Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Umm I don't think rockband implies talent.I have no musical talent, and nor to I desire to obtain any musical talent. I can't even read sheet music when someone was teaching me, and it didn't bother me in the slightest bit.
The point of RB is fun. That's it. I used to think that all of these types of games were lame, until a friend brought over Guitar Hero 2. We played it until 3 am, and afterwards I realized that these games were fun (until you had to play lame songs, which is still a fault).
And I agree that this game is to music as FPS is to Military Training; after an intense CS session I certainly am not ready to head to cs_iraq and preventing the terrorist from setting us up the bomb!
explovewhisper - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Rock Band was released on November 3, 2009 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles, supports all existing Rock Band instruments https://nhacchuong68.com/Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Good article...I love RB and RB2, although I will admit with some of the songs I just think "WTF is this song doing in here" and here are SOOO many songs that I want to play on there that are not available.
I wish that there was some way to import songs into the game and define the tracks (or even let the game automatically decide that, although that'd take a lot of programming and remove a profit area from Harmonix with DLC), because frankly even the songs that are on DLC aren't the ones that I want to play. Sure some are there, but not the ones that I crave to play. And I am sure that there are plenty of other people in the same position as myself, and I am also sure that plenty of other people would not like the songs that I want. Thats the joy in everyone having their own invidial tastes (Rammstein is the band that I'd love to see more than anyone else on there for example)...
I remember 1 song on RB2 on expert on guitar was seriously just the green button at a certain interval that was not difficult at all (a lame rappish type song)...it didn't belong there at all! I fell asleep playing it on expert :-/
I don't play the drums often, but I will admit that the pedal from RB1 does frustrate me and the lack of an adjustable chair makes playin git uncomfortable (long legs makes it hard to hit the bedal properly because my knee will be bent at a less than 90 degree angle), so I pretty much just play guitar (or base). It is still fun though and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Jason
webstorm1 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have a PS3, and there is an option to queue songs for multiple song downloads. You can select Download in the background, so you don't have to wait for any song to download before moving on. Then you just go to the game navigation menu (can't remember the exact name, but it's the one you would use to actually start a game from) and select each song after it has downloaded to install it. I'm guessing this is an Xbox 360 limitation in the online service, so it may even be fixed if anyone cares to do so.Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I couldn't quite figure out on page 1 what the author was trying to say for "You what you would if you..." slightly under the picture.Jason
Gary Key - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Corrected now, had a HTML tag error there...Devo2007 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Instead of saying "The Premium Drum Kit" I think you should specifically mention that it's the ION Drum Rocker somewhere in the first half of page 5 -- it made things rather confusing when you kept saying "Premium Drum Kit" and then randomly referring to the kick pedal as the "ION Kick Pedal."DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
thanks for the advice. i updated the page.Diosjenin - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have to thank you for the thoroughness with which you've dissected the drum kit(s) in particular. I don't actually own either 1 or 2, but I've played the first one a few times and the critiques you gave of the first set I feel are quite accurate, so I certainly trust the critiques you give of the new one(s).I do have to ask - is there an option to designate the hi-hat as the leftmost 'drum' rather than the one second from the left on the non-premium kit (where I presume you can just switch the pads)? If there's an option in either 1 or 2 to change this, do let me know, but I haven't ever played on a system where that's been the case, and not being able to play with my right arm crossed over my left remains my primary qualm with the drum setup as a whole - even above the horrible bass pedal feel and construction...
DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
you can't reassign pads and must rely on what the programmers defined for each song.this is definitely the most frustrating thing for me. having the flexibility of the premium kit here is nice as you can, for whatever song, make it "right" usually by switching the plugs in the brain for the yellow and red pads.
it still just makes me want to buy a real electronic drum kit and a kickbox though.