Rock Band: Unplugged

As anyone who has followed Harmonix from the start will tell you, Amplitude was and indeed is an amazing game. The spiritual forerunner to the Guitar Hero phenomenon saw you switching tracks and following complex button press patterns to keep the music going. It’s, somewhat unsurprisingly, exactly what the rhythm-action gurus returned to when it came to reworking the Rock Band franchise to ignore a set of plastic instruments. And we have no problem with that whatsoever.

With a control system a little more abstract than directly following a note chart on a controller, Unplugged has the freedom to take a few more liberties with its note patterns. These are naturally scaled to the handheld nature of the game – you won’t see the likes of a Dragonforce guitar solo, although some of the later tunes will make your thumbs dance like never before. It’s all about keeping each track running and, unlike Amplitude, it’s a lot easier to do this when the streams you have to hit are a little more telegraphed according to each song.

If you thought Rock Band couldn’t work without instruments… think again. This might not be Rock Band as you know it, but whether it carried the hallowed name or not, Unplugged would still be among the best music games the PSP has to offer.