I’m sure there have been a lot of reviews of The Beatles: Rock Band already, so I won’t bore you with more of the same by telling you how awesome it is (Scott over at Eat.Sleep.Geek. wrote a fairly to-the-point summary/review) when you already know. However, I will share my experience of The Beatles: Rock Band and some halfway-decent cell phone pics with you since I was up for the midnight release.

It was about 11:30PM when I arrived at GameStop. Surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of people there. I queued in line after four other people when the woman behind me spoke. Apparently she was from one of the local newspapers and wanted to interview people who had come out for the midnight release of the game. I chatted with her a bit, and soon enough, midnight came.

It took about ten minutes for me to get the game and another ten to get home. Then, it all began.

I was so excited about getting the game that I forgot to take a picture of the box set before I opened it. This is what it looked like when first opened. My cat wanted to know what the heck the big box was all about and if she could climb into it.

The Hofner bass guitar controller is a full size replica of the same instrument Paul McCartney is famous for using. Unfortunately, the controller is right-handed. This makes me sad since Macca is a lefty, but it’s so beautiful that I can forgive them.

The bundle came with some pretty awesome post cards. I’ll add them to my UK stamp and postcard collection.

Kind of blurry shot from the opening; this was before I discovered you could pause the movie parts.

Even the graphic about how to use the guitar controller is awesome!

Best game ever? Why yes, yes it is. Here’s the start screen.

Part of the opening scene from the Cavern Club chapter. Did I mention, in case you’ve never seen it before, that the opening movie starts out almost identical to the opening montage of A Hard Day’s Night? This is a picture from that movie scene.

The very first chapter of the game takes place inside the Cavern Club. Technically, the drummer should have been Pete Best for this chapter, but we’ll let it slide!

After finishing the first song, I unlocked my first two achievements on X-Box Live

Getting three stars on a song gets you a few photographs. Getting five stars gives you even more. You also get photos when you beat each chapter. When you collect a certain amount of photographs, you unlock prizes — which include things like interviews and demo tracks and all sorts of neat things.

Here’s one of the photographs I unlocked. Pressing Y/yellow fret key lets you see some information about the picture and that particular time in Beatles history.

After the last picture, I put down the camera phone and actually played through the game. There were 44 songs, I believe, and I played every single one. When I was finished, an awesome ending movie appeared (which is where this picture comes from) where the group sings “The End” to finish things off.

Overall, this is a fantastic game. I’ve already started playing again this morning, and I definitely foresee this taking up quite a bit of my time. If you haven’t bought The Beatles: Rock Band yet and you’re a fan of the group, this is an absolute must have.