and vocals, and by holding down buttons and strumming (or just hitting the buttons if you're playing on drums) in time with the on screen prompts they can play some of Green Days finest tunes.
Green Day: Rock Band will also include the vocal harmonies which were first introduced in The Beatles: Rock Band, so if you've got more than one microphone controller you can have more than one person singing, harmonising with the lead vocals (listen to Basket Case for a good example of the harmonies). This also means that if you're a bit inventive, you can have up to six players on one console.
Having listened to the majority of the songs that are going to be included on the game (Check out the complete tracklist here), I've noticed a few songs that might pose a bit of a problem in one way or the other. F.O.D, (as well as the title standing for "F*** off and Die") has a minute and a half of purely acoustic guitar with the vocals, which'll be a bit boring for the bassist and drummer, but that's not as bad as Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), which doesn't have a bass or drum part, unless Harmonix have found live versions which include all the instruments.
I'm almost certain they're not play Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) there
If Green Day: Rock Band is going to be censored like the previous Rock Band games, it creates another problem. A lot of Green Day's early songs include rather gratuitous use of the F word and various other cusses, and removing these is going to remove an awful lot of the song for the vocalist, which, as well as making it sound odd, will also detract from the true Green Day experience and put off a lot of the hardcore Green Day fans. And with previous Rock Band games censoring the word "God", there's going to be an awful lot of words that aren't going to be there.
There's also the chance that a few songs might suffer from Guitar Hero-itis, Viva La Goria's minute-long piano intro and the first verse of Last Night on Earth on the piano are just a couple of sections I don't want to play on the guitar.
It'll also be interesting to see what they do with Song of the Century, the 58 second intro to the 21st Century Breakdown album.After The Beatles: Rock Band exceeded all my expectations, and Lego Rock Band ate up a vast amount of my evenings, I'm hoping that Green Day: Rock Band will do the same, if it doesn't, it's gonna be a long wait for Rock Band 3...
