Sure, Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury might have passed, but including a virtual representation of him in LEGO Rock Band is okay, since it’s just adorable. Besides, he wasn’t the voice of a generation, like other deceased lead singers we could mention.

Check out a clip of LEGO Queen declaring themselves the LEGO champions in the LEGO gallery below. Also, LEGO.

I didn’t, which means I missed a bit of Jack Black cosplay.

Never mind the whole Kanye West/Taylor Swift imbroglio or the Lady Gaga performance blood bath, I didn’t get a chance to see Black walk the carpet as Brutal Legend hero Eddie Riggs.

MTV Multiplayer’s Russ Frushtick says Black was wearing a muscle shirt, head banger’s wig and sporting a ginormous axe. He really should have brought a legion of Headbangers with him to complete the look.

VMAs Feature Jack Black Dressed As Eddie Riggs Of ‘Brutal Legend’ [MTV Multiplayer]

While several bands have gotten their own standalone music titles, none have gotten nearly the sort of treatment Harmonix has given The Beatles: Rock Band. Not only is the track list solely comprised of some of The Beatles’ greatest hits without any filler bands clogging up the works, the Fab Four even scored exclusive plastic instruments and a new vocal harmonising feature in order to ensure as accurate an experience as possible.

Did the extra added attention to details pay off, or will your plastic guitars gently weep little plastic tears? Only the assembled game critics know for sure…

GameTrailers
The Beatles: Rock Band is part music game, part interactive documentary. The music game part is a reasonable facsimile of past Rock Band games, with many of the same modes and features you’ve become accustomed to. But the game truly excels when it redrafts that formula to suit the most revered rock band in history. The presence of a story mode might catch you off-guard. It’s essentially a stand-in for career mode, but it’s hard to dismiss it as such.

GameDaily
It’s obvious that nothing’s been spared when it comes to the overall presentation. The Fab Four and some of their better-known venues were lovingly recreated as animated illustrations (using the word “cartoon” would be an injustice). As the Beatles went from a pop act to a more studio-based band, the game adds its own trippy graphics (all very reminiscent of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) that flow in time with the music. The menus are also completely decked out with graphical flourishes, and this entire experience was obviously created with an almost religious sense of reverence

Eurogamer
Four points. First, 45 Beatles songs stack up pretty well next to the 28 Metallica tracks in the box for their Guitar Hero gig, the rest contributed by “friends”; second, how many artists are there who have 45 songs strong enough to justify a commercial release?; third—boring commercial reality time—these songs must cost a staggering amount to licence and MTV does not have an infinite vault of money; and fourth, how many tracks on average do you genuinely love in the average Guitar Hero/Rock Band release? Be honest. I can only speak personally here, but every single track on The Beatles: Rock Band, whether it be a particular drum fill, a swooning bassline, ingenious harmony or classic riff, contains a memorable, enjoyable gaming moment.

Strategy Informer
The game modes aren’t as extraordinary as the technical aspects, but that, by no means, holds the title back. From Quickplay game modes such as Tug of War and Score Duel, to the Story Mode, there are many reasons to stick around and play The Beatles: Rock Band. Although the vocals are still relegated to singing (or humming, if that’s your thing) the right note rather than the correct lyrics, the rest of the gameplay is fantastic. There’s not as much feedback through the speakers of the lead singer as there was in Rock Band 2, so it’s less about karaoke, and more about enjoying the quality songs put forth by the legendary Beatles. Players are able to add in two extra microphones to their band as six players can now play with two microphones set as harmonisers—so the Rock Band experience is even more extravagant than before.

TeamXbox
What I think is the most interesting aspect of Beatles:RB is its potential in a number of areas: It’s altogether possible that it may draw in older gamers who are very familiar with the Beatles’ catalogue, but aren’t much into video games-and anything that grows the user base is a good thing for all of us (though I figure that gamers having their parents and grandparents fighting with them for time on the family game console won’t be seen as all that positive). Also, having the Beatles’ music introduced to a whole new generation via a video game might finally get the music industry to fully appreciate the game as a viable medium for selling music, which will get more people on board supporting the game industry, which is also a good thing for gamers.

