Green Day: Rock Band leaves you in musical rut

By LOU KESTEN. Associated PressJune 25, 2010

Maybe you should save Green Day: Rock Band for another day.

The problem is, despite the band's ambitions and accomplishments, there's not much variety in its set list. You have your fast, punky songs and your slow, melancholy ballads, but a sort of sameness settles in after a few hours of playing - becoming more apparent when you play the career mode.

Developer Harmonix pulled out all stops when it came to The Beatles, producing elaborate, psychedelic animations for the songs. Green Day, however, gets only three venues to play in: a club called The Warehouse, the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, England, and the Fox Theater in Oakland, Calif.

The disc has 47 songs: each track from 1994's "Dookie" and 2004's "American Idiot," plus a smattering of singles from the time between those two landmarks, including "Brain Stew / Jaded," "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" and "Minority." And there's about half of last year's "21st Century Breakdown," but if you want the rest, you have to pay to download them.

And that's . . . well, infuriating. If you're paying $60 for Green Day: Rock Band, the publisher ought to throw in those extra six tracks for nothing. And if you want to transfer the songs on the Green Day disc to your hard drive (so you can play them in other Rock Band games), you have to fork over another $10.