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I admit, I'm no gamer, but I found the prospect of 'jamming' along to The Fab Four on The Beatles: Rock Band filling my head with marshmallow cloud-like thoughts: I can finally play the Ed Sullivan Show! I can rock Shea Stadium! I can get up there on the Apple rooftop...You get the idea: I can be the 'fifth' Beatle.

OK, truth is, only four people on Earth (five if you count Pete Best) ever got the chance to experience being The Beatles. But thanks to some very refined avatars and scenic imagery, we get the next best thing. This is verisimilitude bordering on the next dimension - and reason enough for me to get the band together.

The group I assembled turned out to be a trio - my son, Gianni, on guitar, his friend Kenny Griffin, who played drums and sang (thank God, as I sure can't) and myself on bass. I stuck to the 'easy' (no fail) mode, while the two young show-offs went all 'expert' on me.

Although Harmonix delivered a review copy of the game several days before today's street date, they were fresh out of Beatles controllers - so alas, no Duo Jet, no Rickenbacker, no Hofner and no Ludwig drums. Already our faux Fab Three wasn't feeling fine.

All of that changed, however, once we clicked on our controllers and had girls going bonkers at our every move - this being in the eerily real-looking Cavern Club (Chapter 1); by the time we got to the 'Abbey Road years' (Chapters 5 thru 8), we were a studio band - you know, just like those other famous blokes.

Just how accurate is it?

From a visual standpoint, the locales, the costumes, the hairstyles and even, to varying degrees, the instruments The Beatles used, the game is spot-on. And it's tons of fun to play. This, however, presents a problem if you're trying to look beyond your onscreen fretboard - you become so immersed in hitting the right notes that you sometimes forget, or just can't, take in the images of The Beatles themselves.

Although we didn't make it through all 45 songs on the game, we did get through a lot of them, and here's how The Beatles: Rock Band stacks up for Fab Four accuracy.

Chapter 1 - The Cavern Club, 1963

The lineup of songs - Twist And Shout, Boys, Do You Want To Know A Secret? and I Saw Her Standing There - could very well have been played during one of The Beatles' final stands at the Liverpool basement where they apprenticed. So far, so good.

The instruments featured are true-to-life, as well: Paul plays a '61 Hofner bass, George has his Gretsch Duo Jet, John is strumming his '58 Rickenbacker 325 (still with its natural finish) and Ringo is playing a Premier kit with the drum head featuring the band's name in script type font with a 'B' that has beetle-like antenna.

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