'Rock Band 2' as great as the original

By: John Bailey

Posted: 9/23/08

When I was a very young boy, I listened to an awful lot of my father's music. Apparently, I would often take all the pots and pans out on the kitchen floor and beat them to hell in time with "Psycho Killer." It was 'cute.'

I have no recollection of this. My earliest memory is of eating Roy Rogers cheeseburgers in a Hershey, Pa. hotel room. But I never stopped liking the Talking Heads, and when I saw "Psycho Killer" on the leaked tracklist for "Rock Band 2," something primal and ancient welled up in my chest, like a volcano. Volcanos, incidentally, do not care about their bank accounts, and a few phone calls later I was the proud owner of the game and the new wireless guitar.

If you want to know whether "Rock Band 2" is worth the chunky purchase, you should first fill out this questionnaire:

Do you already own "Rock Band?"

Is it fun?

If you answered "yes" (the correct answer) to both of those, you should stop reading this review right now and buy the game. And you shouldn't look at the tracklist either, or you'll miss the thrill of accidentally stumbling upon "Chop Suey" in a random setlist. I told you to stop reading!

If you answered "no," on the other hand, I can't do anything for you, other than mention that oh my God, "Chop Suey" is actually in this game. Also: "One Step Closer," so you can relive your eighth-grade school dance.

Aside from "Chop Suey," "Rock Band 2" doesn't add much to the original "Rock Band," in the same way that $1 doesn't add much to $1 million. There's just nothing to hate here: the music selection is bigger. The tour mode is longer. There are drum solos. You can set up default stand-ins, so you don't end up with a bizarre Freddy Mercury clone on bass when one of your friends is laid up with a kidney infection. You can give your teenage punk-rock revolutionary a gasmask.

For the "Guitar Hero" fans that hate fun and love pain, there's still no "Dragonforce," but Harmonix has upped the difficulty on the high-end guitar solos - the "Guitar Legend" setlist will take some dedicated team Overdrive maneuvers to live through. For the most part, "tough" songs have gotten tougher, it seems, but in an enjoyable way; there doesn't seem to be too much reliance on the school of "meedly meedly you absolutely cannot play this" guitar scales, and pitchless vocal lines no longer require guesswork to hit properly (they've almost become too easy, in fact; I've sometimes had coughing fits into the microphone and still gotten "Awesome!" on Expert).

The horizons of the tracklist have expanded greatly since the first game, and by that I mean they put "Chop Suey" on there. I hate most of the indie rock tracks, but there are plenty of them, and my friends with poor taste all think they're great, so fine. And the 89 or so tracks that ship on the disc are almost irrelevant anyway, since there are hundreds more online, along with the tracklist from the first game, which can be imported with a few minutes of time and a $5 purchase.

After you're done being pissed off that this game once again suckered you out of more of your money, you can also find the Battle of the Bands online - but it's not quite as fantastic as it sounds, since you really just play with your regular band against a bunch of randomly chosen scores. To be fair, the particular "battles" have plenty of variety - some require particular instruments while others grade on values other than star score - and they cycle several times a week, but if you want to know if it's actually a worthwhile feature, you should really just take a look at the questionnaire again. There's also the online World Tour feature, but if you're a UConn student and you've got "Rock Band" in your room, you really have no excuse for not having real, live people in your band whenever you play.

The instruments, like the rest of the game, are the same, only better: the guitar has a nice faux-wood finish and an improved hefty feeling, along with quieter buttons and a more solid strum bar. The drums are quieter - which your neighbors will thank you for - and more responsive, now being able to actually register notes faster than eighths (making "Run To The Hills" on Expert now playable). However, if you've already got all the instruments, there really isn't any reason to justify buying a new set, unless you've got a bunch of extra money and it's too hot for a bonfire.

So, should you buy it? Do you like "Rock Band?" Do you like fun? Do you like "Chop Suey?" This is "Rock Band," and it's more fun than "Rock Band" used to be. You really don't need to know any more.