Looking every bit as if it were carved out of ancient stone from some scenic Central American temple, the material covering Thermaltake's Level 10 GT case is actually a material called Balsa Foam, which when carved and sanded looks like... well, it looks like this, which is simply beautiful.

Dan spared no effort in creating a PC mod that was as historically accurate as it is pleasant to look at. He even visited the library. I thought we had burned all of those down.

I really did my research. I went to every place online I could find, art websites, forums, Google searches, among others. I even went to my local library, yeah, they still have those! I created a sort of collage on several sheets of paper, along with my own drawings, to use as my source material. The only direct copy/transfer I did was the calendar though. I had to have that as close to exact as I could get it. I was really trying to not only do it well but to give it respect. The real calendar, heck even some smaller copies, are very detailed works in themselves. And I refused to make a sham of that effort.

All of that research certainly paid off. And if you think the case is impressive, check out the keyboard.

For more shots of the keyboard and mouse hit up the Bit-Tech forums, and check out the link below for a full accounting of Dan's fantastic creation. You have until the end of the year.

AzTtec by dmcgrath [Bit-Tech]

And I missed Luke's post last year and didn't notice Really Big Sky until it came out on Steam back in February.

But never mind all that! If I wasn't aware of this glorious and mysterious thing, odds are someone else out there wasn't aware either, and that's the entire point of the PC Indie Spotlight—bringing games that deserve attention and those with attention spans together. I'm a matchmaker.

I'm doing a lousy job of covering for my egregious oversight. Let us move on.

Really Big Sky from developer Boss Baddie is the sequel to Big Sky, which one would assume wasn't quite as big. It's implied, at least. Not much else is where this game is concerned.

At first glance it looks like any other colorfully explode-y twin-stick shooter, all style, flashing lights, and pulsing music. Indeed those are features in Really Big Sky, only rather than being trapped in a set playing arena the game is constantly moving to the right, and instead of memorizing patterns to help you make it deeper into the game you are slowly driven insane by its chaotic nature.

Start a game of Really Big Sky and you think you know what's going on. Die and then start a second game, and you'll realize that nothing happens the same way twice. You might run into one of the game's planets within the first few seconds, forcing you to switch to your ship's drill attachment to burrow through. The next play through you'll go a full minute before encountering a planet. The next play through might toss a boss fight in your path seconds after your ship comes into existence.

After playing for an hour or so enemy patterns began to emerge, but never to the point where I felt comfortable in my pilot seat, and those rare times I came close were generally when the game would throw a gameplay-altering event my way. Suddenly I'm traveling at warp speed, the pulsing graphics blurring, the screen scrolling on a diagonal.

Such an unpredictable game begs to be played again and again, which is fortunate as you'll need to accrue points to buy upgrades for your ship between games in order to survive to unlock each of the game's 12 modes. And if you're in the mood to sample what the game has to offer without struggling to stay alive, Peaceful mode lets you ride the endless procedurally generated waves, your ship respawning the second after it explodes in a blaze of temporary glory.

See what sort of amazing experiences you can miss if you don't read Kotaku regularly?

Really Big Sky [Steam]

Yes, I found another excuse to post a video of one of my children, but it does speak of the allure of the mouse, keyboard and monitor. Those colorful images, the oh-so-clickable keys; it's almost a natural instinct at this point to reach out and touch them, just to see what happens.

Meanwhile the Xbox 360 controller on the floor by the couch just gets drooled on. Not that I'm dismissing the gamepad; I'm just saying it's not as intuitive a tool as fingers dancing across the keys.

Note that since this lovely father and son bonding moment I've been unable to allow Seamus here anywhere near my computer desk. He goes absolutely bonkers, scrabbling in my arms, twisting about, trying to reclaim his former glory.

He'll make an amazing gaming freak-out video one day.

