[#] AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack (MTV Games, 2008)

I feel like I should be doing an album review for this one.

While the run of Track Packs were originally meant to give Rock Band DLC to the consoles that couldn't get any, this one's an odd duck: effectively a playable version of AC/DC's *Live at Donington* DVD, totally exclusive to this disc! Actually the first time 17 of these 18 tracks have ever appeared in a rhythm game, it seems hard to pass up playing "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and "Back in Black" and "Thunderstruck" in Rock Band—but hold on. There are caveats that I think pretty universally temper how much excitement you can expect to have for this disc.

For one thing, being a live set, there's lots of, well, liveness going on. Several of the songs are extended with long breaks where singer Brian Johnson plays the crowd, or long intros meant to build anticipation. These are fine enough in a live setting, but kinda suck when you're waiting a minute or two for your instrument to come back in, or playing a really dull drum part in a break. These songs also have the longest Big Rock Endings (where the only goal is to smash on your controller for pounts) of the entire series—some go for at least half a minute. Of strumming and mashing buttons! It's a little tiring and dull. Brian Johnson's gnarled space alien singing also probably won't appeal to folks looking for an AC/DC greatest hits in Rock Band, but I didn't mind all that much personally.

That all said, this isn't a bad set to go through if you're a rhythm gaming fanatic or you like AC/DC. It's built on the first Rock Band's engine, so if you're okay with missing hyperspeed and the like, it plays perfectly well. The songs are still catchy and definitely fun in casual play, even if their extended forms make any kind of score grinding an exercise in tedium (gold stars hinge entirely on being perfect on the easy songs or hitting the absurdly difficult solos on the harder ones). Thoroughly flawed but fun in spite of itself, this is the rare case of a wonky game that's wonky for reasons that seem to be mostly out of the developer's control. Harmonix did their usual good job transcribing these songs, it's just that what they're transcribing is a nine minute long rendition of "High Voltage".