Music/Dance

Celebrity culture and status seem to be at an all-time high in pop culture right now, and musicians are often seen in this sweeping spotlight of fame. Kids have always fantasized being pop stars; the likes of Disney keep pumping out fantasies of fame through musical vehicles like High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Camp Rock; and American Idol chugs along season after season. Harmonix rides that wave to produce the next vehicle in the musical fame fantasy-land: Rock Band.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Lyrics, Mild Suggestive Themes

Game Description: Rock Band is an all-new platform for gamers ready to take on the challenges of the rock & roll lifestyle. Instruments available to players are guitar, bass, drums or vocals as they hit the road as either an aspiring superstar solo act, or for the first time in game genre history take on the true collaborative and challenging nature of music as they form a band and jam together in multiplayer action from home or around the world. Either way players will need to master their stage presence through the various game modes and polish their rock chops via the unrivaled Rock Band song list if they hope to make it out of the garage, into the clubs and finally on to the main stage.

Game Description: The active-play phenomenon started by Wii Sports now spreads to your whole body thanks to Wii Fit and the pressure-sensitive Wii Balance Board, which comes bundled with it. Used together players will experience an extensive array of fun, dynamic and surprisingly challenging activities, including aerobics, yoga, muscle stretches and balance oriented games. The focus of these activities is towards providing a "core" workout, a popular exercise method that emphasizes slower, controlled motions, but it's the fun approach to fitness of Wii Fit that will keep players hooked on fitness for years to come.

After picking up a favorable critical reception at the International Games Festival, Audiosurf has been the indie flavor of the month on Steam, and rightly so. Ostensibly it is about veering a hovercraft left and right along a race track that undulates to the beat of your chosen song and collecting colored blocks for points, but the grid that those color blocks fall into turns the game into a kind of two-tiered puzzler. Keen racing reactions are needed to collect and correctly position high-scoring blocks of the same color into groups of 3 or more (after which, as you may have guessed, they will disappear).

Created by Masaya Matsuura, the man who pioneered music-generated gaming in Vib Ribbon, Musika is certainly the most baffling game of the four. Not because of any exciting Japanese weirdness or ultra-tough difficulty (both staples of old school rhythm action), but simply because there appears to be no game here.

As polished and colourful as Phase is, playing Beats on PSP afterwards feels like being sat next to a giant subwoofer in the trendiest, spaciest club in town. This is very much rhythm action seen through a Tetsuya Mizuguchi kaleidoscope.

Made by Rock Band and Guitar Hero pioneers Harmonix, Phase harks back most closely to the developer's outstanding debut titles Frequency and Amplitude. A now very familiar vertical track scrolls toward the screen, while the player attempts to hit the notes dotted along each of the track's 3 lines with the use of the 3 central iPod buttons (left, centre, right).

There is a new selection of low budget games that constitute a slight resurgence in the founding rhythm action principles, utilizing basic control schemes to make playing with music fun. All are downloadable and priced under $10, all integrate the player's own music collection with their gameplay, and all have silly, cred-craving one-word titles.

For proof that Cinderella stories can happen even in the world of videogames, one need look no further than the Guitar Hero franchise. When the series started a few years back, it was an almost off the radar game that only the most hardcore rhythm game fanatics were following. Now, it's a pop culture phenomenon.