As you may have guessed from my Thanksgiving SGD, I've spent the last couple weeks engrossed in Rock Band on the Xbox 360. It's blown away all my expectations, and it's taken over almost all gaming in my house. I'm still playing World of Warcraft, of course, but my cousins would kill me if I stopped.

But it's taken over my console gaming to the point where I bought the Guitar Hero 3 bundle, opened it up, put together the guitar, and tossed the game into the Rock Band tub without a second thought. I also bought Mass Effect, and even though by all accounts it's a spectacular game, the only reason I opened the box was to confirm for a friend that it works on Japanese Xbox 360s (it does, by the way).

The funny thing is, I've barely even touched solo tour mode - instead, friends come over during the weekends and we all rock out together, since I live in a house and not an apartment, so complaints from the neighbors are a non-factor. Most of them own the game themselves, and we certainly could play online if we wanted to, but it's such a spectacular group experience that we love getting together for it.

There's so much I could say about this game that has already been said by millions of review sites, so I'll just distill my favorite parts into a few paragraphs.

First, the character editor is something I've desperately wanted in a music game for ages. During our Rock Band sessions, my friends and I spend about a quarter to a third of our time using our hard-earned fake money on costume changes.  It's fun making up a look, then seeing if someone else can either go well with it or contradict it in the most glaring way possible.  As lead singer, my character DeTonica (it's a long story) has changed his image almost nightly, with such laughter-inducing looks as "Bono goes Grunge," "Laharl from Disgaea," and my personal favorite, "Tattooed Freak."  Our lead guitarist, Suberockr, has spent a lot of money trying to make himself look like Two-Face from Batman, and things have only gotten more fun from there.

Second, the game is highly accessible as a party game.  My family wanted to play it at Thanksgiving, where we had two of my nieces on the drums (one of my , another niece on bass, me on lead guitar and my very, very drunk cousin on vocals.  It was a huge blast, and even the dedicated spectators got a great show out of it.  As a matter of fact, I've been asked for a repeat Rock Band engagement at the family year-end party.

And lastly, the support for it is ridiculous.  MTV and EA are putting a huge amount of work into making sure that there's always a reason to go back to rocking, from frequent and reasonably priced song downloads (Roooooooxanne and JUKE! BOX! HEROOOO are now part of the regular rotation in our band) to upcoming options for custom band shirts, posters, and action figures.  I have a feeling that we'll be playing this game for months.

So that's my rant on Rock Band.  Go out and play it!  Or, you know, form a real band, but that requires a little more commitment than "hey, let's play video games on the weekend."