World of Warcraft and I never did really get along. Since its launch in 2004, I've lost track of the number of friends of mine who loved it. They'd tell me breathlessly about their druids, priests, and hunters while extolling the benefits of the Alliance or the Horde. After ages of politely declining to join them, they've all moved on and given up on ever convincing me. Yet after all these years, the time may finally have come for me to re-evaluate WoW. Starting with pandas.

I've dabbled in a fair number of MMORPGs since I first dove into the genre in January, 2005. I played EverQuest II for over half a decade, but I've also put in a few hours here and there in games like City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online, as well as participating in something like a half-dozen different MMO beta experiences.

World of Warcraft, though, was always the elephant in the room. I last played WoW in 2006, when a dozen EQ2 friends went over there and begged me to come with. I lasted for about three weeks. I absolutely hated the UI, I didn't love the art, I wasn't a fan of the way movement and combat felt ("like steering a cow with a piece of string," I said at the time), and discomfort with my human rogue's build and animations were the final straw. I wished my former guildmates well and ran back to EQ2, where everything felt comfortable. For a while, it became a running joke: of course I would manage to be the one contrarian who hated what seemed to be the most popular game on Earth.

But in game terms, the difference between 2006 and 2012 can be like comparing the Roman Empire to the Information Age. I bailed on World of Warcraft before even its first expansion, The Burning Crusade hit, and years before Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm were even a mote in anyone's eye. The game has changed, and so have I. And so, when I found myself with a Mists of Pandaria beta key in my hand this week, the time had come for me to approach Azeroth once more.

I rolled myself a new Pandaren to start with, naturally, and a few moments after deciding that black patches around the eyes suited a rogue nicely I found myself standing in what was nominally a quiet, meditative panda village.

World of Warcraft has roughly ten million subscribers, and in some ways it felt like every one of them was standing on the Wandering Isle with me when I first logged in. Still, I dutifully ignored the hundreds of other pandas-in-training crammed into the courtyard around me and tried to accept various masters' assurances of my uniqueness and skill at face value. After all, this is a challenge nearly every MMO has faced: when hundreds, thousands, or millions of players are coming through your levels, starting at different times, over the course of years, how do you tell every character that it is special, unique, or worthy? I blithely moved on, from one vaguely Zen instruction to the next.

I collected my weapons, fought dummies, and learned my basic skills, all as NPCs dictated. I gathered items, took down easy enemies, and collected my first bits of gear. The thread of quests led me easily from one NPC to the next, from temple to village to wood. My Pandaren backstabber gave me sultry, knowing looks when I left her idle, shifting impatiently until I had her running lumpily across the land once more. Not very zen of her, I thought; all of these masters extolling her calm and balance would be disappointed if only they could see what I saw.

Whether World of Warcraft has had some tweaks or whether I have grown more patient I couldn't say, but I did find that the experiences I've had trying on a number of games in the years since I last tried had mellowed me on the things I used to hate about WoW. The steering didn't seem so bad, I felt there was more of a flow to fighting, and the stylization and bright colors of the art no longer bothered me. I actually kind of liked it all, once I managed to get a few key binding options tweaked, and I prepared to settle in for an evening of questing.

But try as I might to read every word that appeared from quest-givers, and to think about what I was doing and why, my mind kept drifting. Killing eight of something is tedious, when you are barely level two and have only one weapon and one combat art to use. Killing eight of something that can land on your head, forcing a string of "you are facing the wrong way!" messages from auto-attack no matter which way you turn, is more tedious still. After barely an hour of the panda life, I wasn't frustrated, angry, intrigued, or enthralled. I was bored.

The Wandering Isle, and the entire continent of Pandaria, are still in beta. It's entirely possible (likely, even) that the beary experience will see many small tweaks before its official launch, curing the low-level tedium and fine-tuning the tasks.

Beta or not, though, it seemed that I was failing with WoW again as I had once before, where millions of others had thrived. I was so sure that this time would be different. What was wrong? Was it me, was it the game, or was it the Pandaren experience?

