I love Rock Band. The experience it imbues your entire body with is exactly what videogaming should be all about. It is pure genius in a $170 box.

"Sure," you say. "But I love Rock Band too, and so does everyone else that's played it."

Listen, you're not hearing me: I really love Rock Band. I love it so much that I decided to build a room specifically to play it in.

Yes, you heard that correctly: OXM now has its own music room dedicated primarily to jamming out in Harmonix's new masterpiece. So why did I do it?

Speaking seriously for a moment, the idea was born out of a legitimate concern: how could we possibly play and review Rock Band -- a necessary task (yessssss!) as part of our Holiday issue feature story -- and not disturb the rest of the staff as they work on the rest of the magazine in our open-format office space?

There's no way that we could play Rock Band in our regular office space properly and not bother Fran (or anyone else).

Think about it: whacking the drums with real drumsticks, singing into the microphone, and having the game audio loud enough to drown out the latter two bits of noise all combine to make an experience that is anything but quiet (not that rock 'n roll should ever be silenced).

So my brain went to work.

Knowing that we would be getting our Rock Band kit in a couple of weeks, I walked into our 12x12-foot storage room and surveyed the situation: there were tchochkes everywhere, boxes of OXM back issues, stacks of original Xbox debug kits and a few Xbox 360 debugs, two large storage racks, and two big file cabinets containing our massive archive of Xbox 1 and 360 games. It was time to clean house!

I tossed out tons of old crap that we don't need anymore: old promotional materials, non-OXM magazines, and a miscellaneous cache of office supplies. Next, I rearranged the shelving units and the game cabinets, placing them on opposite walls. Then, with the help of OXM Multimedia Editor Dane Fredericksen -- who happened to have a stash of soundproofing foam left over from our old office location -- I tacked the foam pieces to the walls at speaker level, killing the nasty metallic echo in what was a horrific audio environment and simultaneously ensuring that the Rock Band noise wouldn't bleed through the walls and irritate the rest of the not-currently-rocking-out staff.

After hauling in the 37-inch HDTV that was on my desk into the Rock Band Room (I then somehow convinced the company to buy a new one for my desk), I wired up a set of 5.1 speakers to a receiver we had leftover from the old-school OXM days, brought in a surge strip to handle all of the awesomess I was about to task the room's single outlet with handling, and hooked up a 360 and tested the audio. All good. The final step was to order a microphone stand.

Once our Rock Band kit arrived (EA was kind enough to provide a drum stool and guitar stand), we simply had to hook everything up and get to the rockin':

The oscillating fan is a necessary evil with four 98.6-degree humans generating face-melting heat.

Needless to say, the room now gets daily use once the whistle blows and everyone goes off the clock, and we almost always have jealous editors from our other magazines -- console and PC alike -- knocking on the door, anxious for a taste of the action. Though I'm sure everyone thought I was crazy (or just joking) when I said I wanted to convert our storage closet into a soundproofed, mega-wattage Rock Band room, I'd like to think that it all paid off in the end. In fact, the only thing left after we commenced jamming was to christen our newly created "rehearsal space" with a name:

Nobody gets mocked in here. It's all about having fun.

Here are a couple of other pics:

The 40-inch Toshiba HDTV is a review unit loaner. Our regular Rock Band room set is a very nice 37-inch Westinghouse.

This is the view from the drummer's seat.