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On September 9, classic rock fans will have a chance to strap on a plastic guitar and jam along with the biggest act in popular music history.

Artfully orchestrated buzz has been building for The Beatles: Rock Band since the start of 2009, and the team of developer Harmonix and publisher MTV Games (and distribution partner EA) hope to provide a bright spot in an otherwise drab video game market with one of the few video game products for the 2009 holiday season that has a real chance of appealing beyond core gamers.

We've gotten our hands on a final retail version of the game (minus the new Beatles-inspired instruments, but our old Rock Band gear worked fine), and gave it a test drive in CNET's AV Lab. Check out this video to see our extremely shaky music skills, and read our hands-on impressions below.

Gallery: The Beatles: Rock Band

Dan:
Music aside, this is essentially the same Rock Band game you've been playing for two years, but with nicely done overhauls of the menus, graphics, and interface, including some very cool animated Beatles segments. The biggest change to the actual gameplay is the inclusion of three-part vocal harmonies (you'll need three USB mics). We found out the hard way that these songs are actually pretty tough to sing, and nailing the harmonies is even tougher.

(Credit: Beatles: Rock Band)

Beatles lovers will soon be able to feel what it's like to sing and play with the Fab Four in the interactive game The Beatles: Rock Band. But what famous Beatles tunes will be featured on the disc?

Rock Band makers MTV Games and Harmonix revealed 19 more songs Tuesday, bringing the total of known tracks to 44 and leaving the final tune a mystery.

The Beatles: Rock Band lets players sing, strum the guitar or bass, or hit the drums to play with John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they tour the world. Players can join in with the Beatles, starting from their early days in tiny Liverpool clubs to their final performance on the rooftop at their Apple recording studio.

The game's origins stem from a conversation between Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison, and MTV President Van Toffler. Harrison eventually took the idea to the Beatles' Apple Corps and also sold the concept to Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono.

Though part of the Rock Band franchise, the Beatles game was designed from the ground up with new graphics, menus, and interfaces.

Beatles: Rock Band is set to hit stores on September 9 for Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. The software alone sells for $59.99. The Premium bundle sells for $249.99 and comes with all the Rock Band equipment, including Beatles-branded drums, microphone, and mic stand.

The 44 songs in the game so far are:
A Hard Day's Night
And Your Bird Can Sing
Back In The U.S.S.R.
Birthday
Boys
Can't Buy Me Love
Come Together
Day Tripper
Dear Prudence
Dig A Pony
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Don't Let Me Down
Drive My Car
Eight Days A Week
Get Back
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning
Hello Goodbye
Helter Skelter
Here Comes The Sun
Hey Bulldog
I Am The Walrus
I Feel Fine
I Me Mine
I Saw Her Standing There
I Wanna Be Your Man
I Want to Hold Your Hand
I Want You (She's So Heavy)
I'm Looking Through You
I've Got A Feeling
If I Needed Someone
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Octopus's Garden
Paperback Writer
Revolution
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Something
Taxman
Ticket To Ride
Twist And Shout
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
With a Little Help from My Friends
Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows
Yellow Submarine

If you're an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you'll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.

It's more complicated than posting a song to iTunes, but you'll get placement on a more exclusive platform.

(Credit: MTV Games)

To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year.

You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game. Next, you'll have to submit your song for other creators to critique and finally to MTV Games for approval.

Once approved, the song will enter the Rock Band Network. All songs will debut exclusively for 30 days on the Xbox 360, and the Rock Band team will pick stand-out songs to make available to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles.

Under the network terms, musicians can charge between 50 cents and $3 per song, and they will keep a 30 percent cut of all sales. That may seem small, compared with the 70 percent cut musicians get for selling their songs on iTunes, which requires much less work, but Rock Band is a much more exclusive platform--you're much more likely to stand out here than among the bazillion songs available through Apple's music store.

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Our fantasy of a tiny set of plastic pocket-drums will have to wait till next year.

(Credit: Harmonix/MTV Games)

Rock Band has gone portable, kind of: MTV Games, Harmonix and EA have officially shipped Rock Band Unplugged to stores, meaning you'll finally have a new UMD game for your dust-gathering PSP. Although the game won't go on sale until June 9, we thought we'd give you an idea of what to look forward to just in case you find someplace putting this on the shelves a little early.

With 41 tracks on disc and a full World Tour mode, the band creation and unlockable wardrobe/swag are everything you remember from the console versions. But what, you may ask, has been done about all those plastic drums, guitars, and whatnot? Does it come with fancy mini-instruments that interface with the PSP?

How can Rock Band be portable?... Read more

The long-buzzed-about Beatles video game, from the creators of the Rock Band franchise, made news this past week with some pricing details and an official release date. The Beatles: Rock Band, coming September 9, 2009, will be available as a $59 stand-alone game, a $99 bundle with a guitar, and a $249 bundle which also includes a drum kit.

While this is about as big a coup as a video game publisher could hope for, and we'll be the first in line to jam along with "Hey Bulldog" (which will hopefully be included), there's still reason to be concerned that as long-time holdouts to any form of digital distribution, the Beatles are showing up too late to make a real splash.

The most important factor is that consumers may have already reached a saturation point in terms of music rhythm games. We're on the fourth generation of guitar-bundled music games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and the second generation of the full drum/guitar/microphone versions. Even though both franchises continue to be popular, they're not selling as quickly as they used to--after all, once you have one set of plastic drums and guitars--do you really need another?

