If strapping on a huge guitar grip accessory and fretting on your Nintendo DS seems a bit much, Konami thinks they've got an alternative solution to get your portable music fix. The Nintendo DS version of the company's Rock Revolution will let a player pick an instrument and play through a song, using a control method that best suits that particular style of play. Guitar, bass, drum, and vocal parts are available to choose from.

The first mode I tried out was the guitar section. Here, a guitar is displayed on the touch screen with up and down arrows scrolling down from the left and right side. When an arrow crosses the middle of the guitar, you need to literally "strum" across the guitar in the direction indicated by the arrow. The stream of arrows and the resulting strumming motions mimic the motion of strumming on a real guitar convincingly. The arrows don't exclusively alternate between up-down-up-down, either. Sometimes you need to perform several strums in one direction, and other times a double arrow will show up, requiring you to quickly do an up/down motion in one note, similar to that of a whammy. The guitar mode was quite challenging and a pretty pleasant surprise for me, even after having played Guitar Hero: On Tour.

Next up was the bass guitar. Instead of being a copy of the guitar mode, bass mode plays much more like its real-world counterpart. Four strings appear on the touch screen, and small circles begin to come in from the side on the different strings. An arrow will appear above one of the strings, telling you exactly where to pluck it to play the note correctly. The arrow could appear anywhere on any string at any time. This felt a bit random on the first few songs, but after getting used to it a bit it made sense to differentiate the bass mode from the regular guitar mode in this way. I'm still not sure if this was the best way to organize it, but credit is due to Konami for making the bass and guitar sections unique game modes.

I didn't get to try out the game's vocal mode, and I only had a brief glimpse of the game's drum modes. It plays pretty much as you'd expect with a DS game, with a touch-screen drum kit and a line of notes to be played on the bottom. I only tried it for a moment, but I was immediately turned off by the fact that it's quite difficult to follow the notes on the top screen and hit the right drum on the bottom screen without taking your eyes off one or the other.

Then again, that could also be because I'm a stubborn pro and went straight for one of the harder difficulties. Even if you're experienced in the field of music games, there's still a learning curve to get used to a different system of gameplay. Rock Revolution has four different systems of gameplay in one package, just like the modern console music games. Of course, it's hard to carry around a guitar, bass, microphone, and full drum kit in your pocket ... unless, of course, it's all inside a single DS game card.