Rock Band 3: Ds Version – is It Worth Playing?

When I heard that there was going to be a Nintendo DS version of the new Rock Band Game, I admit, I was a little excited. I already played the first two DS Guitar Hero games and had fun with those. Since I like the Rock Band series more than Guitar Hero, I expected that the Rock Band game for the DS would also be better than the Guitar Hero DS games.

How wrong I was. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that Rock Band 3 on the DS doesn’t even have the one thing that actually made Guitar Hero work as a portable version; instrument peripherals. Though the Guitar Hero DS games did get some criticism for the odd “Guitar Grip” (and the nickname “Accordion Hero”), it did make the game a lot more fun than it would have been if there hadn’t been a guitar peripheral. 

From what I’ve seen, in this version of Rock Band 3, all of the instruments are all played in exactly the same way; by hitting one of four buttons on the DS. Even though the game does require the player to switch between all of the instruments throughout the song to avoid failing, they might as well have skipped that feature since all of the instruments are essentially the same anyway. 

Now, I can kind of understand this control system for the actual instruments. When you get down to it, you are still just hitting a specified combination of buttons at the right time to play the console version instruments, except the controllers are shaped like guitars and drums. This control scheme makes no sense whatsoever for the vocals, however, since the DS does have a built-in mic. The fact that vocals are played in this manner was the biggest deal-breaker for me.

Now, I do get that the creators of the game probably didn’t want it to be exactly like Guitar Hero, which is most likely why they chose to forgo the peripherals. Fine. But there were still much better ways they could have gone about representing the instruments. Remember Jam Sessions? Probably not. It was an earlier guitar playing game for the DS. They could have done something similar for Rock Band 3. They could have also made the drums appear on the touch screen to be played with the stylus (or two styluses). I already mentioned the fact that it would have made more sense to take advantage of the built-in mic for vocals. 

After looking at Rock Band 3, I bought Band Hero, another game in the Guitar Hero series, on clearance instead. Now, Band Hero isn’t without it’s faults (I had to use the DS headset to get the vocals to register properly), the red drum pad occasionally takes some extra effort to play, and there are only a few good songs to choose from, but overall it was a much more worthwhile purchase than Rock Band 3 would have been. Without peripherals, or at least a reasonably interesting instrument interface, music games really aren’t even worth playing. If you just want to use the DS’s buttons to play a game, play something with actual substance, like an RPG.

The simulated instruments are why these games are fun. If you’re not holding an approximation of a guitar while pretending to be a rockstar, you’re just a pathetic loser pressing random buttons while music is playing. The DS version of Rock Band completely misses the point.

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