Rock Star 1.1
Do you like music? Are you one of those people who can listen to just a few seconds of a song and know what song it is, who sings it and what album it was on? Then you might want to check out Freshly Squeezed Software’s new game Rock Star.
The Rock Star application icon
Starting up the game presents you with the main screen. From there you can choose to play either single player or multi player (party) games, read instructions, set preferences, look at the high scores (offline and online), check out who made the game or quit the game.
The main screen in Rock Star
Game Types
Rock Star is a music trivia game. It quizzes you on the songs that are in your iTunes library (including those purchased from the iTunes Music Store). You can choose to play with songs from your entire library, or select any of your playlists if you want to play with a more limited selection of songs. There are four game types: name the song, name the artist, name the album and “mixed bag”.
The Game Type selection screen
When you select songs, Rock Star plays a song and you have to name the song playing. When you select artists, game play is the same but you name the artist singing the song. Selecting albums is the same thing again, but you name the album the playing song is from.
The Mixed Bag option mixes it up by playing a song and you have to name a different thing each time. One question may ask you the name of the song, the next may ask you who’s singing it.
Game Play
Game Play is fairly straightforward. A song plays and you have to name the title, artist or album. When a song starts playing you are given five answers to choose from, and the question is worth 1000 points. The name of the game is speed, as you hesitate to answer some of the incorrect answers will disappear, but so will lots of the points. Don’t answer too quickly though because while points disappear fairly quickly, the fastest way to get zero is to answer wrong.
Game in progress, using the “name the artist” game type
For multi player (party) games, the game styles are the same except that there are more than one person playing. Up to 5 teams can participate in a party game, and there is a maximum of 100 questions asked (20 per team with 5 teams, 50 per team with 2 teams).
Each team answers a block of questions on their own time, in other words it’s not a mad dash for every team to hit the keyboard like in other quiz games. Once one team has answered their block of questions (usually 5 at a time), the next team goes and so on until all the questions are answered and a winner is declared.
Game preferences let you choose how long it takes for answers to disappear, as well as how many questions there are for a party game (minimum 20, maximum 100) and the in game volume.
At the end of a single player game you also get the chance to add your score to the high scores list, not only on your own machine but on Rock Star’s online high scores list. Fo you do add your high scores to the online list, you can add your top scores to your web site, too.
The game over screen is where you enter your name for the offline & online high scores.
Conclusions
Rock Star is a fun game, and an original take on the whole quiz game genre. Pitting your own collection of music against you can be extremely rewarding, or extremely humbling depending on how well you know, or think you know, your music.
Party games work extremely well in terms of game play, allowing each team to go in turns allows not only for higher scoring games and better competition, but because the other teams aren’t trying to answer the same questions they have more time to try and fake the answering team out (which is fun in and of itself 
).
Party games work especially well with more teams if you are playing on a laptop and have a video out cable for your television. Not only does the big screen help, but there is typically more comfortable furniture in a living room than a computer room, and more of it too.
On top of that, single player games are fun, too. Especially if you are the type of person who likes to compete with yourself. It sounds like an easy game because you are being quizzed on your own music collection, and in some ways it is an easy game but out of a possible 25,000 points I’ve only managed to score just under 20,000 when naming the artist, and less than 14,000 when trying to name the album.
Rock Star is a great little game. It’s simple to play, difficult to stop playing, and gets a 9 out of 10.
Links & Info
- $9 USD Registration Fee
- Requires OS X 10.3 or later
- 10 MB RAM/5 MB HD
- An iTunes 4 Library full of music
Flock of Seagulls and Lil Bow Wow?
That’s totally rad, man. Totally.
Snicker.
yeah, its a cool game but i’ve only played once without it crashing, and when it crashes in full screeen mode i cant do anything to force quit, or command-tab etc… and have to reboot.
im using a g5 1.6 with os 10.3.3. i tunes 4.5.
i would never pay 9 dollars for a game that doesnt even work.
I’ve never had Rock Star crash, in any instance on three different machines (iBook 600, iMac G4 700 and G5 1.6), using version 1.1 with iTunes 4.5 and OS X 10.3.3.
So the questions you need to answer are:
Did you have the latest version of the game?
Did you have anything else running that might conflict?
Did you read the FAQs to check for any known issues?
Did you contact Freshly Squeezed Software’s support team?
Or did you just assume that there must be something wrong with the game because it couldn’t be anything else?
I tested the game on multiple systems, including a G51, and it worked just fine, so there must be something different about your set up causing the problems.
[1] Note, I only registered it on my iBook.