Rock Band 2

 Rocking out in your living rooms has become an activity which is made available on a yearly basis. Rock Band 2 is the latest in a long line of titles that spawned from the original Guitar Hero which sparked and revitalized rhythm game interest in North America and in Europe. Starting with initially strictly guitar based gameplay, soon the games opened up to bass and then with the original Rock Band there came drums as well as vocals. The problem with the original Rock Band on the Wii is that it was a title which was not developed with the Wii in mind; Rock Band put on a fine performance on the 360 and PS3 but the Wii version came later and neutered of any online aspect which was one of the defining reasons to own Rock Band; to be able to rock as a band with others across the world, at any time.

You don't have to worry about that issue though, since Rock Band 2 is virtually identical to its big bro console counterparts.

In Rock Band 2 you essentially get a rehash of the original but not with a couple small new features and the ability to play online in a career online with others across the world. The primary solo mode, World Tour, operates the same way as it did in the past; you go from city to city entering different venues and then playing different setlists, which can hold any number of songs (though they typically range from one song to seven.) By completing setlists you get cash and stars, and the more stars you have the more venues and the more cities get made available to you. As you progress you will gain opportunities to get additional support for you band in two different areas; transportation, and management. Steadily you can go from driving around in a beat up car to having your own jet, and slowly you go from having your mom as a manager to having one of the industry tops who helps increase the money you earn. One of the cool things about the managers is that they all have different specialties; some increase money earned, some increase fans earned, some help get more fans to attend, etc.

In addition to World Tour there is a new mode however, called Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode essentially replaces the Career mode of the original Rock Band, and in it you get a set of different challenges organized by difficulty which consist of setlists that you must complete. In order to progress to the more difficult challenges you must first pass the easier challenges, and it operates similarly to the original Rock Band's career mode in this aspect. Unlike in World Tour, you can also stop part way through a setlist and quit out while saving your progress on that setlist, so that you can come back to it later. In this case this is actually necessary in certain instances, as game DLC is incorporated into the challenges and often times you'll find challenges including upwards twenty songs.

If you're more of a competitive player then Rock Band 2 sort of has you covered. What you get on the competitive side are the same two modes that the original Rock Band had, Score Duel and Tug-of-War. Score Duel has you and your opponent playing the same song on the same difficulty, and the game is all about who gets the highest score. Tug-of-War on the other hand splits the song up into smaller portions that you and your opponent take turns playing, and whoever does better on their portions gets more of the crowd's support. This game mode is all about getting more crowd support than your opponent. There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with these game modes, but there was an oversight with difficulty selection, the difficulty is not selected until after the song is selected, and because the Wii does not have mic support it's basically a play-and-hope that your opponent plays on the same difficulty that you do. This could have been remedied by being able to search for games which operate on a specific difficulty, as is done in the Guitar Hero titles.

The game engine itself is barely changed. Notes still come down in their rectangle beings and you have to hit them as they cross a bar near the bottom of the screen. Everything works exactly as before except now there's the small introduction of hammer-on chords. Hammer-ons are smaller notes which you don't have to strum to play so long as you hit the note that came before it. Hammer-on chords are just like other hammer-ons, and really this ends up changing very little as few songs even use the hammer-on chords. However they are handy in situations where the song is chord heavy, and shifting quickly between chords. The most notable instance of these new notes' use is in the song Bodhisattva, where there are strings of chords going back and forth, all hammer-ons.

Just like the first game Rock Band 2 also offers character creation options as well as some band customization. You can change your characters hair, facial features, clothing and attitude (which defines their on-stage animations) and you have a decent variety of choices to pick from to do so. You can also give your characters tattoos, and their own band logo, but this is where the one difference between the Wii version and the 360/PS3 versions come into play. In the Wii version, you can pick only from pre-made logos to deck your character out with/to set as your band's logo. In the 360/PS3 versions, you can fully customize them by pulling from a large number of pre-made images and letters. This is a small feature to be missed however and indeed pales in comparison to all that was missed in the original Rock Band on Wii.

Absolutely none of this would really matter however if the song selection was poor. Rock Band 2 takes songs from all decades from the 60's to the 00's, featuring a myriad of artists such as Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, The Replacements, Dream Theater, Beastie Boys, Linkin Park and Paramore. There are over eighty on-disk songs, and in addition to those songs there are twenty additional, free songs available to download online through the game which includes bands such as Kyuss, Between the Buried and Me, and Chevelles. Along with these twenty free songs there are many other songs available as DLC which you can purchase typically at 200 points per song, and the catalog is ever-growing with Harmonix adding new songs every week. For as long as this title has support, the setlist is essentially never-ending.

And that will be the core reason for you to get this game. A setlist that caters to many different tastes, and additional DLC released by the week to expand on whatever your taste happens to be. These songs fit in with the lengthy World Tour mode, which can now be played online with others, offer one of the most robust rhythm game experiences currently available on consoles. This is everything that the first Rock Band should have been, and is perhaps the first truly great rhythm game available on the Wii.