Nintendo DS Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] Lego Rock Band (MTV Games, Nintendo DS, 2009)

Whimsy, chat, whimsy!

Plastic instrument games and consoles that don't support plastic instruments—name a better combo. No, seriously. Harmonix managed it not once, but twice with Lego Rock Band and Rock Band 3 for the DS, and they did it in kind of a clever way. Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Harmonix was making instrument-juggling normal controller rhythm games like FreQuency and Amplitude, and applying that to the Rock Band formula doesn't just make sense, it makes for a surprisingly fresh experience! Lego Rock Band, being the child-friendly, adorable entry in the series, only makes sense for a DS port, and while I can nitpick it, it was a favorite growing up and it's still a favorite now.

Like all Rock Band games, you form a band and play songs, touring the world (or in Lego's case, fantastical locales like pirate ships, racetracks, under the sea, and deep space) to unlock new gear and clothing to dress up your minifig bandmates. You play each instrument with the buttons and d-pad (or the touch screen, but have fun with that), swapping when you've played a two bars of each track successfully. It's a big juggling act, but one that's majorly satisfying to get into the flow of. Unlike most rhythm games, you don't lose your multiplier on missing a note, and that and Super Easy difficulty (you can't fail and only two buttons get used) both help to keep the difficulty manageable for the kids this was aimed at.

As said, I can nitpick. The charting is a little wonky at times, weirdly spaced off-beat notes and one-handed patterns that can be a little hard to follow, and fitting in a place to activate Overdrive between notes can be clumsy (all things they improved on for Rock Band 3). The setlist is just okay, certainly repetitive through the tour with only 25 songs in all, and featuring a ton of kiddie-friendly standards ("We Will Rock You", the Ghostbusters theme, "Walkin' on Sunshine") that I could mute the console for. You do get some huge tunes in Sum 41, Counting Crows, Vampire Weekend, KT Tunstall, The Primitives, and Spin Doctors to (almost) make up for it, though. Again, just nitpicking. You can play as Queen. We both know what you gotta do.