Green Day: Rock Band (Green Day vs Beatles vs Jesus)

Green day had the unenviable task of following up the Beatles in a dedicated stand alone Rock Band game. It may not be fair to compare the careers of a relatively recent neo pop punk band to one of the most successful bands in popular music. But as soon as you strap on a fake plastic guitar and watch those colored gems come down the track, it’s hard not to make comparisons.

While Green Day has been around for 20+ years, the game spans 15 of those years. More specifically, Green Day Rock Band covers three of (arguably) their most popular albums, Dookie, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. The ten year span between Dookie and American Idiot is also represented with some of the singles (aka the songs you probably know) off their intermediate albums, Insomniac, Nimrod and Warning. The 47 tracks included in the game give a nice overview of their career but it doesn’t have the same feel of progression like the Beatles outing did. But that probably has less to do with the game and more to do with the fact that Green Day hasn’t really had a dramatic shift in music or appearance like the Beatles had.

The game features three venues, each corresponding to one of the three highlighted albums. Avatars of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool prance around on the virtual stages, somewhat replicating what it’d be like to go to a Green Day concert. Although, I feel the stages for American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are a little more accurate. Green Day’s cleaned up look translates well to the simpler, stylized art style in those later venues. But I can’t help but feel they were a little generous to the band’s appearance in the Dookie years. Gone are Billie Joe’s jacked up teeth and the “I’m going to rape this microphone� look he had while singing.

But if you miss that aspect of the band, you can always view the unlockable photos and videos taken over the year. Like in the career mode for Beatles Rock Band, by three or five earning stars (also called “cred� in Green Day Rock Band) on each song unlocks a different photo. And the more stars you get, you can unlock challenges, which in turn unlock videos. Since Green Day is a relatively recent band though, the watching the videos felt less like I was unearthing never-before-seen footage and more like I was watching MTV or VH1.

The songs themselves show a real progression from the earlier punk inspired era to the later rock opera era. For the most part, the early guitar parts difficulty comes from the constant fast strumming and the later guitar parts are somewhat easier. The bass parts on the whole are probably a little more interesting than your average bass in Rock Band songs. The drum parts, however, are harder than average. When I sit down to play Rock Band, I generally gravitate to the drums and without tooting my horn too much, I’m probably above average on expert. But I don’t think I got through half the songs on expert drums here. Vocal harmonies return and the parts are a little easier if only because you’ve heard a lot of these songs a million times on the radio.

One of the features that Green Day Rock Band has that the Beatles iteration didn’t was the ability to export the songs into Rock Band or Rock Band 2. (Well, the PS3 and 360 versions have this... Wii owners, you're SOL.) It’s a nice feature if you don’t want to swap discs going back and forth between your Rock Band catalogue and your Green Day songs. However, it will cost you an extra 10 bucks if you own the standard edition of the game. If you get the Plus version of the game, you get to export those songs for free as well as getting the six songs from 21st Century Breakdown that were previously released as downloadable content.

I have to confess, while I am pretty familiar with the songs off of Dookie, American Idiot and the singles off of the intermediate albums, I wasn’t as familiar with 21st Century Breakdown. Obviously when I first started playing, I gravitated towards the songs I was familiar with, but as I started playing through the entire tracklist, I started to favor some of the songs off the most recent album. And really, isn’t that what these Rock Band games are all about? Giving you exposure to songs you may not be familiar with and hopefully turning you on to them?

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