When EA first announced Rock Band Unplugged for the PSP, I feared the worst. How on earth would they possibly recreate the awesome experience that is Rock Band, on a handheld console? We’ve already seen Guitar Hero repeatedly get it almost right on the DS, but that’s an indirect port featuring just the lead guitar. How do you do drums on a PSP? And vocals?
It was at that point that I heard rumour that the game was loosely based on the likes of Frequency and Amplitude, two kick-ass music titles that didn’t really grab the game-playing population when released for the PS2 way back when. It turns out that Rock Band Unplugged isn’t so much a loosely based rendition, rather pretty much a direct copy of the gameplay mechanic from those titles. That’s no bad thing. As the song starts, you take your pick and “play” drums, vocals, bass or lead guitar by pressing combinations of the up, left, triangle and circle buttons – with each one representing a different colour on the traditional Rock Band stave. Successful completion of a phrase causes it to play on its own for a few bars, so you can quickly switch (with the shoulder buttons) to take over another instrument. The idea is – obviously – to get as much of the song playing at any one time as is possible, and to skip between tracks as you complete a phrase, in time for the beginning of the next one. If you leave a track unattended for too long, it begins to act as if you’re missing the notes, meaning that you have to constantly switch back and forth, and can’t rest on your laurels. Individual instruments can be “failed” and then rescued by using overdrive (down on the d-pad, strangely) just as individual band members can in the home console editions.
It works.
Not only does it work, but it’s just as addictive as Amplitude and Frequency were. The tour mode comes over from the full-sized version in a relatively complete form, with tracks and venues being unlocked as you play. Some new-to-the-series tracks such as the ever so topical “ABC” by the Jackson 5 also make an appearance (and for the record, that track would rock as DLC for the Xbox 360 version, EA….wink, wink) and more tracks are available to download from the Playstation Network. So, you have everything that you could possibly need in order to keep you rockin’ from gig to gig.
There are a couple of issues. On the standard (original release) PSP, the buttons sometimes fail to complete the job of playing repeated notes – which is a pain when you’re “drumming” – although admittedly, this is a hardware design issue, rather than a software problem. The game also does do an awful lot of loading and although this is true of most PSP titles, the issue seems to be a tad worse than normal here.
But, those really are the only issues that I can see. Rock Band Unplugged really plays well for the majority of the time, and there are times when you’ll be sat on the bus or train having a cheeky play-through of Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, only to find everyone staring at you as your fingers click away at the buttons and your face twists into a rock grimace as you hit the first note of the chorus on the guitar. This can be an issue, so watch for it. You’ll have plenty of time, since the game is so unbelievably addictive that you’ll be playing for a long, long time. Everything is in time, and – aside from the slight button-press problems that I mentioned – everything works well enough for playing to become a real skill – just as it is with the home console editions. Indeed, on the hardest levels of play, you’ll be challenged enough to want to start out on easier levels and learn the techniques that’ll get you through the tracks on the expert level, just as you did with Guitar Hero and the original Rock Band.
Given that the PSP as a console has a very, very sparse selection of “must-have” titles, it comes as a surprise to find one that comes out of nowhere and slaps you around the face such as this. The PSP has pretty much lost its way and the hope that it would be the leading handheld console around is all but lost. EA has proved that there’s life in the old dog yet, though, and if you’ve got a PSP, then you should probably check this out.
