The Beatles: Rock Band

The Beatles: Rock Band is an unusual project that, instead of a collection of songs from various bands, devoted an entire game to a single group and its story. It plays the same way as the other entries in the series: colored notes for guitar, bass, and drums scroll down the screen, and the singer follows their own line, whose accuracy the game evaluates through a microphone. The major difference is the singing, since Beatles songs are often built on multi-part harmony, and the game therefore allows up to three harmony parts to be sung at once, which in a living room makes it a completely different affair from typical rhythm games.

The campaign leads the player chronologically from the club beginnings through the famous rooftop concert to the late studio period, and is divided into chapters that correspond to specific places and stages. While the early songs are accompanied by visually faithful reconstructions of concert scenes, for the later albums the game moves into abstract, dreamlike animations that react to the music and change with every verse. The difficulty is set more gently than in other games in the series, since the goal wasn't to punish but to let the player move through the catalog; even so, expert-mode drums offer more than enough of a challenge.

The production quality is exceptional by console standards: every environment has its own artistic signature, the character animations draw on period footage, and the audio track uses separately recorded stems, so that an incorrectly played instrument really does drop out of the mix. At the time it was a critically very well-received title, often cited as an example of a video game that also functioned as a musical document. Today the game is a rare item, since both the accessories and the discs are limited, but whoever manages to find them gets one of the most tastefully produced music titles ever released on Wii. It also works well as a social experience for people who know nothing about video games but know the songs by heart.