There was only one way to find out. I logged out of the Pandaren and created a new character. I stayed on the same Beta server, and I stayed with the same character class. (I pretty much always play rogue-types in everything.) But this time I rolled a Gnome. I knew I had played one before, in 2006, for about ten minutes, but other than her baffling pink pigtails I remembered nothing about the experience. Whether it was original or had been revamped (a quick search tells me the gnome starting experience was changed with Cataclysm), it would be different from The Wandering Isle, and would give me a different feel for the game.

I kind of loved it. Gnomes are always fun, or at least I always enjoyed them in my EQ2 days, and I was pleased at how smooth, quick, and comical World of Warcraft's gnome experience was. I felt that I'd accomplished more in twenty minutes with her than I had in an hour with the Pandaren, and, most importantly, I wanted to keep playing.

Joining an MMO that's more than five years old doesn't always feel right. It's like coming late to a party and walking up to a knot of merry conversationalists just in time for them to share the punchline and disperse without even noticing your arrival. You might hang around for a few hours but you missed whatever happened at the start to tie everyone together, and that amazing dessert someone brought is already gone.

So considering all that, is Mists of Pandaria a good or worthwhile way for someone who's never played World of Warcraft, or who's been away from it for many years, to jump in? Ultimately, I haven't loved the Pandaria experience but that — again, like my failure in 2006 — might be just me. But I did, through my little gnome, have the chance to discover a much-changed Azeroth, as a much-changed player. I found it a good world, and this to be as good a time as any to explore it.

The 2007 game was a cross-platform affair, uniting Xbox 360 and Windows gamers in online combat for the first time, so I don't mind sharing a little PC Gaming Lives time with the console crowd. We all need a little closure.

After working on this guide for many years, we learned the biggest pitfall of our previous work along with many other buying guides online: they expire shortly after publishing. Prices change daily, components come and go, and the guides simply degrade in worth until they're eventually rewritten a few months later. Recognizing this, we're taking an alternative approach in our revamped PC Buying Guide.

We will add and update new hardware to the mix as it's released. All four builds will be updated on major product launches and we'll make a biweekly pass over the components and their prices to catch anything in-between. We wholly welcome your support and input to keep this guide as fresh as possible.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at our four system price points:

The Budget Box

If you just need to create a few documents and check your email, you can get by on much less than a $500 desktop. Hell, a $300 netbook can tackle that job while remaining highly portable. Buying a netbook is a worthy route for the road warrior, but desktops still reign supreme in terms of value and expandability.

If you follow this build you'll have a system acceptable for any role apart from running graphically intense applications. Throw a budget video card into the mix — which can be had for less than a $100 these days — and you'll have a humble solution to gaming as well.

Motherboard, Processor, Memory

AMD has reclaimed a seat in our Budget Box with its Llano-based desktop APUs. In our recent review of the A8-3850, we found the chip's general execution to be slower than Sandy Bridge, but its integrated graphics core was significantly faster, exceeding entry-level discrete graphics cards such as the GeForce GT 520 and Radeon HD 6450. At ~$140, we believe the A8-3850 is a great solution for budget system builders, especially if you intend to run some lightweight games without a discrete graphics card.

However, if you do plan to employ a discrete GPU, or if CPU performance is crucial to your needs, we'd opt for Intel's $125 Core i3-2100 as it's a little quicker and cheaper. The chip offers comparable performance to the acclaimed quad-core Core i5-750 in applications that don't utilize the two extra cores — which includes most games. Although it's mostly useless for gaming, the integrated HD 2000 IGP is more than suitable for basic tasks. We'd pair it with MSI's H61M-E33 if you don't need SATA 6Gb/s or ASRock's H1M/U3S3 if you do.

Although you could save a little cash by purchasing 2GB of RAM for basic productivity and browsing, the chosen ASRock FM1 board only has two RAM slots. That being the case, it seems like a better idea to fill them with 4GB instead of potentially shorting yourself. Better safe than sorry as they say, and DDR3 RAM is incredibly cheap at the moment with a 2x2GB kit running as little as $20.

