LogFAQs > #951589010

06. Rock Band 2 (Xbox 360, 2008)


I suspect that the presence of The Beatles: Rock Band was a surprise to many of you reading this, even knowing that I am a big fan of Rock Band, and of Harmonix more broadly, but when you get down to it, that game is built off the bones of the best game in the series: Rock Band 2.

The first Rock Band was a pretty spectacular thing in the most direct sense: it was remarkable, and a bit of a spectacle, but it was far from perfect. There were a lot of bugs and quality of life improvements that could be made. The soundtrack was good, but some of the best songs - Paranoid, Run to the Hills, Train Kept a-Rollin, Tom Sawyer - werent masters, but good-sounding imitations, as had been the case with much of GH1 and GH2s soundtracks. As Rock Band 2 came into being, we learned that most - but not all - of the songs from the first game would be exportable into RB2s library. But not Paranoid, Run to the Hills, or Enter Sandman, a master track that was lost to Activisions deal with the band for Guitar Hero: Metallica. The original Rock Band instruments? Not the most durable, as it turns out - especially the drums.

Harmonix took all these lessons to heart and corrected (almost) all of them in Rock Band 2 (a few songs, including Metallicas Battery, were not exportable to Rock Band 3, but Battery is also the only one they lost worth keeping). The setlist was bigger, and better, the instruments sturdier, the gameplay sharper and tighter, the visuals more appealing.

The secret to Rock Band 2s success - which Rock Band 3 and Lego Rock Band tried to emulate, but failed to, for reasons Ill get to in a minute - is the collection of songs they assembled for it. With the exception of a couple of the hardest songs (Bodhisattva, Shoulder to the Plow, Get Clean) and the few songs by Harmonixs in-house bands, the setlist here is basically the most karaoke friendly song that every band featured has in their catalogue.

Think about it: whether you like the bands or the songs or not, you know damn near every word to Livin on a Prayer, Down with the Sickness, One Step Closer, Spirit in the Sky, White Wedding, and so on and so on. Basically, if you have a familiarity with a given artist, you know the song they have in Rock Band 2 before you even start playing. From top to bottom of the setlist, theres basically no misses among the non-bonus tracks. Even most of the bonus tracks are great - no one saw Conventional Lover or Supreme Girl or "A Jagged Gorgeous Winter" being as good as they are. In the 84(!) songs, theres maybe 3 or 4 duds: Welcome to the Neighborhood, Souls of Black, and Visions, though the latter is at least responsible for one of the greatest RB2 videos ever (about which more later)

Oh, and somehow, this game brought into existence the presumed vaporware/development hell of Guns n Roses Chinese Democracy, whose first single, Shacklers Revenge, was released to the entire world in Rock Band 2. It is not a very good song, and frankly one of the aforementioned duds, but it says a lot about the cultural power of Rock Band in the late 2000s that perhaps the most anticipated rock song in recent memory debuted in this game.

Lego Rock Band and Rock Band 3 leaned into the idea of broadening the appeal and having every song be karaokeable, but neither has anywhere near the 90-95% hit rate that Rock Band 2 has. Im not sure any western rhythm game does. It was an impressive feat, to be sure.

On top of that, the fact that it came out at a time when the idea of video game as party game, even for non-gamers was hitting its first peak was a perfect confluence of events that led to me and my friends - even my family once in a great while - playing an absolute ton of Rock Band 2. We tried so desperately to get the Endless Setlist achievement, for playing all the songs in one session, back to back to back. We had a natural singer, a talented drummer, and me on guitar, all on expert. The song that did us in was Visions, which to this day I have never beaten on X Guitar. We tried it so many times, and if I got going okay (rare), our drummer would fatigue out and the non-sung vocals simply didnt have enough overdrive to carry us through. We paused at one point, at maybe 2 or 3 in the morning, after playing the game for god knows how many consecutive hours, to see if we could find any Youtube videos of the song to give us an idea of how other people played it, you know, maybe pick up a tip to navigate the absolutely painful guitar riff or all the blastbeats better.

We found this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdZ4t1cft4

Needless to say, it broke us. We fell on the floor laughing. Im not sure Ive ever laughed harder.

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The Thighmaster