Spring Break
'Rock Band 2' as great as the original
John Bailey
Issue date: 9/23/08 Section: Focus
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).
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).
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