Graphics, Sound

This build is not intended for graphically demanding tasks, but adding a relatively low-cost GPU like the Radeon HD 7750 will do wonders for your framerate, transforming this into a practical solution for casual PC gaming. We recently published a tech tip with a list of the top budget and mid-range graphics cards available, which should offer some guidance. Along with the A8-3850's integrated graphics, the chosen motherboard has a Realtek ALC662 audio chipset and integrated sound is more than sufficient for a basic machine.

Storage

**Recent flooding has dented hard drive production. Prices have skyrocketed and unless you're in desperate need of new storage, we recommend delaying your HDD purchase. Perhaps you can reuse an old device or treat yourself to a new SSD.

The way hard drives are priced these days, a few extra dollars can literally yield a 50% increase in storage space — and gigabytes disappear faster than you think. But if you're certain you won't need the additional storage, you're welcome to save a couple bucks by choosing a less capacious drive. The 500GB Caviar Blue currently offers the best bang for your buck.

Power, Case

You wouldn't put diluted gas in your car and you shouldn't feed your PC dirty power. The instability offered by your typical no-name PSU will lead to an untimely failure, leaving you with an unglamorous paperweight. In short, friends shouldn't let friends buy cheap power supplies. Antec's Neo Eco 400c will not only provide this build with all the power it could ever need, it should also meet the requirements of most entry-level video cards in circulation.

There are plenty of basic chassis donning a sub-$50 price tag, and the NZXT Source 210 Elite is our personal pick with a front USB 3.0 port, plenty of space for expandability and stock 120mm/140mm fans, which should be more than sufficient for a system with no discrete graphics and perfectly fine if you decide to add one later. It's almost always available with free shipping, which is a major plus if you're buying a 14lb metal box.

Monitor, Speakers, Peripherals

A 20" display doesn't sound like much these days, and there's no denying it's toward the smaller end of desktop monitors. The Acer S200HLAbd features a native resolution of 1600x900 and unless you've already been spoiled by high-res displays this should prove adequate for general computing tasks. No sub-$150 screen is going to boast superb imagery and most are comparable enough in quality that you're safe buying anything with decent reviews. We recommend just finding something that fits your required size and resolution.

It should be noted that the chosen display doesn't have built-in speakers and such a "luxury" will cost a few bucks more. Frankly, you might as well buy a pair of budget external speakers. Logitech's S-220 2.1 speakers are only $20 and will sound infinitely better than an integrated solution.

Unless you intend to use this machine for prolonged productivity or heavy gaming sessions, you can probably get by with a basic wired or wireless keyboard and mouse set. We recommend Logitech's budget MK260 wireless combo, which features 128-bit AES encryption, a handful of multimedia and web keys, as well as a spill-resistant design. The keyboard gets up to two years of battery life and the mouse can last about five months.

Continue Reading

The Entry-Level Rig
The Enthusiast's PC
The Luxury System

Republished with permission from:
Matthew DeCarlo is a writer at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.

After spending three weeks with Razer's Tiamat 7.1, the world's first true 7.1 surround sound headset, I realize what an easy-to-please idiot I was ten years ago.

Since my initial foray into surround sound headphones so many years ago, I've kept myself occupied with simulated surround, convincing myself that it was just as good as the real thing. I could live with inconsistent volumes across simulated channels and the occasional dead spot, as long as I could vaguely tell which direction the bullets were coming from.

The same goes for PC audio hardware. Onboard all the way, why waste a slot on a fancy sound card when what I've got has all the required inputs and outputs?

Those of you used to a richer audio experience are probably ready to strangle me right now. I'm right there with you.

The Razer Tiamat 7.1 has shown me the light. Or let me listen to the light from different directions. Something like that.

The difference is plain to see the moment you free the Tiamat 7.1 from its extravagant packaging. Windows on the outside of each ear cuff (which can be covered with a pair of opaque plastic pieces) deliver an excellent view of the 10 drivers powering this beast: two of each front, center, side, back, and subwoofer.

