Genre: Rhythm
Year: 2008
Developed by: Harmonix
Published by: MTV Games
Platforms: XBOX 360, PS2, PS3, Wii
#98
Feeling Like: HELLO, 1138 VIEW STREET!!
I’ve mentioned on the 500 many times that our gaming sessions on King St. probably knocked my GPA down half a point. Super Smash Bros. Melee, Shadow of the Colossus, Guitar Hero 2 and both Baten Kaitos games swallowed an enormous amount of joyous, yet precious time. It may have taken Lipsit, Dave R, Randy, Danimal and I five years to graduate but graduate we did. D’s get degrees!
I can thank my lucky stars that Rock Band and Rock Band 2 didn’t release a year or two earlier. The allure would have been so strong, I’m convinced I would’ve needed a sixth year.
I’m defying my usual opinion about rejecting the “one entry per franchise”. I usually scoff at that for a number of reasons. Primarily, with 500 spots, there’s more than enough room for everybody and two, sequels are DIFFERENT GAMES! I don’t need to adhere to any SEO bullshit, nobody is reading this save for a few esteemed friends so I don’t feel any pressure to “give the fans lots to talk about.” It’s not my fault that Marios, Zeldas and Final Fantasies have multiple masterpieces among them.
However, Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Rock Band 3, and Rock Band 4 are essentially the same and it doesn’t make any sense to differentiate them. I only really dug into the first two anyway, but Rock Band 2 was the best in my experience so it gets spot #98.
It’s a genius concept, and I do mean genius. You take the rhythm gameplay of a Guitar Hero and you include other instruments, including a karaoke style microphone for the singer. You know, like a band!
I got more non-gamers to play this than I did with Wii Sports. There’s no unifying force on the planet like music. Everybody likes music. I can’t play an instrument to save my life and know nothing about pitch, or tone, or timing and I like music. I got my family to play, out of town visitors, drunk party-goers (ok, that’s not much of a feat – drunk people love karaoke more than alcohol) and even the cast of Enchanted April. If you haven’t got a pair of British women in their 70s to sing ACDC, you haven’t lived.
Dob and I bought the game immediately when Peter and Samantha at Neverblue showed me how much fun it could be. I’ll never forget this, we got it at Future Shop on Cloverdale, which has since turned into a HomeSense. Good! Fuck Future Shop! They offered us a warranty on the instruments, since we heard the drums and guitar controllers broke often. We caved, stupidly.
Well, the drum pedal broke after a month or so. We brought the warranty back and nope! No extra drum pedal for us, or compensation. Nothing. It was a harsh, but fair lesson; never buy the goddamn warranty. The staff couldn’t even tell us what the warranty covered in the first place. Can we at least get the warranty refunded? Absolutely not. Get out.
Dobbo then ordered a custom drum pedal (metal, instead of plastic) which endured the remaining years we obsessed over Rock Band 2. Dob and I always finished a session with Green Grass and High Tides, by the Outlaws. It’s a perfect southern rock epic. Way better than Freebird. It’s hard as nails, it kicks every kind of ass you can think of, it has challenging parts for the whole group and it’s nearly ten minutes long. Regardless of how long we’d be playing, or if we had to work in the morning, we had to finish with this song. Whenever I hear it on the radio, I still think of Dob crushing the drums to my right in our first apartment as I lean over for double points and try to perfect the solo.
I can’t sing a lick. I can fake a few notes due to my theatre background, but that’s about it. I only ever tried to play an instrument once (clarinet) and that lasted about a month before I realized I hated it. I’m not the best person to take to a concert – I’m impatient, I hate encores and I still don’t understand the concept of an opening act. I’m about as lame a music fan as you can get. But Rock Band 2 was about as close as I got to “getting it”. Surrounded by friends of all ages and skill levels, we all reveled in classic rock songs while playing and singing. Poorly, but who cares? The music is terrific, hitting the notes feels good every time, you can customize difficulty per entrant so there’s no risk of frustration. This is the top rhythm game on the 500 for a reason and while the plastic controllers eventually turned into lifeless closet fodder and the world moved on from Rock Band, for a time Harmonix was literally the world’s biggest producer of drum sticks. Not many developers have that kind of claim to fame.
The 500 