I recently got a closer look at Rock Band 3, and while I saw new elements of the game's Pro mode (you'll read more about those at a later date), I came away impressed with all the enhancements made to the interface and career structure. Harmonix project director Daniel Sussman wasn't about to let me overlook it. "Everybody wants to talk about what we're doing with the keyboard and the pro guitar," he said. "The bigger story for me is that we've taken apart and put back together the core experience."

When I first previewed the game, I saw "the overshell" in action -- across the bottom of every screen hides a persistent options menu, through which players can jump in, jump out and set up their profiles and characters as they see fit. You can also change difficulty in the middle of any song, on a per-person basis, and I often found myself tweaking the difficulty up or down mid-song as I got more or less used to the drums or keyboard setup. Whenever you change difficulty, the song rewinds by a few seconds to give everyone playing a chance to get back into place.