This arrangement makes for a rather beefy set of headphones, but no more so than your average larger-sized headset. The padded leatherette ear cups are almost too small for my giant-sized noise glands, so they shouldn't be too unwieldy for those tinier than me (i.e. a large percentage of our readers).

A slight panic gripped me as I unraveled the Tiamat 7.1's braided cord to be met by five audio plugs and a USB cable (for powering the drivers and the signature Razer glowing squid thing). I wasn't certain my PC had that many audio ports. Being a computer manufactured within the past five years it certainly did, but again, that goes to show how little attention I've been paying.

So I hooked them up, loaded up some Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (which doesn't expressly support 7.1 surround), and the difference was immediately clear. These ten little drivers we're doing a better job of keeping me surrounded on all sides by crystal-clear audio than anything else I'd plugged into my PC earlier. And once I realized the bass drivers weren't firing and went into my control panel to fix that, they sounded even better.

Gone were those pesky dead spots. Volume inconsistencies were handled readily via the bulky-yet-lightweight control module, which features individual volume controls for each of the five channels as well as the retractable built-in mic (which, incidentally, certainly did the job it set out to do).

The control even features a pass-through for my PC speakers, so I don't have to keep handing the wife my headset whenever I want to show her YouTube videos of our children.

Looking into games that expressly support 7.1 surround sound I was delighted to discover that Left 4 Dead 2 was on that relatively short list. I quickly discovered that sometimes knowing where the zombies are coming from isn't a comforting thing. I found myself jumping at every sound made by the infected, my teammates, and myself.

In fact the only thing I wasn't jumping at were the normal sounds of my household—annoying cat, babies in peril, things on fire. The Tiamat 7.1 does a wonderful job of muffling the outside world, something I can't recommend enough at this point in my life.

And I can't recommend the Razer Tiamat 7.1 surround sound headset enough either, though keep in mind this is coming from someone that's gone from "okay, that works" to "more sound than I knew existed". The only two major problems with the unit currently is availability: Razer is sold out and struggling to meet overwhelming demand, something that seems to happen quite frequently with their oft-delayed high-end products.

Some may also balk at the $179.99 price tag. I'd say this is a case of getting what you paid for. Hell, I'm shopping for sound cards now, convinced more hidden audio treasures are waiting to be uncovered by these inexperienced ears.

Gamers and game developers have spent much of the past year arguing and speculating over Nintendo's upcoming Wii U console. Will it be more powerful than other gaming devices? Less powerful? Just as powerful? Will it have HD graphics? Online connectivity? Arms? Will it do your taxes?

The truth is that nobody seems to know anything. First a Darksiders dev said the Wii U is as powerful as the current-gen Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gaming consoles. Then the gaming website GamesIndustry.biz reported that developers told them it's less powerful than current-gen consoles.

Now Gearbox's Brian Martel, director of the upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines, said in an interview published today by Nintendo Gamer that the Wii U is more powerful than current-gen consoles.

"Things like the Wii U are becoming very sexy," he said. "The machine itself will be one of the best-looking versions of the game, you know, because they've got more RAM than some of the other things. And you know, they're late in the cycle so they've got this really great processor and all that kind of stuff."

All these conflicting reports are making my head explode. We'll know more at this year's E3 conference in June. Until then, let's just assume that the Wii U is just a figment of our collective imaginations.

Wii U has "more RAM" than other current consoles and "really great processor", says Aliens: Colonial Marines director [Nintendo Gamer via NeoGAF]

Gearbox Software's first Borderlands won fans over with its awesome, awesome loot, high-contrast art style and wacky characters. But, as great as the game's procedurally-generated weapons were, Gearbox say that the first-person shooter/role-playing hybrid was whatever the gamer wanted it to be.

During Gearbox Software's trip to NY for a Borderlands 2 preview, I asked senior producer Sean Reardon if he wished certain merits of Borderlands were more emphasized in the eyes of their community of gamers. He told me that the games the team makes are for the consumers, and it effectively becomes their game.

