Harmonix’ first foray into portable games was recently revealed: Rock Band Unplugged for the Sony PSP, scheduled for release June 9th.

If you remember the older Harmonix PS2 titles Frequency and Amplitude, you may recognize the gameplay depicted here; Rock Band Unplugged is a spiritual sequel to those games.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: there are no fake plastic instruments for this game; it uses the default PSP buttons for a drum-like set of four colors: yellow and red on the left arrows, and green and blue on the right face buttons.

Part of the challenge is juggling multiple instruments at once, as represented on screen by the side-by-side tracks; you use the shoulder buttons to zip back and forth between the instruments, keeping each one alive in band mode. And yes, you collect overdrive; pressing down or X triggers it. I haven’t seen this confirmed, but I suspect the analog stick will be used for whammy, too.

(One thing I can’t quite figure out — what does the orange horizontal bar occasionally seen on the fretboard mean? It’s sort of like the drum kick line, but it’s on every instrument, and there are no buttons left to press that I can see..)

It’s a remarkably full featured version of Rock Band, despite the control limitations:

• In-game wireless DLC music store on PlayStation Network (with 10 songs available on the day of release)
• Traditional beat match play along with overdrive and chord functionality
• Game modes including: World Tour, Band Survival and Warm Up
• Character creator functionality
• 40 master-recordings including nine new Rock Band songs:
• 3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite”*
• AFI – “Miss Murder”*
• Alice in Chains – “Would?”
• Audioslave – “Gasoline”*
• Black Tide – “Show Me the Way”
• Blink 182 – “What’s My Age Again”
• Freezepop – “Less Talk More Rokk”*
• Jackson 5 – “ABC”*
• Tenacious D – “Rock Your Socks”*

Tracks marked * are now available as DLC.

The full Rock Band Unplugged track list is now on wikipedia.

Note what is conspicuously missing: any mention of multiplayer! Unplugged is single player only, I guess.

The tracklist consists of existing Rock Band 1, Rock Band 2, or DLC tracks. Even if you have no interest in all in a portable version of Rock Band, note that those 9 exclusive tracks listed above are confirmed to be released as Rock Band DLC eventually.

If, like me, you don’t own a PSP, Sony’s Rock Band Unplugged PSP bundle featuring the game, the PSP, a 4GB memory stick, and School of Rock on UMD is mighty interesting.



Unplugged preserves the feel of Rock Band as well as you probably could on a handheld. But I’m not sure it’s for me. As I learned when I played Frequency for the first time, the full experience of the fake plastic instruments is what makes these games fun! Mashing buttons on a traditional controller just isn’t the same.