Rampant Coyote on Rock Band 2
I wasn't waiting until Christmas this year. I snagged a copy of Rock Band 2 last night. You know, the game that Harmonix said around this time last year that they weren't even thinking about making for quite a while.

We played as a family last night for about an hour or so, and I got some solo time in. I came to the conclusion that it could be called, "Rock Band 1.1: A Whole Bunch of New Songs." They managed to get rid of some of the annoyances of the first game (like having the band tied to one character, and having that character tied to a particular instrument only). And they have some new features, including some competitive scoring "battles of the bands" modes which we will probably never use, because they require everyone to play on expert difficulty. Oh, and a drum training mode. The residual Guitar Hero style single-player mode (which I didn't play much) seemed to be gone from what I could see. Single-player is now the same as multiplayer, but with only one band member. This deletion is probably an addition... it's nice to have it all seamless now.

I'm sure there is more, and I'm sure I'll even explore them at some point. I might even find a new favorite. But for the most part - it's a minor upgrade to Rock Band plus - if you include bonus songs and some free downloadable songs coming soon - over 100 songs.

And you know what? That's not bad. At least they didn't include boss battles where you break the other guy's instruments while playing (at least, so far as I can tell). Really, aside from what they've now addressed, I can't really think of many ways to really improve on Rock Band. This is like Guitar Hero 2 to Guitar Hero - they sorta took it as far as it can go, and any further changes might only wreck things. Did I mention GH3's really lame and irritating boss battles yet?

The best thing - an incredible thing, when you think about it - is that not only is all of the downloadable content for Rock Band 1 compatible and automatically works in Rock Band 2 with zero effort, but the original's songs - all but about three, at least - can be exported into the new game. And you can go back and delete the ones you hate ("Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys is the prime candidate amongst our friends). It's sad about the missing songs - probably because of $ome kind of licen$ing i$$ue. But the end result is that unless you really, really want to play Run to the Hills, Enter Sandman, or Paranoid (and granted... I might), there's no reason to have to put your RB1 disc in the drive ever again.

So I guess I could argue that Rock Band 2 comes straight out of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of game design. They fixed what they needed to, added some optional new features, and otherwise just delivered the same Rock Band-y goodness I've been enjoying for the last year with friends playing the ultimate (game console) party game. So now we have more of the same, without having to worry about swapping characters and bands in the middle of a set when we're switching off.

So I'm pretty thrilled about it.

Also - "The Trees," "Carry On Wayward Son," "Hungry Like the Wolf," "One Way Or Another," "White Wedding," "American Woman," "Pinball Wizard," "Any Way You Want It," "Livin' On a Prayer," "Aqualung," "Go Your Own Way," "Ace of Spades," "Round and Round," "The Middle," and even some fun cheesiness of "We Got the Beat" and "The Eye of the Tiger." Man, those would just about be worth the price of admission all by themselves.

Labels: Guitar Hero, Mainstream Games, rock band

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:23 AM (Permalink)