"It's a long way to the top (if you wanna rock n' roll)"

If you know me IRL, you know I've been jonesing over Rock Band coming out. Santa delivered it on Christmas morn. We were supposed to head to my mom's house on Christmas day but we got walloped by a snow storm so we postponed that trip a day. That gave me and the family time to whip up a quick band and play a few songs before we headed for a much closer destination (as in minutes away), my wife's sister's house.

In short: What was that other music game I was playing called?

There is so much to say about this game. Way too long for a blog post so I'll just hit a few highlights.

The guitar is different than that other game. The big difference is the strum bar. It's spongy on the RB Strat and "clickey" on the other one. I enjoy it more. My family enjoys it less. However, mine did have the strum bar issue after a week of playing so I'm now in the free replacement program.

The drums are freakin' hard for me. I'm ok until I start mixing in my foot and then it throws me all off. One of my nephews and my oldest daughter have it down pat on the easy setting.

The drums intimidate people more than I thought they would. We had two other families over on New Year's Eve night. Both families are into those other music games. Only their kids were brave enough to try the drums. I was the only adult who played them.

I have yet to venture into mic land. My daughters, nephews, wife and sister-in-law have all done it though. I seriously doubt I ever will unless some fit of bravado comes over me.

Kid friendly factor: as kid-friendly as those other music games go. However, there is something about actually singing the lyrics vs. just hearing them that we've decided that our kids are banned from singing some of the songs. Hearing my daughters belt out "Nature is a whore" just doesn't sit well with me.

The "Band World Tour" mode is the most fun about the game. However, it requires some dedicated players. Of which, I have none besides me in my house. It's not available online but there are rumors that Harmonix is working on it. What's cool is that you can bring you characters that you've created into quickplay mode though. With all their outfits and personalizations that you have from the band and/or solo mode.

My wife wishes for more popular 80's songs. You can see the song list here. Obviously, anything that had a lot of keyboards in it from that time period would be out but we would just love to hear some guitar centric songs from The Cars or Burning Down The House by the Talking Heads.

And...I'm hoping for AC/DC content. Preferably with Bon Scott singing on the songs he sang in the first place. You might...just might....get me to the mic to sing Dirty Deeds.