Song List and Improvements for Partying

Music is so much a matter of personal taste that talking about the song list for a music game feels like wasted space. At the same time, the song lists can make or break these games. I know it's much more hip to like music that no one has ever heard of but when choosing music for a mass-consumption video game, it's wise to go with songs that have a high probability of being recognized. While Rock Band 2 chooses to include a wide variety of songs from several decades in order to offer a few selections each person will love, it may not provide enough songs of a certain flavor to fully satisfy any one person. It's a balancing act, but Harmonix manages to hit all the right notes.

Looking through the song list I can tell that certain songs will almost always get picked in a party situation. 1990s Grunge fans will channel the angst of their youth when playing "Alive" by Pearl Jam and "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains, women will leap at the chance to shout along with Alanis Morissette's scorned-woman battle anthem "You Oughta Know" and anyone who was alive in the 1980s will enjoy the inclusion of Billy Idol's "White Wedding Pt. I" and Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf." Then there's Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," which shouldn't be overlooked. These songs don't represent the most challenging pieces in the game but sometimes it's not about furious fretwork or intense drumming. Sometimes it's "karaoke with instruments" that wins the day. Rock Band 2 has a strong song list, and keep in mind there's an option to import most of the songs from the original Rock Band disc for $5 and any downloaded songs already on the hard drive automatically get included.

Rock Band 2 takes an if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach.

Rock Band is a popular party game and first-timers can be too intimidated by the likelihood of failure -- thus ending the song for everyone playing -- to try it out. To alleviate such fears in newcomers, Harmonix included a "No Fail" option with Rock Band 2. Enabling "No Fail" disables saving and achievements but allows players to try the game in a public setting without fear of ruining everyone's fun. The Quick Play mode also allows the creation of custom set lists eliminating the need to go back to the song list and pick a new song every time. Speaking of browsing the song list, Rock Band 2 adopts the look of the Music Store from the original Rock Band as its interface to pick songs. The song list can be sorted by location (downloaded, Rock Band or Rock Band 2), song name, band name, genre, decade or difficulty with the ability to jump to a specific section of the list rather than scrolling through its entirety. These changes to the interface make a song list that could number in the hundreds much easier to navigate.

Another new play mode included with Rock Band 2 is the Battle of the Bands, which requires online connectivity. These Battles are collections of songs -- including downloadable songs -- released by Harmonix that bands across the Internet can play to compete for the best score. Each Battle has a limited time to enter before a winner is declared and the results are not cumulative -- meaning each Battle starts all the bands back at zero.

Band scores are tracked on the leader board. They are also compared across your friends list. Even if you can't compete against the best in the list, you may able to take the number-one spot among your friends. These Battles also show up in the Tour mode at specific venues, once again demonstrating Harmonix refusal to segment its game into compartments.

Multiplayer game modes such as Tug of War and Score Duel made the transition from Rock Band to Rock Band 2 in addition to Practice Mode and the training tutorials. In order to battle growing frustration with the complexity of drumming, Harmonix included an in-depth drum trainer that's split up into three sections: a beat trainer that drills players with common drum rhythms; a fill trainer to discourage flailing during drum fill sections and a freestyle mode with which you can just play drums with no music. The drum trainer is a great addition, providing 76 different beats of increasingly difficulty to play and 45 individual fills to practice with a variety of speeds. It still won't teach real drumming, but it will help with drumming in Rock Band 2.

NEXT PAGE: New Hardware, Conclusions and the Final Score

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