The drum kit will require a bit of assembly out of the box, but it's not too complicated to set it up. You get four drum pads that sit on top of an adjustable stand and a bass drum peddle that hooks on to the stand's cross bar and attaches to the drum set with a cable. The center of the pad features all of the standard controller buttons including an Xbox 360 guide button, so you can just sit at the drums and control the game from there. It's difficult to sit on a couch and play the drums as they require you to sit a little higher, especially if you don't want your calf to cramp up halfway through a song from using the bass pedal.

The mic is a standard USB mic and doesn't include any control features or take up one of the 360's four available controller spots. You'll need to have an Xbox 360 controller on hand to navigate the menus if you're running the game from the mic.

Once you've got everything hooked up you're ready to play and can form a band and begin a new career, or just start playing a song. If you begin a band career then you'll start by picking a band name and creating characters for each of your band members. The character creation tool in the game is pretty powerful, allowing you to style your avatar as a goth, punk, metalhead, or rocker. You don't get Tiger Wood's Gameface style tools, but the number of heads, hairstyles, and outfits available - and the ability to change their colors - makes it pretty easy to create a unique look that you'll be happy with. Once you're on tour and earning money you'll be able to buy even more styles, clothes, and accessories. One minor gripe with the character creation tool came from our female band members in that the camera zoomed in on the area being customized, making it difficult for them to determine things such as whether or not their shoes matched their belt or hair color.

A bigger issue with the in-game characters is not an issue with the creation tool itself, but with a design decision about the characters. Each character created becomes tied to an instrument, so if you create a drummer and want to play guitar on the next song you can't use your drummer character. This leaves you with the option of creating a different character for each instrument or using a randomly generated one, but in either case you'll need to back a few screens out of career mode to swap characters. Or you can do what we did; just switch instruments and play as each other's characters. I suppose that the developers thought that it would be more realistic if each character could only specialize in one instrument, but the game is far from a rock band sim so why impose this one realistic touch on a game that's pure fantasy anyway?

Now there are a lot of things to the career mode that are pretty cool and make Rock Band more than just Guitar Hero with additional instruments. Your band's success is measured not only in the scores you achieve on the songs, but in the number of fans you attract and, as you get bigger, in the size of the venues in which you play. You also begin to accumulate roadies, better tour busses, and all the trappings of a big time rock band. All of these things are basically numbers on your stats page and it would have been great to see your entourage and possessions in some sort of graphical way, but it's still a lot of fun to see how many fans a good performance attracted and how many you lost with a bad one. The loading screens in the career mode are also pretty cool. They show your band members in candid shots or staged cheesy rock poses. It's pretty cool to your band name emblazoned on a billboard with your faces below it.

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