Don’t Rock my Facebook, Rock my XBox 360!

Microsoft is getting on the Facebook bandwagon by giving users a mini-feed to create their own Rockband based off of XBox 360’s Rock Band Live Campaign. Install the application and you get to pick which position in the band you want to play bass, guitar, vocals, or drummer. Then pick three of your friends to be in your band, name the band and have your friends audition.

You can play mini games to compete and win higher scores and places in other peoples bands as well. There is very little point to the Facebook edition of My Rockband other than being a gimmick to hopefully sparking interest in the game. Living advertising at its finest.

If you are a Facebook user and happen to find My Rockband stunningly amazing, then you are probably one of those individuals that loves to punch buttons over and over again, ad naseum. To play My Rockband you have to tap the circles that pop up as fast as you can before they change colors. If your score beats the person you are challenging, you take their place in the band. End game. Unless you wish to challenge another band member, repeat, with slightly different music.

Having messed around with it for around thirty minutes I feel like my brain has lost mass quantities of brain cells. Seeing as Microsoft is not going to pay me for the last thirty minutes I wasted and since I would not go and plunk down the money to buy Rockband Live based on that Facebook experience alone, I decided to explore more.

Facebook has always been gimmicky in its abundance of applications. Each time I get one of those dreaded emails, ’so and so has sent you x application from Facebook, why don’t you join?’, as if just knowing the person is going to guilt me into signing up. It works most of the time until I realize that I am tired of it cluttering up my page. Most of the preteen/ teen/ young adult audience on Facebook, that uses it prolifically for social network inevitably will be the ones to gab over how awesome it is to be apart of “their very own band.”

Next it will become a status symbol to beat each other out of the bands, which as much as I don’t want to admit it, means that Microsoft hit the nail on the head marketing wise. Throngs of kids will be flooding the stores to buy Rockband, just to get the “real deal” so they brag to their friends on their Facebook about how they were first to purchase it all because they created their very own My Rockband.

Fortunately for those interested parties that wish to play the XBox 360 game, psuedo rock band with instruments that mimic the real deal fairly reasonably is more along the lines of what you will get. Just don’t dream too heavily of slamming the guitar too hard. It will break, and replacing those suckers is more than the average gamer’s salary can afford.