Rock Band

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

Jimi Hendrix's seminal second album is coming to Rock Band and Rock Band 2 as DLC. But being less commercial than Are You Experienced?, less solo-heavy than Band of Gypsys and less experimental than Electric Ladyland, the album is perhaps an unlikely first choice for the game. But closer inspection reveals plenty of scope for awesome plastic guitar gameplay. So we've rated each track as to how it'll fit the game.

A lot can happen in 10 years. And it has. As part of this week's post-mortem of the last decade in gaming, we now present for you some of the weirdest, depressing, arousing, significant, entertaining and amusing events, happenings and milestones that have occurred in the wonderful world of games during the soon-to-be-expired Noughties.

Fact: singer is the toughest job in Rock Band, Beatles or otherwise. On Expert difficulty, you’re totally screwed unless you’ve spent loads of time tuning your vocal cords. So here at Radar Labs, we developed an alternate strategy to help you nail that elusive 100% score

Amongst the games, press releases and bulging envelopes of cash curiously marked '9/10, yeah?' that we receive from publishers each day we also get clothing. Mainly T-shirts of random ill-fitting sizes. And they fall into three categories: Outdoors, Indoors, and Bin.

The secrets of their success in their own words.

We the proud musicians who don’t actually play a real instrument, yet still demand the ability to rock the hell out are in for a real treat thanks to our buddies at Mad Catz. Rock Band’s guitar buttons too click-clackity? Guitar Hero’s strum bar too squeaky? Screw ‘em. Mad Catz has the solution to your fake guitar woes and we’re giving you a chance to win a Fender Precision Bass Guitar and three sister

Rock Band can make anyone feel like a rock star, but feeling and being are separated by millions of dollars, obsessed fans, and a voice that anyone actually wants to hear ever. For each “Rock Band EXPERT 5 StArS!!!  OMG!” video you find on YouTube, you can find another song mangling performance so atrocious that it would make Simon Cowell's man breasts explode with snideness.

Some think they can actually

If you're in the market for Rock Band DLC, odds are you tend to buy what you know and leave the rest to rot. We used to do the same... until we realized how many kickass songs we were passing by simply because we'd never heard them before.

That's where DLC Breakdown comes in. We review each song by instrument, so bassists know to check out a starred song even if they've never heard it.

You’ve heard what you really sound like when playing Rock Band . The spastic clacking of plastic instruments is enough to drive your neighbors insane. So when we recently had the opportunity to see the new drum kit for Guitar Hero: World Tour, we were immediately impressed with how quiet it played. After the demo, we filmed one of the developers wailing away on the kit. Then, back at the office, we filmed ourselves thrashing