For all those that love the music video game genre were probably looking forward to Beatles Rock Band.  By music game video genre, I’m talking about the Guitar Hero series and Rock Band, games that require special peripherals in order to play.  These are games that are based on hitting a correct series of notes, rather than advancing a character through levels full of shooting and jumping. 

There is no point in pretending that Beatles Rock Band isn’t just like the other games in the Rock Band series, or that this game is just a reason for Harmonix to make some more money. 

Well, if Rock Band is going to make another in the series, they might as well make one that is a surefire hit.  I mean, the Beatles were a quartet, and the average Rock Band set come with a microphone, guitar, drums, and bass.  It’s perfect for playing George, John, Paul, and Ringo.  Not only that, who doesn’t love the Beatles?  My six-year-old daughter knows who the Beatles are, and I don’t even recall teaching her about them.  The Beatlemania of the 1960s still reverberates until now, and I’m very certain my children’s children will know and love the Beatles as well. 

As far as I know, the only thing that seems to be different is that the game allows for three singers instead of just one.  One person sings the lead vocals, and the others are just backup, which aren’t really used all that often. 

Not only did the company invest a lot into getting a whole slew of Beatles hit songs, but they invested in the graphics as well.  For the most part, I always thought very little of the graphics on the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games.  Much of them seem really badly rendered, but the “videos” for the Beatles Rock Band feel like the really good videos that came out in the eighties.  At times, the videos for “Yellow Submarine” and “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band/With a Little Help from my Friends” are almost distracting the gamers from playing the right notes.  The game’s intro is better than the entire Yellow Submarine movie.  Beatlemania is greater than ever as the songs are always preceded by a date, which presumably is the day the song was recorded. 

The Beatles Rock Band is available wherever video games are sold for the Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.  You can get the game itself for about $50, but sets with instruments themselves are a lot more expensive.