The public had its first hands-on experience with Rock Band, Harmonix's four-player music game, at PAX this year. The line stretched around the booth all weekend as eager PAXers waited for their chance to rock out for the crowd. During a lull in the action, I got the chance to speak with Matt Kelly from Harmonix and even got to try my hand on the drums.

Touted as "the ultimate interactive music videogame experience," Rock Band will feature solo play for guitar, drums and vocals in career mode. Group play will include a career mode for the full four-part band by adding a bass line, and quick play mode will allow a group to play with any combination of the four parts. In addition to the standard play style, there will be a special solo play mode for each instrument in certain songs. The guitars will even feature extra fret buttons for this purpose.

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The version of Rock Band that we played at PAX contained the first 20 officially announced songs. The developers confirmed my suspicion that it is much harder to pick songs when you have to consider four instruments. As Matt put it: "Some songs will have a great guitar track, but nothing's happening on bass." To compensate for this, the bass can get up to a 6x multiplier on its score, instead of the 4x that the other players can achieve. When glancing at the set list, it appears that Harmonix did a great job picking songs to keep everyone occupied. Songs range from classic rock (Rush, Deep Purple, The Who) to punk (The Ramones), heavy metal (Metallica, Black Sabbath), grunge (Nirvana) and modern rock (The Strokes).

We also talked about new song downloads that would be available via Xbox Live. When I mentioned the Guitar Hero II community's dissatisfaction with the content model, specifically having to buy song packs just to get one decent song, the devs nodded vigorously. Matt told me that they were taking this into account when designing their model. There are full album downloads in the works, including "Who's Next" by the Who, and an unnamed Metallica album.

While the devs describe Rock Band as the ultimate party game, which it undoubtedly will be, there will be times when you want to play without schlepping your drum kit to your buddy's house and waiting for everyone else to show up. Therefore, the Xbox version of Rock Band will feature the ability to play online, so you can play with your friends without putting on your pants. (Not that I would do that, of course).

As I mentioned above, I also got to try my hand at the drums. The devs rustled up some other players to accompany me, and we played "Suffragette City" by David Bowie. All parts scroll along next to each other, but I didn't have any trouble following my own part. I did find it hard to hear the drumline, but that could easily have been a result of the background noise, even though we were wearing headsets. The only other bit of difficulty was that I kept hitting the X button by accident, which is in the middle of the drum set and near two of the drum pads. This would pause the game, and we had to scramble to unpause it. While watching others play, I could see that I wasn't the only one who made that mistake. The devs said that they had fixed the problem, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it won't be such an issue when the game is released. Overall, I had a great time playing the drums, even though my accuracy was the lowest in the band! We played on Easy, and it really was pretty easy. Matt told me later that the drums are unique in that they very closely mimic a real drum set, and Hard and Expert modes are nearly note-for-note. Therefore, if you can play through a song on Hard or Expert, you could probably sit down at a drum set and play the same song.

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Rock Band is slated to be released for the holiday season for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Game pricing has not been released yet, nor have details about the particular bundles that will be available. You will be able to use other guitar controllers with the game, which is great, so that you won't have a million guitars sitting around the house.

My overall impression of Rock Band is that Harmonix is doing a great job of extending the music-game concept into an even more exciting, interactive, social game. As a Guitar Hero devotee myself, I am really looking forward to another turn at those drums. There are definitely some fun songs in the game, and the online play option makes it even more attractive. My only fear is that the cost of the full system will be prohibitive, but if Harmonix sells each controller separately, that should help. Basically, I can't wait to rock on.