"We make that as a joke. We'll say, ‘You're a bad designer if you tell your customer that you're playing the game wrong.' It's actually the customer's game. We should do our best to enable that experience. If someone is playing the game and they're not having a good time and it's because they're not playing it right, that's our fault."

Borderlands 1's history shows that Gearbox has practiced what they preach here. I brought up the rampant duping and modding of weapons in Borderlands 1 where gamers would have access to things like rocket launchers with unlimited ammo and perfect targeting.

This was a perfect example, Reardon noted. "People duping weapons was eye-opening and made us feel embarrassed," he responded. And although Gearbox released a patch embedded in the third DLC, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, that wiped most of the duped and illegitimate weapons, they decided to keep one of the buggier creations. It came to be known as "Pearlescent" for its off-white tone. The glitch-based anomaly wasn't a very good gun but it wound up being incredibly cherished for its rarity. And even though it broke the game, the development team decided to embrace the community's positive response towards it. Because in their view, "So long as the player is laughing, it's a feature. If he's crying, it's not."

Fortunately, a game as wacky and creative as Borderlands lends itself quite well to new, community-inspired additions like this one. Reardon looks pleased when he tells me that "we can do basically anything we want if it feels fun." Gearbox feels obligated to deliver on the kind of content their gamers want, and that their gamers find fun even if it wasn't something that the team had come up with. And adding the Pearlescent gun class was fun.

It's unclear if Borderlands 2 will have similar exploits that let weapons like Pearlescent happen, but here's hoping that players will find more unintended options for making the sequel uniquely exciting.

In attics and closets around the world, plastic drum sets are gathering dust. Battery acid leaks into the casings of countless replica Stratocasters long since pulled from under the coffee table and placed in the closet under the stairs.

A lot of people don't really play Rock Band anymore. The game hasn't gotten any less awesome, mind you, but people's ability to pull together to play it has waned. Sure, the truly hardcore still play regularly, and sure, it'll make the odd appearance at a party—a few drinks in, someone will remember how much fun it is and convince everyone to make the effort. But it doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to.

Harmonix's upcoming downloadable XBLA/PSN game Rock Band Blitz aims to change that. The game, which is set to be released this summer, ditches plastic instruments altogether and allows you to play through your entire Rock Band library with nothing but a regular game controller. A few weeks ago I had a chance to sit down and put it through its paces. It's not very much like the Rock Band we've come to know and love, but that's okay—it's still a lot of fun.

Back in March I met up with a rowdy group of Harmonix developers and PR at a hotel in downtown San Francisco to preview Blitz. I figured I'd be seeing a new Rock Band game, but I wasn't sure what it'd be. As soon as I saw the Harmonix guys playing the game with a controller, I thought, "Yep! This makes sense."

One of the best things about Rock Band is its huge and constantly growing music library. Between the Rock Band store and the user-created Rock Band Network, and the songs copied from past Rock Band games, the current number of available songs is 3,640, and it's changing every week. Even casual fans likely have hundreds of classic tunes on their Xbox or PS3 hard drives.

Lately, that music has mostly been languishing unplayed. Rock Band Blitz represents a smart way to address that, allowing players to pick up a controller and play through their entire library in a manner that is more laid-back than instrument-based Rock Band games.

The biggest change Rock Band Blitz makes is that it's a single-player game. Rather than play one instrument as part of a full band, players take control of the whole band using only the console's controller. Notes corresponding to each instrument's part—Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keyboard and Vocals—run towards the player down a road, and players can use the controller to hop from part to part at any time during the song.

"Why, that sounds a lot like Harmonix's earlier game Amplitude!" you may be thinking. And yep, it is quite a bit like Harmonix's now-classic rhythm game, though with a very Rock Band-ish coat of paint.

Players can play any part they'd like, and they're only responsible for tracking the notes on the track they're currently occupying. There are only two possible note inputs per part. So, each part basically has a "left" note and "right" note, which can be triggered with one of two buttons on the controller.

