ROCK LOOSE MUSICAL COLLECTIVE!
My love of all that falls off the back of Harmonix’s Mack truck of rocking goodness (even Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s – the rip off expansion that did remind me that Round and Round by Ratt is the best song in the world EVAH. And the video’s excellent. Especially if you wish that you could wear those trousers without ridicule. Actually, I’m not sure if he could even back then. And yes, I will post that video every time I can) is well known and after the success of the original Rock Band in getting me to drop a pile of cash on Mr Roland and his electric drum empire it was only a matter of time before Rock Band 2 threw its television of rock through the hotel window of my life. I am available for custom tortured metaphor writing for a small fee.
I was actually quite restrained in my rush to Game to buy it, waiting a whole day and nipping in during my traditional Saturday morning foray into the Ealing Broadway centre. Much to my horror and dismay it wasn’t on the shelves. I managed to reach the counter before collapsing with disappointment, but the secret ruler of the shop (and occasional seller of tickets for band nights at the pub down the road) pulled me back from the brink – they had a pile downstairs but were hiding them from the “normal” people and saving them for proper fans like me. Or they could have just been pushing Guitar Hero and not wanting to distract the tiny attention spanned public hid it out of site, noone actually said. The arrival of the game disk at the counter caused a mild stir amongst the staff, with the cute girl with the pink hair running through the new tracks as I discussed my in-progress purchase of a real (electric) drum kit with the rest of the assembled throng. I like my Game, they treat me like a living god. Well, repeat customer. Maybe just customer. Who knows. They’re lovely anyway. Especially the girl with the pink hair.
So, the game: it’s basically Rock Band but with some new songs. Yeah, there’s some new single and multiplayer modes (the former of which I shall mention shortly), the graphics are a little bit nicer, the gameplay has a couple of tweaks and the drumkit has a new set of sounds, but there’s not a lot that’s changed here. Not that that is a bad thing – Rock Band did what it did very well and Harmonix haven’t changed much for that reason.
The song list seems to be all originals now, rather than the occasional not-bad-but-not-quite-right cover that popped up from time to time in Rock Band – there are benefits to being owned by MTV and having a scarily well established world wide brand. I heard tales that even Dave Mustaine has started rambling about how it would be stupid not to let your songs be included in games these days (although I suspect his release of a couple of albums in Rock Band might have something to do with that. That and the new boat he’s saving for). The music spans the normal range of genres – metal to folk with a touch of the 80s and the chunk of solid ROCK that calling a game ‘Rock Band’ would suggest. Stand out tracks to me are Living on a Prayer by St John of Bongiovi and his lively bunch of players, a new Paramore song (my single secret-ish emo-ish weakness), a fun to drum bit of Dinosaur Jr (another excellent video there), a Mighty Mighty Bosstones track, some AC/DC (that destroys the arms when drumming non-stop for its full length), a bunch of others that I can’t remember at the moment, and the finest song of all time – Round and Round by Ratt. There is no escape from the awesomeness of Ratt.
They’ve updated the local “career” game to actually be band based this time, with the standard linear “play gigs unlock songs” game of the previous iterations replaced by various locations with differing venues, each offering different “gigs” and unlocking as you reach different landmarks. A gig can be anything from a single song up to a whole set (the most I’ve hit so far is 7 songs in one go) and as you play new songs they get unlocked for quick play and practise. Instead of the mode having to be played through by one person at a time you now have your band and can play multiplayer or single player, with each player switching around to whatever instrument they want – no creating a new in game character to switch over to vocals for a bit of variation. There’s the obligatory character creation, which I think I’ve managed to abuse to get a vaguely familiar looking avatar, and accessories buying, allowing you to make your character look as stupid as you like and giving you something to spend the money that you earn in gigs on. 
As I’m a boring git who doesn’t care much after making a bald fat man appear on the screen it means little to me, but for those who like unlocking in-game stuff you will be happy, with a pile of digital representations of awful clothes and haircuts to choose from.
The gameplay is pretty much the same as before – I’ve heard tales of the bass drum timing being changed, but that seems to only be noticeable by considerably scarier drummers than little old me (azuritereaction being the guy that brought it to my attention and he not only blogs about his Rock Band drumming exploits, but has a special upgraded kit and can do Lord of the Dance on Stepmania) and there’s been little tweaks, like being able to play the drums after the end of a song (rather than just getting ‘your hitting things when nothing should be hit’ noises) and on the guitar end you now seem to get hammer ons onto multiple notes (which I’ve not seen in the previous game). But overall things continue as they were.
They’ve tweaked the interface, making everything look like the music store, which not only makes it all a consistent UI, but makes it all look quite pretty. With the purchase of a license you can transfer all the tracks from Rock Band (which I did this afternoon – £3.40 of Microsoft points and 15 minutes to copy them all to the hard-drive), which along with the continually increasing library of downloadable songs (recently augmented by a bunch of Yngwie Malmsteen tracks for those who are INSANE) should keep you going for a while. There are also another 20 tracks available for free which they didn’t get done in time for the disc pressing – a teeny tiny 540MB download. These are some fairly random songs, including one from Shaimus’s soon to be released new album – a band that I got into through Guitar Hero and am even planning a trip to Los Angeles to see live.
So, if you liked Rock Band and want more songs then it’s probably worth an upgrade. If you haven’t got Rock Band yet then you are a fool and should purchase Rock Band 2 immediately (and then Rock Band 1 secondhand so that you can get all the tracks off of that as well). You will then tell me your online nick so that you can join my band – Uncle Billy and the Bouncing Goldfish. At the moment we have me on drums and…that’s it. Please buy it and help me to not sit sad and lonely in my lounge on my own. Well, in my lounge on my own but with pretend internet friends at least, I don’t want to get ahead of myself…
(The title of this post is in relation to the current status of my band, the awesome Dead Karma. We are currently downgraded to below the status of “loose musical collective” due to the seperation of band members now ranging from Nashville to Geneva. We will, however, return. Mere physical seperation is no barrier to the mighty power of ROCK. Well, it and laziness is, but we shall see. The website will be back soon…)
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Posted: December 6th, 2008 under blog.