Games: Rock Band 2
Today we’re going to get some rock off with our socks off with a quick review of Rock Band 2
For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘musical gaming’ genre, Rock Band and similar products often use controllers shaped like guitars or drums. You simply hit the colored buttons on the instruments in time with the colors on the screen to play the notes. A simple concept, but incredibly fun none the less.
What first made Harmonix’s Rock Band stand out in comparison to it’s nearest competitor Guitar Hero is that it allowed players to not only play guitar, but drum and sing as well. Though this has been evenly matched by the most recent Guitar Hero World Tour
Aside from just hitting the buttons to match colors, I think a huge part of the appeal of these games is that you can be part of a band, not just somebody playing a game at home on a Saturday night. Rock Band 2 takes advantage of this by giving players the ability to not only form a band with friends at close range, but to join with anybody online. This, for me, is a huge factor as the people online can’t see you dancing around in your PJs while playing We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos.
Rock Band 2 has also capitalized on the character creation factor of games, giving users the ability to make their avatar as normal or bizarre as they want it to be with everything from ripped jeans to a Viking helmet. Along those lines, users are able to register their bands online and put their custom bands into cool looking photos. They can even print out stickers and make t-shirts! (Check out yours truly rockin’ out here)
![Games: Rock Band 2](http://www.rockband.com/img/2976740/422" "Games: Rock Band 2"){kind=small}
But what good is playing when you don’t know any of the songs? Rock Band 2 has a ton of good songs, and (whenever Nintendo gets around to it) will feature downloadable content (DLC) to allow aspiring musicians to enhance their library even further.
The only fault I’d say (if anything) this game is lacking compared to Guitar hero is the ‘oddity’ factor. This is just playing songs, where as in Guitar hero there are ‘battles’ where you can throw off your enemy and random encores through out the game. It makes it good to spice up. Rock Band does this with ‘benefit shows’ and ‘TV recordings’, but the game play is still just playing the songs. It would be nice to see a mode to make it a little more interesting in Rock Band 3. (I have picked up another musical game today completely based around being strange, keep an eye out for a review)
So are any of you rock legends? Let me know in the comments below, maybe we can do some face melting some time. Rock on!
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