Review by jeff_b on 06 Feb 2010 (Rating: 3)
In this off-beat little management game by Codemasters, the aim is to take your washed-out Z-list rock star (or group of them) to the lofty heights of the pop charts with the final goal of obtaining 4 mysterious speaker-shaped awards. Quite how you do this is unclear (I only ever managed one) and the Mel Croucher-scribed instructions don't exactly aid matters, though they do provide nifty loading instructions for CRAY IIXMP and HAL 9000 formats.
The game begins with the player selecting up to 4 hapless muso-wonks from a provided selection of parody 80's pop stars, each with varying pricetags. Once this is done, you are presented with a menu of possible options for your band to pursue - book a practice session, book a concert, work a publicity stunt and buy gifts. A Record Single/Album option appears if your band lands a record deal.
The meat of the game is boringly authentic - you book concerts, and then sit in the band bus counting the money or lack of. Occasionally unlikely tragedies will occur and you must use your skill and judgement (or most frequently sheer guesswork) to overcome them. Bill Collins demands a huge inflatable robot at the gig. Dorrissey dies in a nuclear holocaust. But the show must go on. The annoyance here is that there's a certain inevitability and pot-luck to the game's smackdowns. You can be virtually assured from the outset that half your band will die in horrible ways, or that one will eventually make a ridiculous demand that you can't satisfy. Unfortunately the game's just too random to actually play properly, so the sort of gleeful carnage the instructions prophecise never comes to fruition, because all your rockstars are dead and you didn't even chart.
It's a similar story with the recording options. There's a wide array of them, but they function pretty much identically. Okay, you hired the best engineer, and the best studio, but you're still screwed by the random event that scrubs all your recorded tracks, for example. You may decide the video for your single will feature lusty vicars or exploding rodents, but there's no feedback indicating which option is likely to have a good or bad effect.
It's this crapshoot nature that lets Rockstar down as a game. Though perhaps blundering through the years as best you can is an accurate portrayal of life on tour, it hardly makes for compelling playing knowing that somewhere inside that rubber brain a counter is ticking and when it reaches critical mass, something punishing and unfun will happen.
And it's a shame, because the presentation is great (though static through the nature of the game), the sound is suitably cacophonic (though the much vaunted "Hear your Rockstars Get Better Through Practice" tagline was, one suspects, typical Darling hyperbole) and there's a lot that could be done with the idea, even today. I just have the sneaking suspicion that it is, at heart, a reskinned Mugsy with rock trappings. But it's not as good. And eight times harder.
i like very much the caricatures of morrissey, bowie, mccartney, jackson and all of them, but the game itself is rather boring, altough it was an improvement over previous similar games as the biz and it's only r'n'r.
