Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by yourself), and she had it mostly unpacked by the time I was done studying Japanese.

So we tried out the quick play multiplayer mode. I was on guitar; at first, she wanted to play the drums, but she found it kind of frustrating, and switched over to vocals after a few tries. I was worried that vocals would be kind of tricky since she’d never heard the songs before (which makes a difference on vocals since, unlike the other instruments, you’re not just responding to straightforward cues, you have to know something about the melody of the song), but she did fine, making it through all four of the the introductory songs.

While we were heating up leftovers for dinner, I downloaded Still Alive; Miranda was twice as excited when we saw that. I read the manual during dinner and figured out how we could make characters, so she didn’t have to play as (horrors) a boy (incidentally, I was very disappointed at the lack of beards; googling, I guess I’ll be able to unlock that?); we then played through Still Alive a few times. You could tell that she had practice with the song: on her first try (on Easy), she got it 100% correct, we were still doing fine with me on Expert and her on Hard, and I’m sure she would have done well on Expert as well. (It didn’t hurt, of course, that it’s a pretty easy song, at least compared to my memory of songs in the original Guitar Hero. Though I was surprised to see Expert having you switch between green and orange buttons so quickly; I didn’t remember that before.)

Quite a pleasant evening. I’m not thrilled with the guitar, but it’s okay, and Guitar Hero III should show up tomorrow and fix that problem. I’m curious to give the drums (and, for that matter, the vocals) a try. And I hope we’ll convince Liesl to join our band soon…

Any recommendations for other songs to download? I’m sure we’ll be happy for quite some time playing the songs on the disc, but, with that game, it would be a shame to not explore the downloadable content.

Jordan: I don’t suppose you’re ready to give in and get an Xbox 360, are you?

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