I’m in Brooklyn right now, relaxing on my friends’ couch, recuperating from a really nasty bout of something gross. Long story short, I had to go to the emergency room the other day, but it looks like I’m on the mend. And though my hopes for an exciting visit to New York in which I’d get to see some of the sights and go to Nintendo World and all have been dashed, I’m happy right now just to be relatively lucid.

So, I’m sitting here thinking about why I don’t own an Xbox 360 yet — clearly, I’m now a poor graduate student, so I can’t afford one, but also there just hasn’t been anything interesting released for the system yet. At least not interesting enough for me to plunk down the dough. That looks like it might change soon, thanks to some music-related games on the horizon.

First of all, here’s Rock Band:

If you’ve known me in the past year, you know that I was a huge fan of Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II, but after the less-than-amicable breakup of developers Harmonix and controller makers Red Octane, I wasn’t sure where Guitar Hero was going to go. It seems as though Activision is content on rolling out more and more Guitar Hero games with more or less the same quality of content (though the ’80s pack, out this week, is not something I’m clamoring for). Harmonix and their new corporate overlords MTV want to make the game even more fun for multiplayer, and Rock Band seems to fit that bill.

The UI seems a bit cluttered, but I’m not sure how one gets past that when you’ve got to deal with a guitar, bass, drums, and vocals all represented on the screen — some have suggested that they should come up with some new notational system that incorporates all the instruments on one staff, but that’d just be way to hard for n00bs to understand. I’m happy with what I see from Rock Band and will probably shell out the $150+ to get it. That Harmonix knows good game design and knows good music is evident from the game’s initial track list (so far):

“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” – Blue Öyster Cult
“Enter Sandman” – Metallica
“Go with the Flow” – Queens of the Stone Age
“In Bloom” – Nirvana
“Learn To Fly” – Foo Fighters
“Main Offender” – The Hives
“Mississippi Queen” – Mountain
“Paranoid” – Black Sabbath
“Reptilia” – The Strokes
“Rockaway Beach” – The Ramones
“Say It Ain’t So” – Weezer
“Suffragette City” – David Bowie
“Tom Sawyer” – Rush
“Vasoline” – Stone Temple Pilots
“Wanted Dead or Alive” – Bon Jovi
“Won’t Get Fooled Again” – The Who

“Suffragette City” and “Rockaway Beach” are not songs I would naturally assume would make it into videogames, so I’m tickled by that. Plus, though I hate “Enter Sandman” (and that era Metallica in general), the fact that they got Metallica to be involved at all bodes well — since Rock Band promises to release entire albums of content online (first up, The Who’s Who’s Next I believe), perhaps we’ll get Master of Puppets on this thing eventuallly.

Additionally, here’s another odd music-related game which caught my attention:

Kevin H. posted about Eternal Sonata, an interesting looking new game coming out for the Xbox 360 — it appears to be about the adventures of composer Frederic Chopin (!?) through a series of fantasy worlds. Check out the trailer:

This kind of thing is phenomenally weird to me — initially exciting until one sees that, oh yeah, it’s just going to be a lot of slashing up of monsters and shooting stuff. If you’re going to bother to create a narrative that’s so original and daring, and render it so beautifully, why not introduce some new game mechanics? Maybe there’s more under the surface, but the trailer was really exciting until they got to the actual non-cut scenes.

Still, it looks interesting. Without knowing much beyond what was in the trailer, it strikes me as a novel way to do an RPG, but hopefully it turns into a novel way to play an RPG, which has never been a genre I’ve been terribly interested in. At least not in the digital forms its predominantly seen in.

Okay, time to take a nap and continue my recuperation.