If you work with me, please ignore this post because there is no way that I would take time out of my busy test casing schedule to play a video game. Obviously, this is a guest post, put here for the masses and in no way reflects my actually life. If you don’t believe me, please check my Xbox LIVE profile! Just because I have no LAN connectivity to my 360 due to floor construction wouldn’t have anything to do with missing status. Nope. No way!

I finally caved. Waded into my electronic-assploded kitchen, grabbed my 360, video cable, and power supply. Hooked it up to a lackluster 20″ LCD and dropped in Rock Band. After all, it’s been in the house for almost 11 hours – thought I’d take a look.

Straight up, if this sounds like a Rock Band versus Guitar Hero III mini-review, I’m sorry, but that should be expected. I mean, you have a new product in a relatively new genre without many products in it: the best benchmark you have to compare it to is the already successful leader.

The guitar is very… different. It’s longer than the wireless GH3 guitar yet lighter. It’s got a larger and more angled Whammy bar. It’s got the lil slider joystick like a real guitar – I still don’t know what it does on a real guitar but in the game it looks like an FX option selector or something. I haven’t used the new solo fret buttons, but I’ve also only played two songs off the solo career on medium, where there aren’t many long fret-intensive solos.

The thing that makes it most different though, is the strumming bar. For GH, the strumming bar is a rocker switch. It can be rocked in either direction and it’s got the telltale loud clicking sound [for proof of this as a trademark sound, see South Park’s “Guitar Queer-o” episode]. Not so with the RB guitar: that’s very stiff and very quiet. If I had to guess I would say that it’s possibly an analog stick input being used in there, possibly to allow for pressure sensitive strumming? Or it could just be stiff an will loosen up. Either way, it certainly threw off my guitar playing a good deal… the good thing is that I use the GH2 or GH3 guitars with the game, so if I choose not to deal with the new hardware, I won’t have to. Time’ll tell.

One thing to RB’s credit: four of the first five songs in the first set are by the original artists. In fact, only 7 of the 45 songs included on the disc are done by cover bands. This is something that is critical, especially when you start dealing with vocals – the less covering bands the better the game will be. Also, I believe the set list is pretty balanced – two of the songs in the first set are songs that you want to play along with regardless of instrument. Particularly “Here It Goes Again” by OK Go; we liked that song enough for to use it for one of the 360 commercials… that should say a lot.

The vocals? The Mic is still packed in the box.

The drums? Also still packed in the box. And that’s out of fear. I’m afraid that if I take the drums out of the box, I’ma play them… all freakin’ day. No, it’s better to leave them in there, at least until later tonight. Then I’ll unpack’m and have them. The Mic is too… scary to play around with right now!

And all of this doesn’t take away from GH3 or even GH2. It’s just another experience in the same general genre. GH3 has surprised me: their battling mode is fun for parties and their tracks are harder (but follow the music) more than they did in GH2. RB is more about the group/party experience with four player support local or via Xbox LIVE. It’s also expanded the experience into other instruments… I love the fact that if there’s a long period without vocals that they make the singer use the Mic as a tambourine – that’s just a classic feature to me.

I am rather displeased by the character selection in RB, though: even though there’s more customizable options than there are in GH3, I can’t seem to make my character look as anime-esque as Midori does!