Rock Band 3 (2010)

Lore & Background

Rock Band is based on Harmonix's previous success with the Guitar Hero series of video games in which players used a guitar-shaped controller to simulate playing rock music. Rock Band expands on the concept by adding a drum and microphone peripheral, allowing up to four players to participate in the game, playing lead and bass guitar, drums, and vocals. The gameplay in Rock Band is comparable to that in Guitar Hero along with elements from Harmonix's Karaoke Revolution.

Reader's Guide

Players can play Rock Band alone through a Career mode for lead guitar, drums, and vocals, earning in-game money for their character to purchase new outfits and instruments. Each of the 45 songs has a different difficulty ranking for each instrument part, as well as a total band difficulty. There are a total of nine difficulties, or tiers. In career mode each song in a tier must be successfully completed to move onto the next and unlock the songs in that tier. Once songs are unlocked, they may be played in any mode, including Quickplay, and multiplayer (competitive and co-operative modes) off- or online. Each instrument part in each song can be played at one of four difficulty levels, which include Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert.

Did You Know?

• Rock Band for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 and 3 shipped with 58 songs on disc, while the Wii version contained 5 additional songs that were released as downloadable content for the game.
• The European version of the game includes 9 additional songs that have since been released as downloadable content for other regions.
• "Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld" comes from the titular fictional band featured in the comedy show South Park.
• The European Wii version contains 14 additional songs compared to the launch versions due to containing both sets of extra songs.