Rock Band 2′s changes are more subtle, but for the better – such as this phototaking mode for your band.
I’ve spent my gaming time this past week alternating between pretty much two games: Rock Band 2 and Condemned 2. Having completed Condemned 2 last night and already giving it a little review, I can spend this week’s gaming update discussing my thoughts on Rock Band 2.
Initial experience
After I got home and decided to start it up, I tore off the plastic and loaded the game in the 360. I had already paid the $5 to export the songs from Rock Band 1 onto my hard drive so I could play them on Rock Band 2. The first option was Quickplay so I went to the second option, Tour, and created a new drummer. I didn’t really know what to do so I just created “Snake”, and made him look sort of like Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series. I figured, maybe in my joke band I’ll just have various popular videogame characters. I was disappointed though that there wasn’t much change at all to the character creation feature. Nothing really new.
Then I got started and was surprised that there was no setlist to play through in Single Player like in Rock Band 1 or the Guitar Hero games. “Where are all the new songs for me to play?” I wondered. All I could see was the World Tour mode, which looked just like the World Tour Mode from Rock Band 1 but with one notable difference: I was able to play it just by myself. I started World Tour and played a few of the songs in the initial section I was in. Then I chose “Make a Set List” and picked two new songs from the list (I like how the Make A Set List looks like the Music Store now). After beating the Make a Set List section, I tried Mystery Set List, which randomly chose two songs for me. I was playing the Drums on Hard and was somewhat disappointed to see Rock Band 1 songs show up under the Mystery Set List. But then when I thought about it, from looking at the Make a Set List option, there were perhaps only 5-10 songs from Rock Band 2 available – the rest were all my Rock Band 1 and downloaded songs. Apparently the odds were heavily in favor of Rock Band 1 songs if I did Mystery Set List.
Another thing I noticed after beating the first club in New York was that there were no longer any stars next to any of the gigs I just played. In Rock Band 1 you could see how many stars you scored on a particular song or Set List, so you could go back and play it to get the 5 stars if you wanted to. But in Rock Band 2, there’s no stars to speak of, which is quite annoying considering you do get a star value at the end of playing the song/setlist.
Discovery of Challenge Mode
I thought to myself, “This has got to be a joke. I have to go through all of World Tour by myself in order to unlock all the songs before my friends come over this weekend to play it?!” Fortunately, it was not like that. After checking online, I discovered that under the Band Tour mode, there’s a section called “Challenges”. The “Challenges” section is the closest thing to the single player mode of Rock Band 1.
Initially, everything is locked except the Tier 1 Challenges, consisting of a band setlist, a guitar setlist, a drum setlist, and a vocal setlist. Beating any of these Tier 1 challenges unlocks more setlists corresponding to that instrument, so for example, when I beat the initial Drum setlist challenge, Drum setlist challenge II was unlocked. What’s interesting is that it’s not just completely linear paths up for each instrument. The Challenge mode actually checks the songs that you have on your hard drive, and puts together Challenges based on what you have. So after beating a few different Challenges, I was surprised to see a 9-song setlist consisting of Rock Band 1 popular songs. There was even a 3-song Challenge that unlocked for my Oasis pack that I paid for and it was playable with any instrument. Pretty neat overall – I’d say the Challenge mode is the real meat of the single-player and I think it’s quite innovative.
The Challenge Mode is pretty much the fastest way to unlock all 84 of the songs in Rock Band 2. Basically, there’s setlists of 6 songs all from Rock Band 2, and if you beat one, it unlocks the next six songs from Rock Band 2. Playing through all of these setlists allows you to not only experience every song in Rock Band 2 without repeats, but you also get to unlock them at the same time so it’s not bad. One additional new element with Rock Band 2 is that you can stop between songs in a setlist, as in, you don’t have to finish all six songs to stop. You can also change difficulties in the middle of your setlist too, so say you get to song 5 of 6 on an Expert playlist but you can’t beat it. No problem – you can change it to Hard and still continue on that 5th song.
Discovery of only one character needed per band
While you do end up using your created character to play in the Challenge mode, it’s not the character that is tied to the Challenges as it is the Band. In Rock Band 1, I had a character on guitar, another on vocals, and a third one on drums since I had to pick each corresponding character whenever I wanted to play a specific instrument. That’s why I created Snake in Rock Band 2 – I figured he’d be my drummer and I’d create another character on guitar again. Except this time around, any character can play any instrument so I can just stick with one from now on.
Definitely a welcome change since I’d rather just worry about my main character instead of managing several different ones. What’s also neat is that when you play solo, you can have the created characters play for your band instead of computer generated ones. That way, once my friends create their characters, I can have them show up in my band whenever I play it solo, which is a nice touch.
