I got all the stuff I was after. Bought the Beatles limited edition with the fake Hofner bass, a drum kit and a microphone. I also bought some cymbals for the drum kit.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that in all the pictures, it looks like there's a little fake bass-drum that says "beatles" on it, like Ringo's set circa 1963/64. However, what's in the box is actually a piece of fabric you can put on the drums. I haven't put it on.
Setup was very easy and intuitive. Took maybe 20 minutes to set up everything including the aftermarket cymbals.
Nobody had the Madcats 3 cymbal set around here. I bought two of the 2-cymbal sets. The way you play the game, it has 4 different colored drum heads. (Yellow, Red, Green and Blue) and the bass drum pedal.
During the songs, if you get, say, a high-hat part, you play it on the yellow drum head, which is your mounted tom. Makes no sense. Or, if you have cymbals (which you pay extra for, and which don't come with the kit), you can hit either the yellow drum head or the yellow cymbal. The game scores them both the same.
So, I unpacked the cymbal kits and discovered that you can only mount two of them on the rock band drum kit, itself. Not a biggie for me. I went upstairs and got a cymbal stand from my studio and used it for the hi-hat. I wanted the hat mounted to the left of the "snare", anyway, so I can play hats and snares cross-hands.
It all feels like a cheap toy drum set, but hey, that's what it is.
I fired up the game and it had some tutorials, but I think you learn just as fast by just diving in. The easiest mode was actually sorta hard to play. You didn't have to play that many notes, and although they were in time with the music, they barely made any sense.
As you went up in difficulty, the drum parts started matching the ACTUAL drum parts much more closely. So, they started making more sense. Problem is, they also got a lot more difficult to play. Coordinating with my bass-drum foot was the hardest part for me. I was playing "Getting Better" and there's one section with a repeating syncopated bass-drum beat. I still don't think I got it.
They measure you on your overall accuracy. And if you're in game mode, if you do poorly enough, they end the session/concert, and you just sorta fail. Otherwise, you finish the song and you get a percentage rating on how you did.
The drums were just a blast and a half.
I did find that it wasn't that easy to hit them and score. You had to be relatively in rhythm. At first, I tried playing it like a video game, reacting to the screen. However, the more I just tried for some musicality, and learned the pattern, the better things got.
I don't get the feeling that this teaches the fundamentals of playing actual drums, but it does teach some basic music fundamentals. It has some educational value.
My son came down and wanted to try out the drums. He's my pretense for getting this thing to begin with. So, I had to let him play. I figured I'd try the hofner bass. You can play either a "bass" part or a "guitar" part with it. All I can say is, as a guitar player, it was the stupidest experience I could ever imagine. It made no musical sense at all. It had nothing to do with music or playing a guitar. You probably could learn to play guitar faster by learning to type.
I heard somebody once say that a friend of theirs had so much fun playing guitar hero that they went out and bought a regular guitar in order to learn to play it. After having experienced it, I just don't see any possible way that this transitions to actual guitar playing in any way. It has zero in common. Actually, worse, it does things that are so unlike a guitar that it likely would make learning to play an actual guitar much harder.
So, after one song, I have pretty much resolved that I will never touch one of those fake plastic guitars again. What a stupid idea for a game. No wonder I was against these games for so long.
Finally, they included a microphone so you could sing along with the song on the TV. As you sang, it measured your pitch, and if you were close you got rated just as if you were playing the fake drums or fake guitar.
So, the verdict? Singing along was mildly entertaining. Playing the drums was a barrel of monkeys. Playing that guitar-thingie was a nightmare.
Total cost to buy the game system (which doubles as my only blue-ray player), with the beatles rock band and the extra cymbals was about $650, including all the tax.
Probably not the best investment, but half of that is the PS3, which is going to do double duty as a blue-ray player. Also, I enjoyed playing the game. So, even if my son is lukewarm to the idea, that's fine. I'll get my money's worth of enjoyment out of it.
And it'll give me an excuse to get some V-drums here in a few months.
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