Playing a sold-out gig in New York, my band attracted 2,000 new fans but earned only $15.

"I'm not in it for the money," my bandmate Matt remarked as he tapped his drumsticks together. "I'm in it for the music."

Perhaps, but I still couldn't help wondering if we needed better management.

Alas, the groupies and the cash were both illusions created by the rhythm game Rock Band.

Rock Band is an evolutionary jump forward from Guitar Hero, the interactive video game played with a guitar-shaped controller. This new game, created by the same developer that built Guitar Hero, comes with a guitar controller, a drum controller and a microphone, essentially combining Guitar Hero, singing games like Karaoke Revolution and drum games like Donkey Konga into one big party game.

Up to four people can form a virtual band, so my friends Francis and Matt and Matt's friend Adam came over to take up guitar, bass, vocals and drums. After assembling the drum kit (which took up too much space in my small Manhattan apartment) and hooking up the instruments through a U.S.B. hub included with the game, we began the rocking out process.

Rocking out involves following directions given by on-screen indicators while a song like "Gimme Shelter" or "Maps" plays. The display is presented neatly; even with four indicators the screen doesn't feel cramped.

The guitar controller (which is used both for lead and bass) has five colored buttons that must be pressed when colored markers are displayed on-screen. A similar scheme is used for the drum kit, which has color-coded drum heads plus a foot petal. The vocalist is shown the song lyrics and a pitch indicator; the words don't matter to the game, which grades players on how closely they match the original vocalists' pitch and rhythm. Play well and the virtual audience cheers; miss too many notes and you are booed off the stage.

While you can just choose a song and play, it's more fun to go on tour. Finish a song at a chosen venue and the game gives you an unlikely number of fans and a ludicrously small amount of money. Touring follows a logical progression. You'll need to enter a band competition to win a tour bus to travel to other cities, and you'll need to play some venues in New York to get a recording contract.

So I put on a headset and created a band of two (the minimum number of players for a band tour) with me doing both guitar and vocals. This was tricky, since it's hard to sing a song you don't know while keeping your eyes focused on the guitar indicator, but fortunately vocals on the easy setting require little more than random humming. Playing guitar while singing "Creep" is terrifically fun.

Rock Band is a big game, coming in a 20-pound box that a small dog could live in. The first-person shooter Crysis, however, weighs only a few ounces, but seems just as big when you play it. Crysis follows the general design of the developer Crytek's first game, the sleeper-hit Far Cry (might future Crytek titles include Battle Cry, Cry Baby and It’s My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To?). Once again Crytek has shunned the usual grimy sewers and sterile office buildings typical of shooter games for a jungle island setting.

Visually, Crysis is dazzling. It is wondrous to walk along the beach watching crabs scuttle in and out of the surf or to watch leaves flutter in the tropical winds. Everything you do affects this world. As you walk through tall grasses your body pushes them aside. Shoot enough bullets into a tree’s branch and it will fall with a crash (meaning enemies can blast away the tree you are hiding behind). Throw a grenade into a corrugated tin shack in an enemy encampment and the whole thing will collapse.

There is little time for sightseeing though, as the island is swarming with hostile soldiers who are smart, tough and seemingly everywhere.

Action games tend to funnel players through a set path, but Crysis is often more open-ended; there is a goal, a huge jungle and soldiers, and how you manage is up to you. Swim across a river to sneak past soldiers, snipe them from a distance or steal a turreted jeep and start firing.

Enemy numbers are overwhelming, but the odds are balanced by a "nano suit" that can briefly make you stronger, faster, or, most usefully, invisible, allowing you to hide in plain sight.

Early on, the story introduces a mysterious, monstrous creature, but when you finally catch up with it two-thirds of the way through the game, Crysis abruptly shifts from being a strategic shooter about infiltrating enemy lines to being a fast-paced run-and-gun-style game about killing alien monsters.

It's a startling change that the game emphasizes by having the aliens cover the island with snow. It feels as though Crytek created two games and jammed them together, and while the last third is still pretty fun, it feels like a pale imitation of Halo 3.

Dense jungles, grand lakes and endless beaches weren't enough for the developers, yet the big noisy climax Crysis builds to is a poor fit with most of the game. Sometimes you need to know how much is too much. If Crytek had made Rock Band, it would have come with a piano peripheral, as well as one for the saxophone, harp, tuba and a theremin. And that box would have weighed 500 pounds.