I have been struggling with whether to preorder the Rock Band 3 keytar bundle. Although I've been a huge Rock Band devoutee, I just cannot get worked up about Rock Band 3. For some perspective, I was a Guitar Hero fan from the beginning, a time when you could only play the main tour mode of the game by yourself. I loved donning a guitar for the first time and almost immediately feeling like a rock star, a fantasy most people have had shared at one point or another. The multiplayer option was also great - competing head-to-head against a friend. Standing next to a friend while you were both rocking out on a fake guitar was a shared experience, even though you were competing with each other. The fun continued in Guitar Hero 2 and 3, which were both games that refined the formula but were essentially the same experience. Starting with Guitar Hero 2, I started throwing parties where I would set up Guitar Hero in one room of the apartment. People would mostly do multiplayer matches, and sometimes it evolved into a tournament. That tradition continued with Guitar Hero 3. Although you could play cooperatively with one player on guitar and one on bass, that mode just did not incorporate the rest of the party and felt more like an isolated experience of those two players. Noone else was that excited when the two players got five stars or got the new high score. So head-to-head matches still ruled the roost. Just as I started to tire of the Guitar Hero experience and parties, Rock Band was born. Rock Band changed everything. What once were parties that featured Guitar Hero became parties focused on Rock Band - Rock Band parties, as we called them. The cooperative experience that allowed you to synchronize your star power to maximize points or to save your teammate struggling on a difficult song on drums really created an awesome atmosphere. People would trade instruments and hand off the microphone to someone at the party that knew that song better. The parties became more frequent, probably at least one every other month, if not every month, permeated with random gatherings after work or going out. The craze reached a frenzy with Rock Band 2. A great setlist and a refined tour mode with challenges culminated in an extremely long night to complete the full setlist challenge as a full band. My hands throbbed from drumming as we attempted to complete the final, most challenging songs. Success and jubilation! But then things started to slowly fade. The novelty had run its course, and sitting around playing songs randomly just did not feel as exciting as it did once before. The Guitar Hero franchise revamped to follow Rock Band's design, but did not do it as well. The Beatles Rock Band provided a blip of reinterest for my group of friends, but once we had completed the entire career, that light dimmed as well. So, what is Harmonix's answer in Rock Band 3 to spice things up? Add a keytar and a mode that allows you to play all of the notes in the songs so you are actually playing the songs as you would with real instruments. Oh, and allow you to buy a very expensive new guitar, which is required to play the full note set. However, I never started playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band because I wanted to learn how to play guitar or drums. I had guitar lessons many years ago and already know I'm not that good. That's why I loved these games so much: they allow me to feel like I'm doing something that I am unable to do in real life, much like many video games do. If I wanted to learn how to play the instruments, I would just go get real lessons and do that, as opposed to only learning how to play the specific songs in Rock Band 3. This aspect of the game only appeals to the most hardcore of players who dabble or delve into the expert difficulty. What about the rest of us who want a unique twist and not just a new song list? What is our motivation to buy the new game when we could just continue to download new songs? I guess the keytar is maybe the most appealing aspect of Rock Band 3. At least it then allows Harmonix to play around with different genres in a way that makes more sense than using a guitar for the part. But do I really need yet another peripheral? It is not going to change the fundamental basics of the game and make the experience any more fun for my group of friends who rocked the hell out of Rock Band 1 and 2 up, down, left, and right. So, sadly, it feels like the end of an era. I will not be preordering, or buying, Rock Band 3. I have to accept that the nights of rocking have become stale and faded away. I look forward to when a developer taps into something new to bring back the fire to music games. Until then, the lighter in my hand will remain empty.