Of the half-dozen acts that played during Monday night's mega event at Staples Center, perhaps any one of them alone could have filled the arena. But together, those genre-spanning superstars produced a fantastic and unforgettable stage show for the fairly intimate crowd.

Also, there might have been something about a video game.

The invite-only event was put on by Activision Blizzard, the Santa Monica outfit that makes such hit games as Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft. Among the first nighttime events for the kickoff of this year's E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, Activision somehow managed to top Microsoft's Project Natal spectacle from the night before, which called upon the ever-mystifying Cirque du Soleil.

How a video game publisher managed to book Staples Center on the eve of the Lakers' crucial Game 6 in the NBA finals was a mystery soon forgotten after things got rolling. Eminem was the apparent headliner of the night, nabbing the longest playtime and the last punch and kick onstage, but it wouldn't be at all fair to call those who preceded him opening acts.

Ringo Starr could probably use a little help from his friends -- to learn how to play Rock Band.

The legendary Beatles drummer said in a recent interview with LP33 that he's never played the game.

"I think the game is great," Starr said emphatically in the video conversation. When asked whether he had ever played it, he revised his praise. "I think the graphics are great," he said with a laugh.

Despite being an animated character in the Beatles: Rock Band and having given authorization during its conception, he just can't seem to get the hang of it.

"I've tried," he continued. "But I get too crazy with that guitar arm and the things coming toward you," he said gesturing wildly with his hands.

He seemed to indicate that it's a sensory overload. Which is understandable, when you consider all of the bright, flashing colors streaming across the screen at any given time.

Drummers tell us that the faux percussion instrument in the game is more technically similar to the real thing than any other plastic doodad -- except for maybe the microphone. But for an aging rocker, it might be better to stick to that rock and roll music any old way you choose.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Photo credit: Harmonix

How do you get started in music composition without any experience or talent? Use a laser beam.

Pop & Hiss has been playing with a review unit of the Beamz Interactive Music System, a fun desktop gadget for cranking out weird music.

Once pulled open, installed and plugged into a Windows computer, the device shoots a half-dozen lasers. Players wave their fingers and hands to break the beams. Don't worry --  they won't zap you.

The sounds continuously play while you're obstructing the beams, making for some nice-sounding music that's incredibly easy to pull off. The device keeps everything on rhythm even if you have none, and an optional persistent beat can train players how to groove.

Rock band No Doubt has filed a real-world lawsuit over its virtual role in the just-released Band Hero edition of the Guitar Hero video game series, claiming that the game has “transformed No Doubt band members into a virtual karaoke circus act,” singing dozens of songs the group neither wrote, popularized nor approved for use in the game.

In a suit filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court, the band alleges that Santa Monica-based Activision, the maker of the game, has far exceeded the contractually approved use of likenesses, or avatars, of band members Gwen Stefani, Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont and Adrian Young.

[Updated at 1:04 p.m.: “The band [members] are bitterly disappointed that their name and likeness was taken and used without their permission,” manager Jim Guerinot said today. “They agreed to play three No Doubt songs as a band.... Activision then went and put them in 62 other songs and broke the band up [and] never even asked.”]

[Updated at 2:25 p.m.: In a statement issued this afternoon, the company said: “Activision believes it is within its legal rights with respect to the use and portrayal of the band members in the game and that this lawsuit is without merit.”]

The suit also charges that the game allows users to manipulate their characters to sing songs popularized by other pop music acts. No Doubt’s contract with Activision allowed the company to use the band’s music and likenesses in no more than three of the band’s own songs, the suit states. The game, which was released Tuesday, puts the group members’ images, collectively and individually, into more than 60 songs, “many of which include lyrics, contained in iconic songs, which are not appropriate for No Doubt and have not been and would not have been chosen by No Doubt for recordings or public performances.”

Metalheads will have to learn to operate a game controller while throwing up the sign of the horns. The new Electronic Arts game, "Brutal Legend," has a pretty heavy soundtrack.

With more than 100 songs from 75 bands, the video game, which is scheduled for release on Oct. 13 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, has one of the biggest libraries of big-name licensed songs out of the box.

Jack Black voices the main character, who wields a flying-V axe (for you non-musicians out there, "axe" means guitar) and an, um, axe -- a literal axe. Metal legends Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford of Judas Priest lend supporting voice roles.

For a full track list, click "Continue reading."

Courtney Love, the controversial rocker and widow of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, is blasting out angry messages on Twitter in response to her late husband's likeness being used in Guitar Hero 5. A character portraying Cobain shows up for the game's two Nirvana songs to sing and play guitar on a virtual stage.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, Cobain's former band mates, joined Love in their disapproval with the game character, saying they're "dismayed and very disappointed," according to a statement released by their publicist.

Bassist Novoselic and Grohl, Nirvana's drummer before becoming the front man for the Foo Fighters, say they knew the Cobain character would be shown during the Nirvana songs but were unaware that players could unlock him to be used in other songs by bands such as Bon Jovi and Bush.

"We urge Activision to do the right thing in 're-locking' Kurt's character so that this won't continue in the future," the Novoselic and Grohl statement read. "It's hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists' music alongside cartoon characters. Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better."

Novoselic and Grohl were quick to point out that they have no say in whether Cobain's likeness can ...

