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Did you ever dream of being a rock star? The rock star life doesn't usually start out glamorous. Before you can become a top musician, you need to pay your dues - practicing all night, working two jobs, playing for free at hole-in-the-wall venues. In Shady O'Grady's Rising Star, you and your fledgling band fight to the top of the charts, one gig at a time.

The first step in Shady O'Grady is starting your new band. You create an avatar for yourself, and pick a name and musical genre for your group. There aren't too many options for your character, only a few hair and shirt choices, but as you play along you'll find that it's not important to the game.

After naming your new band and picking a starting city, you move on to buying some equipment and recruiting members for your new band. Your band can have up to six members, but it's best to start small since it costs money to keep a band going. There are no requirements on the band you put together; if you want to make a jazz trio with a trombone, keyboard, and bass guitar, you can do that. However, it seems to be impossible to start out as a solo act, because you won't have high enough skills to get anywhere with it.

The musical genre you pick at the beginning seems to have no effect on the game other than limiting your venues to ones of the same type. Also, the list of available musicians is limited by genre, but I was able to recruit musicians from other genres and it didn't seem to affect anything.

With the band together, you get down to the real work - writing songs, practicing, and performing. Songwriting is the first order of business, and hopefully you recruited some good writers to help you out. For each song, you make up a title and designate who will write the song. It's fun to make up song titles, for a while at least. I started to run out of names and resorted to picking names off things on my desk. This made for some memorable tracks such as "Ice Mountain Spring Water" and "Bowl of Pennies."

To determine the quality of your new song, you have to play a mini-game. Weirdly, this mini-game is of the tile-matching variety. The number of tiles and how long you have to play are based on the skills and inspiration of the songwriters, but basically you match tiles with musical instruments on them. It seems like an odd choice, but I got pretty good at the game after a while.

After you get a few songs under your belt, you practice your sets with your band mates, and try to get gigs. You have to make friends before you can get gigs, so you go to shows around town, hopefully building up your reputation with other bands. Eventually you'll get the call to come play a free show, or join in a Battle of the Bands, and then things start to speed up. While waiting for that first gig, you might also find yourself short on cash, so you can do odd jobs to make a little money.

While I had a lot of fun playing Shady O'Grady, it definitely has its tedious moments, like when you have weeks between gigs and there's not much to do but practice and go to the occasional show. Also, relationships between band members seem to go sour for no reason at all, which brings down their happiness level. If things get too bad, band members will quit. I wish there was an easier way to repair relationships between members without having to take an expensive vacation.

Since Shady O'Grady is all about the real business of the music business, there are some game features that attempt to make it more like real life. For example, when you need to go to a gig or to the music shop to pick up some new guitar strings, you have to drive the van around town by navigating with the keyboard. It gets old really quickly, trust me. Once you have enough money to take limos everywhere, you will.

I haven't mentioned the graphics yet. Shady O'Grady is very simple in terms of graphics, which might turn people off who are used to big, expensive games. The band member avatars are blocky, there aren't many options for clothing, and you don't actually see much that's going on in the game - no dashboard of the van, no stage shots during a gig. It reminds me of older sim games, before the advent of 3D graphics. The important thing to remember here is that those older games are still fun to play, and the newer, shinier versions are not necessarily better.

The game ships with a set of mp3s that play while you do. The titles of the tracks appear at the bottom of the screen. Some of the songs are good, and it's definitely better than listening to a canned soundtrack. You can add your own mp3s as well, so you can listen to your own music while you play. That might be a good way to get into the right mindset for your fledgling punk band.

Despite the unpolished graphics, despite the tedious moments, I was surprised to find myself coming back to Shady O'Grady again and again. It's strangely addictive, in the way that the original Sim City was addictive - it's fun, relatively easy to start playing, and success builds on itself, so you want to keep playing to see if you can make it big. Music fans will probably be disappointed because you don't actually get to play any music. Under the covers, this is a sim game for old-school sim game fans.