Kotaku
The promise of Harmonix and Apple Corps working together to deliver a new way to experience The Beatles can’t help but raise expectations. It doesn’t help that early on Harmonix was adamant that what fans would receive would not be Rock Band featuring music from The Beatles. And that eventually, ultimately, is very close to what Harmonix delivered. But while the game’s core remained mostly untouched, the developers managed to massage enough new, enough subtlety into the title to deliver something that leaves gamers somehow feeling much more in tune with not just the music of The Beatles, but their personalities. Ultimately, The Beatles: Rock Band is an interesting experiment, one that, while flawed, eventually delivers a new and rewarding experience for music and game fans alike.

It got by with a little help from its critics

Now, that may be true, it may not be true, we’ll probably never know. But when you hear Paul McCartney say stuff like this, well…

I haven’t, actually [played it]. I’m kind of, you know, looking forward to playing it. My excuse is, I play guitar. I was on the real record. So the idea of pushing buttons and things in time is kind of slightly intriguing for me, but it’s actually more interesting to do a show like this…[gestures towards crowd at concert].

You mean over the past 18 months nobody ever put a controller in his hand? Must be a generational thing, because if somebody was making a game based on, well, me, I’d want to at least have a go.

How the Beatles got ready to conquer the world – again [The Observer]

SPOILERS

“The End”.

END SPOILERS.

If this checks out (it’s unconfirmed for now, but seems likely, as the Abbey Road DLC won’t be out until October), was it really worth all the fuss? I mean, nice song and all, and poignant considering the circumstances, but the secrecy around it probably had people thinking it was something a little more… well, worthy of all the secrecy.

The Beatles Rock Band – (almost) Full song list!! (44/45) [ScoreHero]

So if you own Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and LEGO Rock Band, you can put all your songs in one place, and never have to swap discs ever again. Like Rock Band 2’s import feature, there’ll be a small fee, but as Rock Band 2 showed, people are willing to pay for that convenience.

Rock Band News: Lego Songs Exportable, Deets on Queen, White Stripes [Wired]

A “competitive analysis” chart obtained by Wired—drawn up to show how Harmonix’s Rock Band offerings compare to Guitar Hero’s—has revealed that along with the two Queen songs included in LEGO Rock Band, there’ll be another ten Queen songs coming as downloadable content next month (only one, “Under Pressure”, has been named).

That leaves nine chances for one of them to be Princes of the Universe.

Rock Band News: Lego Songs Exportable, Deets on Queen, White Stripes [Wired]

Asked by MCV whether Harmonix and MTV Games would in 2010 be releasing Rock Band 3 or another “major artist game”, MTV’s Scott Guthrie has said “We’re exploring both—and possibly will do both. The Harmonix development team are working on what is effectively the next game, or Rock Band 3.”

Great! Though we’re actually more interested in what “major artist” MTV would follow up after The Beatles. It’d have to be someone big. Our hearts say Led Zeppelin, but our brains say…listen to our hearts.

Great Scott [MCV]

News of the pack comes via two sources; an ESRB rating and a leaked achievements list, which when combined give us the following songs:

The Haunted: DOA
Blue Oyster Cult: Transmaniacon MC
Nazareth: Hair of the Dog
Hawkwind: Master of the Universe
Motörhead: Killed by Death

Those might be the only songs the pack includes, it might just be a selection from a much larger pack, we don’t know. All we do know is, this game needs more [insert favourite metal band from the 80's/90's]

Rock Band: Metal Track Pack to feature Motorhead, Nazareth, more [Joystiq]

No jaw-dropping cinematics here. Just four full tracks, from start to finish, showing everything you can expect from The Beatles: Rock Band.

UPDATE: And the links are now dead.

[via Joystiq]