Rock Band 2

The Short


Pros
- Refines the Rock Band UI down to a perfect shine
- Tons of new, awesome songs
- Character creator is much improved and a character can play multiple instruments
- Menu selection for songs becomes fantastic
- Charting is better for all instruments, especially bass
- Introduced the Rock Band Network, where people can create and submit their own songs to sell
- All songs (like Rock Band) exportable to be played in different versions
- Compatible with all old DLC and exported Rock Band songs
- There is no "solo" career; it's all unlocked either as a band or by yourself
- Challenges are a nice new addition, though not particularly enthralling

Cons
- Doesn't dramatically mix up the formula
- Doesn't add any new instruments or significant changes
- Songs are still locked until you play through career mode
- Load times are better than Rock Band, but are still pretty bad if you don't install to the HDD

Rock Band 2 was more about polishing rather than innovating

The Long

Continuing forward on our Rock Band saga, skip ahead a few months after we got Rock Band. Rock Band 2 was actually already out by the time we got Rock Band (I'd picked that one up instead of the 2nd one because it was super cheap) but I hadn't completely sold my wife on the idea that we needed another music game when the one we had was good enough (plus we could buy DLC, so what did we need this new disc for?). Unfortunately for her, I visited a friend who owned the game and proceeded to rock out to Rock Band 2 for several hours, and after seeing all the improvements I was totally sold. I managed to snag a copy for $30 (which was apparently cheap enough for her to approve), exported the Rock Band songs (which, again, no Enter Sandman :( ) and never looked back. 

While Rock Band started our musical addiction, it was Rock Band 2 that finalized it, getting both myself and my wife totally invested in the whole "Rock Band" thing. It also was a key selling factor in upgrading our TV to a slightly bigger one (by slightly bigger I mean 10 inches bigger), and spawned the whole "Rock Band Party" thing that our friends would know and love (or loathe). 

The interface looks significantly cleaner, especially in HD

The general gist of the game is the exact same as from Rock Band. Get a singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer together, plug in all your plastic instruments and rock out. The only real significant change I noted was the singing: the pitch detection in this game is way better than in Rock Band, where it was sort of all over the place. This made singing more accurate, which also started us on our "Sing every song on Expert, even if we don't know it" kick that we are still on (like I said, we are good at singing). But aside from that, you still strum notes when they hit the bottom of the screen to get combos, and you still have those four instruments (not really mixed up until Beatles and Rock Band 3). 

Something that was a subtle improvement that you really won't notice until you compare the two games side by side is how much cleaner the game looks. The "film grain" on the background scenes was significantly decreased, meaning you could both see your characters better and the "highways" of notes were less foggy. Notes were shinier and more vibrant, bass-pedal notes on the drums were brighter and easier to see, and the highway hit the perfect balance between transparent (so you can still sort of see the on-stage action) and being dark enough to provide contrast for the notes. Again, very subtle things, but being a lot easier on the eyes is actually a lot more significant than you might think.

The song selection screen set the new standard

The biggest improvement was the way you selected songs in quickplay. Gone was the stupid flag that gave you no difficulty indicator (unless you sorted it by difficulty). Now we had many sorting options: artists, albums, etc. If you had a bunch of songs from a particular artist, the game would auto-sort them into sub-categories under the artist by album (for example, under my "AFI" tab it would split between "DecemberUnderground" and "Crash Love"), which was really convenient. But the best feature, by far, was the fact that if you were on a song it would give individual instrument difficulty. I cannot stress enough how important this was, especially when you were playing with friends of varying skill levels. Ranging from zero dots to five devil heads, you could finally pick the perfect song to play for you and your friends. It also had a "band" difficulty level, which I never thought was that useful (I don't care about the band, I care about what instrument I'm playing) but hey, we'll take it. 

An added bonus was the album art in the corner, as well as the album name and release date (which you could sort into musical decades, also good when playing with my parents who don't know any music after 1990). It just looked really clean, and made it so when you ended up buying truckloads of DLC (which we did), you could easily sort through all of it to find the songs you wanted.

