GAME: Rock Band 2

Ever since the music game business started booming there was always guitar hero. However since last christmas, Rock Band has stepped up to challenge the empire. At first there was no competition. However as time moved on, Rock Band grew on people and now Rock Band 1 sells more copies than GH III. Now this fall Rock Band 2 is being released to compete with GH World Tour. In this competition, I am a Rock Band guy. I love how many songs there are and the style. It is in my opinion that bars work better than circles (anyone who's played "One" in GH III on Expert and knows the finger tapping solo knows that those circles look like they overlap!). Anyway moving on. Rock Band 2 is basically Rock Band 1 with more songs, a better menu, some new venues, and a better online system. Yet for as little different it is, it works. Harmonix (Rock Band developers) did the right thing by finding what was wrong with Rock Band 1 and corrected it. The game is spectacular. One of the biggest additions is the change in menu style and career style. Instead of the common easiest to hardest series of setlists to unlock songs, RB2 now completly works in the style as if it was a band world tour so you just choose your gigs. You can  start these gigs however be warned in that whatever difficulty you choose is the difficulty you keep and if you fail, you lose a good chunk of fans and if you completly quit then you have to start the whole gig over again. One of the best things about RB2 is that all songs are master tracks (no covers) which I consider a huge addition. Along with the world tour are infinite challenges (I say infinite because the system will recognize your downloaded songs and create new challenges). The good part of these challenges is that they can always be stopped and you can return to the last song you were about to start. It is in my opinion that as soon as you get this game. Run through the main challenges for your instrument on your difficulty. Because as soon as you beat one of the impossible challenges you will have gotten an achievement (not counting the other achievements that you will recieve for just completing a certain amount of challenges as you progress). Now I'm going to move on to online. Online is still pretty much the same however its much harder to accidentally drop out of matches (before if you pushed red, you were f**ked). Also you can now bring people into your own band from online and substitute for other bands (i would do this first since if you find I person with a really good band you can get money faster and fans faster (i got with some guy early on and in 3 setlists with a 3 member band I already got the one million fan achievement)). So far I've had no problem with lag and everything seems to run smoothly. However there still is the problem that if a member drops out during a song the whole band begins to fail. But the good news is that if your in a setlist is that by the time you start the song again or retry the song, it should not fail you but instead mute the part so you can get through the setlist. Let me move onto the instruments. I have had the ability to try the new guitar, drums, Ion drums, and bass. The new guitar is like they say, better. However, there still is a lack of a double strum and the frets still clack a lot (but it is wireless already). The standard drums are better however I believe that the noise problem is still there, even for quiter people like me. Also the drums are much sturdier and the pedal is better (however they could of made the whole thing metal rather then just a plate. Now the Ion drums are a work of art. If I was a major drummer for the game, I drummed in real life, and I had $300 then I would definently get this, besides that, I'm good with standard. I got to try the drums at Gamerz (our local gaming lounge). The drums feel amazing. The pads are soft and the cymbals add an amazing effect in that they actually make different sounds in the game (ie the green pad sounds like a tom but the green cymbal sounds like a crash cymbal). Finally the bass. Again I would never buy this just because I don't play bass that often and I didn't like the style. The split stum bar for finger strumming feels strange (perhaps if you actually play bass in real life then maybe its easier). The whole thing is huge and instead of a wammy bar has a button that swivels. Finally I'm going to talk about the songs. Since RB1 I have downloaded every single song ever available (even if I don't really like it). Thankfully, as soon as you load up RB2, all of those songs are available. One amazing feature that I was able to do is to export almost all of the RB1 mainsetlist to RB2 for some microsoft points. Harmonix is also claiming that by the holidays, there will be 500 songs.  All in all the whole game is amazing. I bought the game and never regretted a day that I had it. I would definently reccommend this to anyone who loves the music/rhythm genre of games should definently pick this up. It is worth every penny

Rock Band 2

+Amazing Setlist

+Great improvements from first one

+Better online system

+Much easier to make a band now

-New guitar is not that great

-Drums are still kinda loud

GRADE (Out of 10): 9.5

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