One of the things I really like about LEGO Rock Band is the story mode. It begins by your LEGO character seeing LEGO Queen perform on TV, and starting up a band because… well, the lack of dialogue makes the exact reason a little ambiguous, but I’m assuming that they decide the easiest way to meet Queen would be to be in a successful band.
The story rolls out in traditional LEGO video game fashion, with hilarious cutscenes punctuating your band’s tour. Most of these cutscenes happen around rock power challenges. These are special gigs where somebody needs something and you use the power of rock to make it happen. In the first one you demolish a building. Later on you’ll summon a thunderstorm to save a farmer’s crops from drought. It’s the closest a Rock Band game will ever come to having boss battles.
These are cool. I love them and would not remove them for the world. I’m not finished the tour yet, so maybe they get even better later, but I can’t help but feel like maybe there could be cooler subject matter? Look at Brutal Legend, for example, where the power of rock is used to wage wars. LEGO Rock Band is technically channeling the power of power-pop, so it’s understandable that the most awesome thing they would do is fight off a giant octopus, but imagine if the game were something more along the lines of, let’s say Dethklok Rock Band.
It’s no secret that I’ve been wishing and hoping for a Dethklok-centric guitar game since Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but it’ll never happen. EA will find a way to make a game that gives the player candy and blowjobs before they greenlight Dethklok Rock Band. Mainly because Dethklok is not mainstream enough, and why would EA release a game that’s pretty much guaranteed to move even fewer units than Green Day Rock Band? (Ooh, burn!)
One might also argue that between both The Dethalbum and The Dethalbum II there are only 33 Dethklok songs, and that’s not enough to justify a full disc release. There is tons of music on the show that were never released on either album though, and while some are just bits of songs, I’m sure Brendon Small has complete versions of all the tracks somewhere. And really, would it not be awesome if songs like “Hamburger Time,” “Takin’ It Easy,” and “Underwater Friends” were included? While we’re at it, why not include a couple Snakes N’ Barrels tracks? Or a venue dedicated to Dr. Rockso/Zazz Blammymatazz? The point is, the official material couldn’t fill a game, but there’s more than enough supplemental stuff there to pad it out. Not to mention that fans would eat it up. With a friggin’ spoon.
Circling back to my original point here, rock power challenges would be awesome in Dethklok Rock Band. You wouldn’t even need to read lyrics to come up with cool challenge scenarios; the titles are more than enough in most cases! “Volcano” and “Comet Song” would obviously have you summoning (or maybe repelling) the named disaster with the power of metal. “The Cyborg Slayers” speaks for itself, and “Awaken” will have the band bringing a giant troll to life. You don’t even have to be creative with this stuff, it’s awesome. The challenges in LEGO Rock Band really draw you into the whole scenario, and I think it would only get better with something as intense as causing a volcano to erupt through the power of death metal.
That intensity takes us back around to why the game would never be made: it would be way too damn difficult. In Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, “Bloodlines” is fairly easy, but “Laser Cannon Deth Sentence” is so difficult that I can’t even star power my way to the end. “Thunderhorse” was one of my favourite tracks to play on Guitar Hero 2, even though to this day I cannot 5-star it. The Van Halen and Metallica editions of Guitar Hero have pretty steep difficulty curves (in comparison to the numbered games), but Dethklok Rock Band would be many, many times harder. You’d be a fool to expect any less from a game that’s 90% death metal, of course, but I think it would still turn away potential buyers. Yes, people could step down their difficulty level if it were spoiling their fun, but I’m pretty adamant about not toning it down. If I can’t play a song on expert, I don’t go down to hard: I just don’t play that song. Best case scenario, I play it on expert bass instead of guitar.
The really sad thing about all this is that Konami was developing a Metalocalypse game. …Only it was an action game where you play as a Klokateer for some reason, and was quickly cancelled because they realized how stupid that was. I posit that a Metalocalypse action game could work, but nobody wants to play a Metalocalypse game where you don’t get to play as Dethklok. That’s like having a Super Mario Bros where you’re forced to play as Toad. Good as the game might be, you will inevitably say “fuck this, I’m not playing Goddanm Toad.” Likewise, I do not want to play a Metalocalypse game where I can’t play as Toki or Pickles. Can I say that enough times?
Time has not been kind to single-band plastic guitar games, or even just plastic guitar games in general, so any tiny window there was for a Dethklok Rock Band has long since closed, but I still think it would kick some serious ass. No, it wouldn’t be for everybody, but Metalocalypse has been pretty well-received for what it is, and even though there’s no way it would get close to million-seller, there is certainly a niche that would play it. Maybe we should get Atlus on the case? Somebody do that. I’d be pretty pumped if there were even a Dethklok DLC pack for Rock Band someday in the near future. It doesn’t even have to be a full album, I’ll take a 3-pack (“Awaken” “Black Fire Upon Us” and “Comet Song,” please). The fact that there isn’t even one Dethklok song available yet is sad, and I hope that one day it will be remedied, but I’ll likely have to buy Rock Band 3 when that happens. Hopefully it’s $5 on that day.