So then, Rock Band is the current apex of its genre, a truly great and innovative thing for gaming and awesome fun to boot. But there's a dilemma here, because despite all of that, we can't honestly recommend that you buy it at full price. That RRP of £180 is a massive turd on an otherwise delicious cake, especially when compared to its equivalent US price tag. However much we loved The Evil Dead, we could hardly recommend that you pay £45 for the DVD, especially if it was less than half that in the next town over.
Of course, how much you're willing to pay for Rock Band is really up to you, and we're sure that there are people out there who think it's worth that much. But for one hundred and EIGHTY pounds you could buy a Fender Squier beginner guitar and bass, a second-hand starter drum kit and a cheapo microphone - and ACTUALLY HAVE A BAND. You could also buy an Xbox 360 and cheap game, or a Wii, or twelve hundred Chomp bars. It's simply ludicrous that we're being asked to pay so much for what's essentially a set of toy instruments. Some online retailers are selling the lot for around £145, but even that's around forty quid too steep in our estimation. Rock Band has already demonstrated its huge money-making credentials in the form of downloadable content (which, by the way, is also a smidge more expensive here thanks to the Microsoft Points discrepancy) – surely the profit margins can take a hit on the peripherals?
The way that Rock Band is being packaged over here makes very little sense, too. You can buy a pack of all of the instruments, but the game isn't included, which we bet will confuse many people who've pre-ordered the bundle and get it home to find a boxful of instruments and nothing to make them go. If you want to take advantage of your Guitar Hero guitar, you can buy drums separately – but, oddly, not the microphone, meaning that if you want vocals you have to either shell out for the entire set of instruments, superfluous guitar and all, or sing into the Xbox Live headset - although the latter option does have the added advantage of making you look not one million miles away from
this.
Combine the pricing and packaging issues and this is hardly a smooth launch for Rock Band in Europe. Given that there's been a half-year interim that presumably could have been used to plan this properly, we're really quite upset about it all. It's like offering a child the biggest most delicious ice-cream in the world, then chucking them into a swamp. There are few bad things to be said about Rock Band itself – it's brilliant – but this launch is so problematic that it's hard to find anything positive at all to say about how the game is being handled over here.