I Am Un Chien Andalusia

In my review of Guitar Hero, back in January of 2006, I wrote what can only be considered to be a prophetic sentence:

I guess I should be glad, really, that this isn’t an Xbox game, because I’m pretty sure that if I could pay to download more songs on Xbox Live, I’d be broke right about now.

Well, I now own Rock Band for the Xbox 360, and I can pay to download songs on Xbox Live. And so I am broke.

I exaggerate, of course. The only thing I have bankrupted is my petty supply of “Microsoft Points”, the Xbox’s demeaning company scrip that is intended to make you not know how much money you spent on their products. Yesterday, for example, I spent about $19 to buy the entire Pixies' album Doolittle for Rock Band.

Worth. Every. Penny.

The brilliance of Rock Band is in its guitar (and drum) tabs. Whoever writes these is, quite simply, a genius. Never simply punishing for the sake of being punishing, their tabs seem to be written with one goal in mind: convincing you that you actually know how to play a song, when you really don’t know how to play an instrument at all. Here Comes Your Man plays so perfectly you’d swear it was written for the game.

In summary:

Dear Harmonix,

More bands like the Pixies, less bands like Judas Priest.