Last month Electronic Arts held a little party for a pack of journalists to give them a bit of an early look at their wares for this year's E3. Before the showing, they held a series of demos for the Game Critic judges to give them a walk through of each of the games and a bit of perspective.

While there were plenty of games worth seeing during the event last month, the one I, and I think everyone there, was most interesting in checking out was Rock Band. The game was being shown off in a small office that had been packed with the drum kit, two guitars, a microphone, a clutch of Harmonix employees and quite a bit of whiskey and beer. But the main reason the room was so shoulder-to-shoulder was because the journalists who got into the room didn't want to leave it.

To summarize: Rock Band is every bit as fun, cool, and addictive as any fan of Guitar Hero could have hoped. It takes the franchise and turns it up to 11.

Since I didn't want to torment the people in the room with my voice, I only tried the drums and the guitar. I have never played drums, but I have, like almost everyone who likes music, pounded away on my desk to a favorite song or slapped my steering wheel to the rhythm of a tune while driving. This is not drumming, and Rock Band teaches you that very quickly.

The drum kit comes on a collapsible stand that can be set up in front of a chair so you can play on them as if they were real drums, or you can push the stand down and set it up on a coffee table, or what have you. The four drum pads look like something from one of those 80s electronic drumkits. There's also a single footpedal. And you use real drum sticks. In fact Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos told me that Harmonix is in talks with a big-name drumstick producer to get their sticks included with the game. If the deal goes through the initial order for the game will be for more sticks than the company typically sells in the U.S. in a year.

Playing drums is not as intuitive as you would think, but, as with playing the guitar in Guitar Hero, it's something you can pick up quite quickly. The pads and the pedal are all color coded, as with the frets on the guitar. The play mechanic is essentially the same, you have to hit the correct pad at the correct time to successfully play a note. Flub the timing or the pad and you get a noise as opposed to the note. It helps, it helps a lot to know the song you're playing, but even if you don't it seems like something you would pick up quickly.

Rigopulos, a drummer himself, told me that on the expert setting for the drums you are actually playing note for note on a song. He also said that while the game probably can't teach you to really play drums, it certainly sets you on the path to learning.

The guitar mechanic felt almost identical to the one found on Guitar Hero. There are some differences between the Rock Band guitar and the Guitar Hero guitar. First, Rock band wanted to go for a look and feel that more closely resembled a real guitar. To do this they went with a bit of a bigger design and a less plastic looking and feeling guitar. They also hid those colored frets so that you can only see them by looking down onto the side of the guitar's neck. Another major difference is that the guitar has a second set of playable frets down on the neck. While I didn't see it in action, Rigopulos said they will be used for special notes in solos where you won't have to strum. Instead you can just finger those lower buttons in time.

I didn't play the game nearly long enough to pick up on all of the nuances built into it, but there were a couple little things I noticed. For instance each member of the band is judged individually, and if they suck enough they actually get kicked out of the band. But that doesn't mean it's over for them. If the rest of the band can keep it together and continue wailing, they can actually bring the outted member back into the game.

Each of the game's individual instruments played well and seemed tweaked just enough to have a slight edge over Guitar Hero, but what really pushes the game past its predecessor is that feeling of cohesion that comes when you get four people in the room all playing one song. There comes a moment, when all four of you are jamming away, that you feel like an honest to god rock band. It is much like the feeling I got the first time I successfully played through a song on Guitar Hero. A single moment of clarity where I stopped listening to the music and actually felt it playing through me. Rock Band does that times four... maybe times 11.

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