The center of the entertainment portion of Thanksgiving at our house was Rock Band 2. As mentioned in a past post, at my wife’s suggestion, we upgraded from “that crappy Wii Music” to something with actual plastic instruments with which to flail about.
And, as a method of entertaining ourselves and our 16 guests, it was quite a success. Here are some people having fun:
Those in the picture, from right to left (because they are easier to describe in that order), are my daughter, my aunt, her daughter who is also my youngest cousin (21 year age gap between us, so I’ve been playing online games her whole life), and her boyfriend.
Now, I have been holding onto this post in hopes of being able to come up with an embarrassing picture of myself playing Rock Band (Potshot was calling for video), and a number of people actually took pictures of me on that day playing, but so far nobody has coughed up a shot of me in the act.
I added in two things that helped that success along. One was an additional guitar (thanks for the link Snafzg), which both enabled four people to play and doubled up the option what people seemed to find the most fun.
The other was the secret weapon to get the older crowd involved: The Beatles Rock Band.
The Beatles Rock Band had a huge advantage over Rock Band 2 in that most of those over a certain, including myself, are familiar with almost all the songs. Occasionally there was a title I did not recognize, but once the song started my first thought was generally, “Oh, that song.”
And so the old folks hogged the game for a couple of hours having a good old time belting out the Beatles.
The effect was such that my aunt who, like my mother, is just about the perfect age to have appreciated the Beatles, was on the phone with me the following week trying to figure out the cheapest route to go from having no video game console to having The Beatles Rock Band in her home so that she and her friends could play.
After we were tired out, the kids took over the Wii and ditched the Beatles for the standard Rock Band 2 edition.
Eventually, after dinner, the kids began a game of Mario Party 8 which ran long enough that they all tired of it and the parents ended up finishing the game. I blame the fact that for a while they insisted on practicing the mini-games that fall between each turn until everybody felt they were good at them.
I generally fall into the “hurry up and learn by playing” school of Mario Party, something I started enforcing once the parents, including myself, had to pick up the remotes.
So at the end of the evening, Rock Band seemed to be a hit and the Wii got probably the biggest workout it has had in ages.