Saying you don’t like the Beatles is like making a face when someone carries a birthday cake into the room. Such aggressive contrarianism can make a stir at a party, but ultimately, it’s just hard to believe. So,  let me just assure you, though I am about to tell you why I have my worries about the imminent release of the Beatles: Rock Band, I respect and adore the Fab Four. I’m a pop lover who spent my formative years immersed in rock music, and I grew up in the 1970s. There wasn’t much choice but to be a late-adopting Beatlemaniac.

Paul McCartney was my first massive crush, cultivated through hours of listening at the houses of friends who had hipper parents than mine (and staring into those big brown eyes as pictured in the framable insert photo from the White Album). The throngs I heard squealing on the “The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl” album, released when I was 13, taught me how to be a teenybopper. “Yellow Submarine” turned me on to psychedelia, and "Revolution" did the same for social protest. As a grade-schooler, I didn't get John Lennon's sarcasm. But I did like to argue with my dad, which seemed related, and changing the world sounded cool.

The Beatles also taught me that pop could be a serious thing. Following the group's evolution across the tracks of the Red and Blue collections, I got an inkling of what artistic evolution sounded like. Little did I know that the story of the Beatles' transformation from a fun bunch of lads imitating Little Richard and Ronnie Spector to a serious quartet influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Andy Warhol would become the foundation for a whole system of defining popular music's worth, which would become known as "rockism," and which favored the more "artistic" kind of rock on the second collection. Or that, decades later, a new gang of artists and thinkers, sometimes called "poptimists," would battle that legacy -- arguing for mop-top red over granny-glasses blue.

Poptimists (myself included) don't hate the Beatles -- how could anyone who loves a great radio-friendly dance hit reject "Drive My Car," or "Helter Skelter," for that matter? But that narrative, of a band's music becoming more meaningful as it becomes less obviously catchy and commercial, has done a lot of damage. It has caused some taste makers to favor album-oriented rock, which favors earphones and contemplation, over equally sophisticated but more socially friendly musical forms like disco and funk. It's also led to an emphasis on the mostly white, mostly male artists of the classic rock era over the often black and female stars of pop before and after that counter-cultural moment.

With one guitar chord, geekfest turned into Ozzfest when Ozzy Osbourne rocked the Anaheim Convention Center on Saturday night. The heavy metal legend performed during the closing ceremony of BlizzCon, an annual conference for video-game publisher Activision Blizzard that brings thousands of PC gamers to Orange County.

The 26,000 attendees spent two days testing unreleased Blizzard products ("StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty,"  "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" and more). The crowd, which skewed overwhelmingly male, of course, unwound with Black Sabbath songs and Osbourne's miscellaneous favorites, including "I Don't Know" and "Mr. Crowley."

Osbourne commanded the thousands standing in front of their seats and in the small pit, as fans clapped and hopped in unison. Still, the audience remained unusually tame -- by heavy metal standards. That was until Osbourne and Co. launched into "Ironman," which sent the pit into a wild, shoving fury.

Osbourne seemed unusually vibrant for the 60-year-old rocker who has been tamed by an MTV reality show. He was in fact well-spoken and ...

File this one under "best minute of viral marketing ever."

A video surfaced on YouTube today called Naked Girls Get Interrupted. It stars four attractive ladies -- and a funny but unfortunate "interruption" from actor-model "Music Steve"  -- stripping off their clothes and strutting down a street in Los Angeles County. Censor bars obscure their private parts and display popular song titles.

Surely this isn't what Kurt Cobain had in mind when he wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

It's hard to look past the action in foreground, but after repeated viewings (all in the name of reporting), we believe they're walking down the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

The editors of the professional-looking video aren't saying who's behind it. The minute-long clip was posted to a new YouTube channel called Windsieve.All signs point to a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming "Guitar Hero 5" video game. The song titles shown in the video are all performed by bands that are listed on the game's featured artists page, and game publisher Activision is no stranger to viral ads.

Dear Activision, we look forward to learning more about songs in the game by staring at partially naked women. Although perhaps it should have been given a different name: "Things people who play countless hours of Guitar Hero will never witness."

A track listing with songs from the video, courtesy of GameDaily, is listed after the jump.

The Beatles: Rock Band will be a delight for pretty much anyone except those poor Fab Four nerds born without a shred of playfulness in their DNA.

Based on the preliminary preview I received recently at MTV Networks’ offices in Santa Monica, the game connects a deep respect for the quartet’s musical legacy with a sense of the inspired fun that was also central to their collective personality.

The visuals that have already been previewed online have telegraphed a strong sense of the look and feel of the game; Rock Band (and Guitar Hero) players will feel at home almost instantly, and should appreciate the amped-up visuals created on behalf of the honorees.

Beatles avatars appear in period-representative clothing, hairstyles, mustaches and beards as the game shifts from the band’s relatively scruffy early years in the cramped, sweaty underground environs of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England, through the career-making appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in those natty collarless suits to historic concerts at New York's Shea Stadium and the foursome’s swan song public performance on that windy and chilly January day in 1969 atop the Apple Corps headquarters in London.

Anybody’s who’s been sentient during the last half-century will have a good idea of what the game will sound like from the 45 Beatle classics that’ll be included with the initial batch of software. Still, there are treats in store on that front thanks to new remixing work by Giles Martin, the son of veteran Beatles producer George Martin. And Giles is no Beatles novice -- he won a couple of Grammys for his work with his father on the striking remix/mash-up of their catalog for the Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, “Love.”