Viacom recently saw, "lower sales of Rock Band than we originally hoped," and Activision says sales of Guitar Hero games are down 22 percent year-over-year. When we visited a local Circuit City to check out its liquidation sale, one of the most striking images was the stacks and stacks of discounted, but unsold, music games.

Also worth considering is that the Beatles (and their heirs and business partners) have largely sat out the most recent trends in music distribution, ignoring digital download opportunities such as iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store.

While surely gaining new young fans every day, this is still a band that broke up in 1970. Other longtime MP3 holdouts include Metallica (now available on iTunes) and AC/DC, but both those bands have continued to tour and release new material--and both have already climbed on the guitar game bandwagon. By keeping the music in the walled garden of physical CD sales for so long, there may be an entire generation of digital natives (a key video game demographic) that have missed out that particular Magical Mystery Tour.

The Platinum i-Series from iHarmonix produces better sounds than the headset Apple includes with the iPhone.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

Once in a while you get something and like it so much you wonder why you hadn't gotten it a long time ago. Or, as in my case, why you didn't use it.

This happened back during CES. I was given a headset from iHarmonix, the Platinum i-Series, as a freebie. I didn't have a chance to really use it until just now and asked myself why I waited so long.

The headset's sound is much better than that of Apple's OEM included with the iPhone. For the first time, I can enjoy the bass and really control the multifunction button (that ends calls as well as controls music playback), thanks to its round shape and larger size. The iPhone's included headset has a very tiny button that's hard to press on. It was almost impossible for me to make a successful jump to a previous track.

What I like best, however, is the fact that the Platinum i-Series is black instead of having the same white color as Apple's headset. Now I can blend in without people looking at me and thinking, "Oh I know, you got an iPhone, all right."

It's only rock 'n roll, but Wii like it. Harmonix, the game developer acquired by MTV Networks to create the Rock Band video game, announced Monday that the software will be available for Nintendo's Wii console on June 22. Currently, versions of Rock Band have been created for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3.

(Credit: Harmonix/MTV)

Rumors of a Wii edition of Rock Band first started to circulate early last month. The game was originally released in November amid the soaring popularity of Activision's Guitar Hero franchise, which had a Hollywood-worthy $115 million opening weekend for its most recent game, Guitar Hero III. MTV's Rock Band puts a spin on the concept by letting participants play bass, drums, and vocals in addition to guitar.

Despite the inherent similarities to Guitar Hero, Rock Band has been a huge hit, too.

But, just like a rerun of Behind the Music, the guitar-playing video game craze has been ridden with drama. Harmonix developed the original Guitar Hero, but MTV Networks acquired it in 2006 to create rival Rock Band and distribute it through gaming mega-publisher Electronic Arts. Meanwhile, guitar manufacturer Gibson Guitar has filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band as well as six major retailers--according to Gibson, it's held a patent on a guitar-playing video game since 1999.

So far, none of the gaming console manufacturers--Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo--have been targeted by Gibson's suit.

The June 22 Rock Band Wii release will encompass the U.S. and Canada markets, and a core bundle (software, drums, microphone, and one guitar) will cost $169.99. Standalone instruments will also be sold. It'll feature a lineup of 63 songs, including five exclusive to the Wii.

One hundred fifteen million dollars.

That was how much revenue Activision's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock brought in in its first week on the market recently.

But the Guitar Hero franchise, which Activision bought in 2006, has lost its monopoly as the only major video game giving users the fantasy that they can join Steven Tyler or Bono onstage.

'Rock Band' includes dozens of hit songs, including one by the Rolling Stones.

(Credit: Amazon)

That's because Harmonix, the studio that developed the original Guitar Hero, has finally launched Rock Band, its own version of the rock star genre game, and the market is likely to heat up pretty quickly.

Many Guitar Hero fans still consider Harmonix--which is owned by MTV--the real deal, and so many of them are likely to eschew the new Guitar Hero in favor of Rock Band. Others will choose both games, and I can imagine dueling Guitar Hero, Rock Band competitions in bars, at parties, and even on TV.

Well, maybe not on TV.

It will be very interesting to see if Rock Band can come anywhere near the first-week sales figures of Guitar Hero III. My guess is it won't get there, only because of the name-brand recognition of the latter. But I'm willing to be surprised. There's definitely something to be said for true bloodlines, which is what Rock Band and Harmonix have going for them, even if they doesn't have the hit name anymore.

Either way, competition is good, and the end result is likely to be stronger versions of the games when both Activision and MTV issue the next iterations of their dueling titles.

Stand back. It's going to be guitar battles to the death.

Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 were big hits for Harmonix, and now the company is going even further with its newest game. Today, Harmonix announced Rock Band, a music game for the PlayStation 3 and 360 that combines guitars, drums, and singing into a mutant offspring of Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, and Taiko Drum Master.

Like the name implies, Rock Band will focus on cooperating with friends as players take lead/bass/rhythm guitars, drums, and vocals and work together to rock out. Guitar, drum, and microphone peripherals will all be available, but you won't need them all at once to play the game. Online play will let players take their favorite instruments and play with friends across the country, a first in the Guitar Hero genre.

Harmonix is working with EMI Music, Hollywood Records, Sony BMG Music, Universal Music Enterprises, and Rhino Entertainment to secure the rights to the ton of hit songs spanning the different rock genres. The music labels also are providing the original master recordings for several songs for use in the game itself. This is a big change from Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, where Harmonix produced new tracks for most of the games' songs.

Rock Band is scheduled to ship for the 2007 holiday season, so you still have several months to wait. Of course, you could use that time to learn how to sing or play guitar or drums and start your own actual rock band. Either way, please don't cover any Fallout Boy.