Fab

I've now had several days to play around with the latest Rock Band incarnation, "The Beatles: Rock Band." It's every bit worthy of both names in the title.

Harmonix has made a number of minor interface adjustments that collectively add up to a system much easier to navigate around. Improvements from Rock Band include:

• You can now see difficulty levels for each instrument on the screen after you've selected a song to play.
  
  
• You can switch between left- and right-handed modes with one button on that same screen.
  
  
• For the new players, Easy difficulty now defaults to "No-Fail Mode."
  
  
• For the veteran score junkies, the Leaderboard standings are now shown on the song selection screen. Your ranking is also reported to you on the Song Completion screen, so you can immediately see how you did.
  

But the big win is the addition of harmonies to Vocals. Songs now support two or three singers simultaneously, with bonuses for managing to sing every part of the harmony correctly with your talented friends. I was looking forward to this feature more than anything else in this incarnation of Rock Band, and it managed to be even better than I was expecting. It can be a little rough at first, but people do seem to catch on quickly, and whenever you nail a phrase with all the harmonies in place, it just sounds awesome, and you feel like a freakin' rock star. It really, really makes me wish that all Rock Band songs supported harmonies, though it's certainly a reason to switch back and forth between The Beatles and Rock Band 2.

The only bad thing I can really say about the game is to note its relatively limited song selection. Oh, I'm not complaining about the fact that it's all Beatles. They have a diverse enough catalog of songs that playing through the game doesn't necessarily feel like you're playing the music of one band. No, the problem is that it's only 45 songs, and since they were all written in the 1960s, very few of them run longer than about 3 minutes.

What that means is you can run through every song in the game in about 3 hours if you really want to. And in a party setting, it doesn't take long before people start running out of songs you haven't already played. This situation will be helped as downloadable complete albums become available (starting in late October), but for now it's a bit of a restriction. Rock Band 2 has spoiled me in this regard. Between all the on disc dongs from that and the original Rock Band (plus the rather distressing amount I've spent on downloadable songs), I never have to worry about coming upon the same song twice during a game session, no matter how long I let it run.

Regardless, I give the game an enthusiastic recommendation. If you're a fan of Rock Band (or, if you don't know better, Guitar Hero), you should definitely pick it up. And don't let "I don't really know a lot of Beatles songs" be an excuse either. You know more than you think you do, I'd wager. And you're just denying yourself a lot of fun if you pass it up.