Features// Girl Gamer Does Rock Band

Hi. I’m not me any more. And I wasn’t ready. I thought I was. Oh, I’d played Guitar Hero, I’d had a bit of a go on SingStar, hell, I’d even had a quick bang on Donkey Konga, but I was not ready.

I assumed that this article would be about Assassin’s Creed, or maybe Mass Effect, or Crash of the Titans. Maybe the next one will be, but for the time being I have to express my, almost inexpressible love for a miraculous game.

Unfortunately, like racing drivers, prison guards and secondary school teachers, I now have something which envelops so much of my time and energy so brilliantly dangerously that my non-Rockband time reduces me to a deflated and wistful figure; like a burst balloon, floating on a trickling rivulet, waiting until it becomes a surging, thrashing river of rapids and I am once again inflated to the stature of a, well, a dinghy would be the appropriate way to run with this metaphor. A dinghy. A rock dinghy. Full of booze and rolling easily, but chaotically over the waves.

Rockband, dutifully and reverently procured from overseas, hit two of my mates’ homes this week. Come Friday, I performed a feat of driving through oceanic motorway floods to pick up them and their kits. Pelted by such rainfall as would make Noah freak out a bit, we eventually got everything into the car, dried off fractionally, drove back to mine and got drenched again getting everything into the flat. But it was worth it.

The opening cut-scene, the band riding on the roof of the car along American highways, was enough to convince me it was all I desired, filling my heart with such passionate adrenalin and brain-bursting enthusiasm I could barely dare begin the game. I yelped in shock, so taken away with the image, when one of the guys pressed start and the familiar-from-GH style set list popped up.

We didn’t leave the flat for the entire weekend, and could have gone on for months. Friday we had both kits going. Twelve people, many drinks, several casualties throughout the night and very, very angry neighbours banging on the walls as we all sang along to Creep at four in the morning.