For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)

The exams (ok fine.. the exam) have finally come to an end, and with it usually follows a complete reckless abandon for doing anything productive, and is instead replaced with completely brainless activities. This semester was no different, with a trip to Zouk on Wednesday night, the day my paper finished. But what my friends and I have all been REALLY waiting for is the chance to play the game that has consumed our weekends for the past month or so – Rock Band

For those of you who still haven’t heard about this game, it is basically Guitar Hero upsized (if you haven’t heard of Guitar Hero, you need to get out of that rock you’ve been living under). The game allows a 4-piece band to rock out to a list of songs and go on a “world tour” as a band, acquiring things such as roadies, bodyguards and even PR agents. The game goes one step further from other games and allows owners to purchase new songs online for download into the gaming console, which is an awesome step in the right direction for the pathetic music industry now. I do believe I shall expound a bit more on how awesome this revenue model is both for the game and for bands at a later date.

The game is currently available in Singapore via a secret seller located in an undisclosed back alley in the heart of Sengkang (think DOTA). If you can find ANYTHING in Sengkang at all, you probably deserve to own the game. Even Daryl had problems convincing his friend that Rock Band was actually available in Singapore. Ok but seriously, the Asian version of the game hasn’t been released yet and thus the game is only available from retailers who import the US version. If I’m not wrong, Rens got his version from AMK Hub (correct me if I’m wrong!). Needless to say, this game is so awesome you’d be a fool to wait for the Singapore version to come out. It retails at about S$380 inclusive of one guitar, one microphone and one drum set. Ok enough of the boring details already. I’m already falling asleep just reading my own writing.

The chosen day was Saturday. We were ordered out for breakfast by the Rock Band master (read: owner of the game) himself, Lee Ren Hui. I insisted on meeting at 10am because the original meeting time of 9 was just insane for lazy pigs such as myself. It obviously didn’t help that we stayed at Stim John’s place till 4am. This made for a sleep of about 5 hours, but I suppose a McDonalds breakfast was necessary to provide the energy that would be required for the rest of the day. If at this moment you are sniggering at how pussy this sounds i.e. needing energy to play a computer game, then you need to join us one day for one of our Rock Band marathons.

Anyway, the surprisingly McGriddle-less breakfast consisted of myself, Tits, Rens and Kai. We quickly made our way over to my place and after unloading the set out of Rens’ car, we proceeded to set up and calibrate the game to my TV set. Once that was done, it was all systems go.

A new band had been created to attempt to do the entire Band World Tour in Hard mode. Thus, we have (the creatively named) “The Hard”. We’ll see how long it takes before the emergence of “The Expert”.

We started off at about noon, with a sleepy Da joining us and managing to get 100% on vocals for Maps (by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) even with morning voice and done while eating Hotcakes. After about an hour or so (I honestly have no sense of time whatsoever when playing the game), we were joined by other famous rockers such as May Ramone and Louis Bon Jovi just to name a few (I guess you have to join us to know what I’m talking about). The group for the afternoon was completed with the arrival of Stim, Paul, and the new inductee to Rock Band, Hayley Chen Linrong, who aspires to kick Hayley Williams out of Paramore and take her place (just kidding!).

The jamming finally ended at 8.30pm, and after about 8 hours of staring at a TV screen full of moving colours and trying to play an instrument at the same time, everyone was about ready to go eat and basically do something that required less than one tenth the amount of concentration needed to play Rock Band. So till the next session, I will leave you with this introductory write-up of the game that is destined to take Singaporean living rooms by storm in 2008.

For the rest of the photos, check them out on my Facebook page here.