6-Jul-2007 Guitar zero We need to have a little chat. You're a fine guitarist, really you are. You play well, and you're ever so photogenic. But... you've cost us $5,000 this month in smashed guitars. Five. Thousand. Dollars.
A little healthy rock and roll excess is great - we are called 'Crushmegakilldeathdeathdeath', after all. But you've cost us more than we've earned this month. What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be a success?
Rock Legend is a rare game in that it treat careers authentically, replete with irritating colleagues. In contrast to, say, Colin McRae DiRT, whose sole idea of a career mode is being the very, very best, this is all about the ignominy and the misery. But fun!
It's a management game for a struggling rock band composed of grimy nobodies with severe personality defects, with five game years - around five real hours - to make it big. And it's great - far from the crushing lack of invention in most management games - because it's built around its concept, not simply draping it over an existing structure.
As with any management game, money is all. Practice means more money. Self-promotion means more money. Better songs mean more money. Most of all, more money means more money, as it gets you better instruments and venues.
Everything's reduced to a sequence of button presses, about as minimal as it can be, save for an irksome Simon Says rehearsal minigame fatal to the careers of the butterfingered. Songs are constructed by dragging and dropping named-but-not-heard segments, themselves acquired by listening to CDs and rival bands - one-button plagiarism.
Similarly, recording a CD is about balancing a row of meters - one showing how good it sounds, the others how pissed or pleased the various band members are about being low or high in the mix. This stripped-down approach could have come off as anodyne, but actually it makes the game far more effective. In the same way Football Manager keeps visceral detail to a minimum in favour of text and numbers, Kudos lets your imagination handle the incidental detail. It makes sense: if your band was playing real songs you didn't enjoy, you'd stop playing.
Still, there are only so many ways each attempt at a career can go: win, fail, or fail really spectacularly. It's only really good for two or three novelty-endowed playthroughs. There's also a real lack of cool.
There's a certain charm to the game's goodhearted naivety, but it can give a sense of sterility - that this is, after all, just an engine with crude rock stereotypes slapped on top. It's clearly desperate to make Spinal Tap gags, and sensibly fights the urge - but it still leaves several joke-sized holes unfilled. Despite that, it's palpably its own star, not lip-synching along to some Rock Tycoon or Theme Band.
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