Rock Band 3

Rock Band 3 is the culmination of an era when living rooms filled up with plastic guitars, electronic drum kits and microphones. The basic principle stayed the same as in previous entries: a note highway scrolls across the screen, the player hits colored pads exactly in time with the song, and the whole band shares one energy meter that can be used to save a bandmate who just failed out. But the third game added two crucial pieces to the puzzle. The first was keyboards as a fully-fledged instrument with their own note track; the second was multi-part vocal harmonies, letting three singers hold different lines at once. Suddenly up to seven people could crowd around one screen, and none of them was just a spectator.

The biggest ambition, though, was the so-called Pro Mode, which tried to bridge the gap between the game and actual musicianship. In its advanced version it wasn't enough to hit five colors; the guitar required a layout matching real fingerings, the drum kit gained cymbals, and the keyboard set could be replaced with an ordinary MIDI instrument. The game could genuinely teach real chords and fingering, at the cost of brutal difficulty and the need to buy expensive extra hardware. The rest of the package was polished down to the smallest detail: a career mode without unnecessary loading screens, smart filtering of a huge song library, playlist creation, and the ability to drop into a song already in progress without interrupting the game.

On the Xbox 360 everything ran completely smoothly and without lag, which for a rhythm game is a basic condition of existence; players could also fine-tune audio and video calibration to match their TV. Visually it was a colorful show with animated avatars on stage, but the true star was the track list, spanning classic rock, punk and pop, backed by a huge selection of downloadable songs that could even be carried over from previous games. Critics received the game enthusiastically, and many players consider it the best rhythm game ever made. At the same time, it was also the genre's swan song, which by then had grown oversaturated with its own success. Today Rock Band 3 works like a time capsule; the real adventure is just finding working instruments for it.