It sounds very simple, especially when compared to Rock Band 3's various pro-modes, but you'd be surprised how much rhythmic complexity can be conveyed with only two notes. Guitar runs, drum fills, bass solos and vocal melodies are all approximated for the controller but feel solid nonetheless. Each instrument feels more or less like holding two drum sticks and matching the rhythm of the part.

That means that Rock Band Blitz is a more purely rhythmic game than its predecessors. Of course, all peripheral-games concern themselves more with rhythm (where in the measure the beat drops) than with harmony (how high or low the note in question is). The simplest way that guitar-based video games would approximate harmony was with the five buttons on the neck of the guitar—you'd move up the neck as the part went higher and higher. It was a crude approximation, but a surprisingly effective one.

Rock Band 3 concerned itself with harmony more than any game before it, particularly with the pro guitar and the new keyboard peripheral, which gave players a full chromatic scale to work with. It was cool, but it was starting to push up against the limits of how far you can go with a music video game without actually just becoming a fully-fledged instrumental instruction tool. (Not that that would be a bad thing! In many ways, Rock Band 3 is exactly that.)

Rock Band Blitz represents a conscious move in the opposite direction; it's a regression, but one that exists comfortably alongside Rock Band 3 and in no way attempts to replace it. In fact, in addition to the fact that your entire Rock Band music library will be playable in Blitz, all of the music that comes with the new game (more than 20 tracks) will be importable into Rock Band 3.

I don't get the sense that Harmonix believes Blitz is the future of music games, but rather that it's territory that they haven't yet explored with Rock Band yet, and a logical addition to the franchise's arsenal. Given the popularity of what I've come to think of as "The New Music Games" like Pulse and Beat Sneak Bandit, I think there's absolutely room for a simplified Rock Band amid the current music-game milieu. And given how much love there is out there for Amplitude, I'd hazard that plenty of folks will be happy with Blitz as well. In fact, while there would doubtless be lots of licensing hassles with a complete port, I wouldn't be surprised to see a portable version of this game sometime in the future.

I had a lot of fun playing Rock Band Blitz. Playing with a birds-eye view of the entire band makes Rock Band Blitz feel significantly different from its predecessors; it's a more strategic, video-gamey game, but it also gives a different perspective on the music, and how the band works together. There's a "score-attack" feel to everything, and every song puts you into a leaderboard metagame that would doubtless prove compulsive for many.

The key hitting a high score is keeping all of the instrument-rows glowing, which requires hopping from track to track fairly regularly. You'll be playing a guitar solo before hopping over to juice up a drum part, then diving into the bass and vocals, getting each part glowing before you hit a waypoint and have to start the process over again. It's got a cool ebb and flow to it, and feels good to play.

That's in part because the controls are customizable—when I began playing, my two inputs were the Xbox 360's "A" button and the D-pad. I could see how some might prefer it, but I actually found it weird to have different-feeling buttons on the left and the right. So I was happy to find that you can assign the controls to the triggers, which felt much smoother for me.

Before long I was hopping from track to track, easily keeping track of the on-screen data, comfortably going for a higher and higher score. It's an easy game to pick up and play, though it still will lend itself to the kind of virtuosic performance that can make Rock Band so much fun.

Rock Band Blitz is not a reinvention of the Rock Band franchise, nor will it be to the taste of every fan of the previous games. By removing multiplayer, it dons an entirely different identity from its collaboration-heavy predecessors. But even though that sense of goofy camaraderie was the heart and soul of Rock Band, Blitz does fine without it.

The thrill of assembling in the living room and performing as a video-game band has faded somewhat, but Harmonix has rightly concluded that there's still life in the Rock Band franchise. Rock Band Blitz channels that considerable leftover energy and translates it into a fresh-feeling, fun game that anyone can play.

Slap a nasty bass;
pick-slide to a power chord.
Just two buttons!