The characters looked good and had tons of new costumes to make them look like total rocking idiots

The songs themselves were fantastic, probably one of my favorite setlists to date. It provided a good blend of old songs with new songs, though it did get a little "metal" heavy for the hardest tracks (I'm not complaining; I love metal, but I could see why some would be turned off). the game had a distinct lack of any country at all (much to my wife's dismay), but luckily this was heavily rectified in further DLC releases. 

Career mode was back, and while it wasn't a massive improvement it at least was different than all the previous music games that had come out. You got to go city to city, picking from specific songs (and random or pre-determined setlists) as you unlocked stars. Get enough and you got to play a particularly difficult gig that would unlock a van, a plane, etc. that would unlock more venues. It was pretty much just "play songs to unlock more songs" with a new skin. It was nice to have a bit more choice where I played (and seeing it on a globe was spiffy), but the system was beginning to show it's age. The fact that you had to unlock the songs through this mode for quickplay was also a major downer, since I pretty much jumped into the game wanted to play on Quickplay, and I had to beat the career mode first before I got all my songs.

Plus you get like a billion fans, which means...uh...nothing. 

There was also a new batch of "Challenges," which were basically just difficulty-tiered setlists played out of context of the main story. A cool feature of it was it would take your DLC that you just bought and make new challenges out of it (for example, have three or more Offspring songs and you'd get an "Offspring" challenge, etc.). These were also instrument specific, which added some unique stuff for you to do, and provided both fans and money if you were REALLY needing it. It was nice to have the new content, but I didn't really see the point (besides getting the $$) when quickplay existed. 

They also added "Battle of the Bands," weekly leaderboards competitions

Character design was better, though you still earned money to buy stuff which could turn getting that particular guitar you wanted into a money-earning grind. Luckily, though, you only had to buy the stuff you wanted, so if you managed your cash you'd be fine. Items were limited to each character you made, though, which was kind of a huge pain if you wanted to have a full band totally equipped. They were also locked to your gamertag (and everybody had to have a gamertag signed in to play, at least on the Xbox 360 version), meaning my friends who just came to hang out had to make a bunch of local, bogus gamertags to play and keep their characters. Not terrible, but certainly a minor annoyance that could have been ironed out.

The menus for the clothing stores have never been particularly easy to use

As a whole, though Rock Band 2 really brought the band together, if you forgive the cheesy choice of words. With Rock Band my wife and I were content to playing on our own. With Rock Band 2, however, we started inviting people over to play with us. As newlyweds are usually hermits, I think it weirded our friends out (too bad, suckers! We need a bass player!) and the massive amounts of DLC Harmonix kept pumping out meant we could get songs that we wanted to sing rather than be stuck with whatever arbitrary songs were released on disc (which, while they were pretty good overall, some were certainly...bad. Cool For Cats...you suck). 

The addition of Rock Band Network, a service that allowed artists to chart their own songs and sell them in the store, was just icing on the cake. Now bands themselves could put their own music up, in addition to Harmonix still releasing it's own weekly DLC. The number of songs in the game completely skyrocketed, and we've found some pretty awesome bands via this service. 

More songs for ya

We probably burned more hours on this game than any other game on our Xbox360 (except maybe Rock Band 3). It started the whole "Rock Band Party" thing, which has continued to this day. As an improvement on the original formula, Rock Band 2 blew us away, both in style and general improvements. It's still considered by many to be the best Rock Band game, though I personally stand by Rock Band 3.

For now, like the original game there isn't any real reason to own the game, but you can export the majority of the songs for $10 to be played in Rock Band 3. Be warned: for Rock Band all you needed was the disc to export, for Rock Band 2 you'll need both a disc and an unused serial code from the back of the manual (meaning if you buy used it's a crapshoot if it'll work or not), so buying new is the safest bet. 

It still holds up well, though, and earns a well-deserved five out of five. It reigned supreme as my favorite music game ever until Rock Band 3 came out, and that's a pretty impressive feat.