#9: Rock Band 2

Here’s the only music game on my list.

It’s sort of sad to think of the music game genre as dead.  It’s amazing how far the genre has fallen from its perch from 4 years ago.  Every house used to have plastic guitars front and center.  Now they’re tucked in the closet.

Rock Band 2 featured a perfect blend of polish and flair to make an excellent last hurrah for the genre.

It didn’t change the best thing that RB1 had going for it, the gameplay.  But Rock Band 1 did get a few things wrong that RB2 fixed.

The character select system was overhauled to make something that actually functioned.  Thank the heavens.  I don’t know how the original made it through testing, but Harmonix realized how terrible it was and revamped it.

Harmonix added one feature into Rock Band 2 that generated a ton of positive press.  First, if you spent $5, you could upload all of your Rock Band 1 songs onto RB2.  Second, if you had bought a song on the online store in RB1, you could use it in the sequel free of charge.  It created a massive library of songs that was unprecedented in music games.  My playlist was nearing 250 songs and half were songs that I had personally picked out.

I loved my tracklist and because of that, I loved Rock Band