Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House

New Interfaces and Game Modes

There are some slight tweaks to the interface with Rock Band 2 over the original. There isn't any different in the actual game play portion but when moving around the menus and selecting options there are differences. When selecting a song, different category arrangements can be selected (by difficulty, alphabetically, by genre, etc.), and you can easily jump between categories. What ever song is currently selected has it's info displayed to the left (artist and album as well as the difficulty rating information). This is an improvement over Rock Band, but it still feels a little clunky and it's not as easy to use as it should be.

Can't go wrong with Weezer. This one is much easier than Everlong.

Yeah, we're going to take the easy way out here and not suggest a way to improve it. Honestly, organizing 84 songs in a way that its easy to find what you want is hard. It gets even more difficult after 55 more songs from the Rock Band disk are added and at least a good 3 or 4 dozen downloaded songs are thrown in for good measure. Again, this is definitely an improvement over their first attempt, but we hope Harmonix continues to make improvements in this area.

My band is setup, but I have to hit start to move on. Cool.

One subtle interface tweak that we do appreciate is the fact that when you are setting up your band to play, you can connect all your instruments but not everyone has to join in to play. those who are going to play press the button to join and select their character. Once all that is done, you need to press start to continue. This saves us from accidentally doing something like hitting the green button to fast and moving on when we shouldn't be and it keeps us from having to back out one screen further and disconnecting an instrument to play with a different group of people. This is useful in party settings or when playing with varying numbers of people or maybe two people who want to cycle between all 4 instruments.

And now what to do ... We spend most of our time on tour.

The tour mode in Rock Band 2 is very similar to the tour mode in the first one. Gamers select different cities and different venues within those cities to unlock more songs and access more venues and more cities. The number of fans you can win (and the speed with which you win them) is much higher in Rock Band 2, and the addition of managers that alter the rewards or random set modifiers that can pop up is an interesting distraction, but nothing really fundamentally changed with this game play mode.

Getting around on Tour.

And now looking at challenges.

Challenge mode, while still essentially offering sets to play, organizes songs in groups that target specific instruments or themes. Some challenges require single or multiple players and completing challenges can unlock things other than songs like clothing sets for your characters. This is fun for a change from just playing random songs or making your own sets, but some of the ideas that Harmonix had about the difficulty of their challenges is way off. There's no way that the apprentice drum marathon should include Tangled up in Blue. That song is tricky and evil for "apprentice" drummers.

Battle of the Bands mode isn't really as cool as it sounds. You basically play against the score of another band online. While the battles can be cool sometimes (getting the most stars in a no fail set or the longest streak of notes in an impossible song or something), it's still not two bands going head to head on the same stage. With Rock Band 2, you can play online with friends (or strangers) as part of your band, so it doesn't seem like it should be a problem to have more interaction between two distinct bands. In any case, Harmonix updates the battles quite frequently and it has been fun to try and push up through the ranks on some of the challenges. Fun and humbling anyway.

Endless 2.

Completing a new song in any game play mode will unlock that song for quick play or for custom sets in the tour mode, but for gamers who want to get right to the party all the songs can be accessed via a code that enables a game modifier that can be toggled. This means that you can grind through on your own and enjoy unlocking things, but when friends come over to party you can offer them all the variety the game has to give. No fail mode can be enabled as well, but that seems to kind of take some of the fun out of it.

Really, the interface could be better, but they did make it prettier. The backgrounds are subtle but immersive and what goes on on stage while the game is being played is better looking as well. It's impressive how well Harmonix sync'd lips, strumming, fingering, and drum work with the music. All the venues in the tour mode have their own unique atmosphere and feel as well. It's not easy to watch what's going on while playing, but it is a nice bit of polish.