Thoughts on the songs
I was more excited about the Guitar Hero: World Tour playlist compared to Rock Band 2, and so far, I feel like I was right in my assumption. I’ve probably unlocked maybe half of the songs, but only a tiny number of them were enjoyable songs. Perhaps my favorite song so far is Paramore’s “That’s What You Get”, but I tend to enjoy Rock-Pop bands like All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy more than the typical Rock Band player.
I guess it may be too soon to say at this point since I’ve only unlocked maybe half the songs, but they’re not as catchy. There’s also a lot more female-sung songs, which worry me a little bit since I’m generally the default singer for our band haha
The initial loading has been cut down – it’s a definite improvement over Rock Band 1. The only niggling thing I have is that when you play a setlist of multiple songs and some of those songs are male-sung and others are female-sung, the lead singer is not changed for the corresponding song. It’s ok when you have a male singer singing the first song that is male-sung, but then the next song he’s still singing it when it’s clearly a female song. I guess the benefit to that is that there’s no real loading between male-led and female-led songs in a playlist. But it just seems a bit odd to me.
Playing Rock Band 2 with the wife
My wife decided to give the game a try with me the Monday night, so I took us into the Challenge mode. There’s actually certain challenges that require a band of at least two people so we stuck with those instead of doing the Band World Tour. She hadn’t played in a long time, so I started her off on Medium on bass while I played the lead guitar on Medium (been a while for me too). It ended up too easy and boring for her, so on the next set I moved us up to Hard and it was more to our liking. She had a good time and we’ll probably play it again from time to time when she’s free.
I like how this works out though. Basically, I get a lot of exposure with all of the instruments. When I play solo, I play the drums (I can seriously feel like I’m getting better as I sweat away the pounds). When my wife wants to play, we both play the guitars. And then when the rest of the band comes over, I sing. So yeah – it works out pretty well.
A Slight Injury
About a week ago I developed this blister on the inside of my hand. It is about a centimeter below where my wedding band is and I couldn’t figure out what the heck it came from. At first I thought it was because I carried heavy groceries one day last week, but last night I started to feel a bit more discomfort from it when I was playing Rock Band 2. I now realize that it’s actually from playing the drums while wearing my wedding band. I guess I hit the sticks in such a way that it literally bangs the ring or something up into my hand. From now on I think I’m going to take off my ring when I play the drums.
Downloadable Content
With the lack of any really awesome songs so far that I’ve unlocked in Rock Band 2, I went ahead and bought more songs of my own that I liked. Obviously everyone’s taste differs, but here are the songs I ended up buying:
“El Scorcho” – Weezer
“More Than A Feeling” – Boston
“This Ain’t A Scene, It’s an Arms Race” – Fall Out Boy
“One of Those Nights” – The Cab
“Hands Down” – Dashboard Confessional
The last three songs on that list are all pop-rock, so I had to buy them. Ended up going back and buying “El Scorcho” also because I listened to it more and thought I wouldn’t mind singing that (Weezer songs tend to be pretty easy to sing haha). Finally, I felt a little silly buying Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” song since it was on the original Guitar Hero game that I owned, but I thought it was a great song so I had to have it again.
Overall initial impressions
I’m not super fond of the playlist so far, but I’m really enjoying the Challenges and World Tour modes. Rock Band 2 doesn’t feel like a brand new game, but rather, Rock Band 1.5. I love how the Challenges are since there’s a non-linear progression system that differs from past games and I love that I can play World Tour mode by myself. This means it’s certainly possible to unlock practically every Achievement just playing alone. Basically, I like that Rock Band 2 has made the game a lot more single-player friendly.
At the same time, by making it more single-player friendly, it seems like there’s less of a reason to play it as a group, at least in terms of making Achievement progression. Why wait for my friends to come over for the Band World Tour mode when a band is no longer required like in the first game? But overall, I still like how this new setup works because it doesn’t really take anything away from the fun that is group play, while giving more control back to the owner of the game. I can “achieve” on my own while just having fun when my friends come over – which is probably what makes the most sense. I’m not going to “force march” my friends, who just want to play it for fun, to try to conquer every city in the World Tour mode!
All in all, I’m happy with the convenience of the new changes but not super-excited about the new songs. Fortunately, with all the downloadable songs being released each week, I’m sure there will be some new songs I’ll enjoy soon enough. By relaxing the requirements from the first one, such as tying a character to each instrument and not allowing single players to play World Tour mode, Rock Band 2 could be quite the addicting game for me to play alone. I feel almost overwhelmed by all of the challenges and all of the Band World Tour stops that I can accomplish on my own. This also means I can also stand there by myself and play the Endless Setlist without making anyone else go through it (if I really dared to). These initial impressions are practically like a review for the game – if you were to ask me what I thought of the game, I’d give it a low A, based on the criteria how I review games.
