Games of the decade: Rock Band

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Rock Band

(2007, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3; 2008, Wii)

Rock Band 2

(2008, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and Wii)

Forget the Wii. For mass appeal, nothing beats Rock Band. And it's got longevity, too, thanks to a forward-thinking business model that ensures several new tracks to download every week. Rock Band is so interesting from a technical and business standpoint that it would be easy to forget to mention the real reason it's such a phenomenon: it's the most fun freaking thing in the world.

Look, Guitar Hero was incredible. I will never forget what it felt like the first time I played that game. That's not the same sensation I got when I first tried Rock Band, where I knew what to expect. But Rock Band has so much more to offer. The satisfaction of reaching expert difficulty on the drums was much deeper than it was for guitar, because, damn it, it really was like playing the drums! The singing component opened the game up to players who felt uncomfortable trying to handle the game controllers, even as user-friendly as they were.

And the tracklists are just great. Money talks, and the massive commercial success of Guitar Hero paved the way for more songs and more master tracks. Here's another place where Rock Band and Guitar Hero diverge: while GH pursued chart-toppers, Rock Band went for quality, showing what Iroquois Pliskin called "a curatorial esteem for musicianship above other factors." I have gotten into more new bands thanks to Rock Band than at any time since college. The game has made me appreciate classic bands I'd overlooked, while introducing me to current artists I might never have heard of.

More important, it has made me a more active listener of music. Used to be that I mostly heard whatever was more prominent in the mix, the singer's voice or a guitar solo. Now I can pick out bass lines, and understand drum parts. In the course of listening to a song I can dissect it and put it back together again. This is an ability I've never had before. When I hear people warning that music games are eroding our appreciation of music, I have to laugh. It's exactly the opposite.

More on Rock Band:

• Songs I'd like to see in Rock Band, YouTube edition
• I must be holding the drumsticks wrong
• Rock Band 2's lockbox
• Beat not happening
• Let there be rock
• Rock Band 2: Why now?
  

The Year in Review: The Best Games of 2008

Above: This is the one.
(Note to Harmonix: "This Is the One" would make excellent DLC.)

We're wrapping up our recap of the year that was. Today: the best games of 2008.

If you want to read the blurbs, you'll have to read the feature at thephoenix.com. But for discussion, here's my list of the top 10 of 2008:

1. Rock Band 2
2. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
3. Braid
4. Far Cry 2
5. Left 4 Dead
6. Fallout 3
   
7. No More Heroes
8. Grand Theft Auto IV
9. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
10. Yakuza 2
    

A couple things should go without saying. First, yes, I am aware these were my favorite games of the year and not objectively the best. Second, there were more than a few 2008 releases that I missed, although thanks to my cram session I think Fable 2 might be the only serious contender there. But who knows, maybe I would have loved something that got tepid reviews elsewhere, like The Force Unleashed.

I do feel that 2007 was a much better year for games overall. Not that it matters what the calendar says. You could reframe the debate and come out with a much different-looking list, as Iroquois Pliskin does in suggesting that video games completed the Tiger Slam from August 2007 through August 2008. What the heck -- we all enjoy these year-end lists, even if bitching about them is also fashionable. It's nice to take a minute and reflect on what we already have, before rushing headlong onto the next thing. Isn't that what the holidays are all about?

With that, I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

(Posting is likely to be light until January 5.)

The Year in Review: Year-End Superlatives

Above: A winner is you, everyone.

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: year-end superlatives.

Today, we're handing out accolades to the games, systems, and people who made the year so interesting.

Welcome Trend: Downloadable Content for Consoles

Downloadable content is nothing new, but 2008 was the year it matured. If you wanted to play the most interesting and innovative games, you had to download them. The Wii finally branched out from Virtual Console re-hashes and offered original content like the charming LostWinds, the much-loved World of Goo, and Mega Man 9, which I couldn't in good conscience have played on any other system. Sony continued to quietly turn the PlayStation Network into a high-end boutique with games like PixelJunk Eden, Echochrome, and Wipeout HD. And, of course, Xbox Live Arcade was the videogame equivalent of the 1927 Yankees when they released Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, Braid, Bionic Commando, and Castle Crashers all in one month's time.

Noble Failure of the Year: Mirror's Edge

But we're not talking about this anymore.

PR Knucklehead of the Year: Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard

As quoted in MTV Multiplayer:

The games Activision Blizzard didn’t pick up, he said, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises. … I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus… on the products that have those attributes and characteristics, the products that we know [that] if we release them today, we’ll be working on them 10 years from now.”

Not that it's anything we didn't know already, but usually they're a bit more tactful than that. Get ready for more awful Guitar Hero games, everybody!

On the other hand, maybe we should be giving this guy points for honesty.

The Donut Hole Award: Fairway Solitaire

Ineligible for this year's top 10 list because it was a 2007 release, and left out of last year's because I didn't play it in time, Fairway Solitaire was nevertheless one of the most fun and addictive games to come down the pike in quite some time. You really need to try this one. I guarantee that the 60-minute demo will convince you to buy the full game.

Game Blog of the Year: Hit Self-Destruct

Put simply, nobody else I know of is doing what Duncan Fyfe is doing at Hit Self-Destruct. He's a superb writer, whose narrative approach to writing about games is insightful and often very funny. He can take a subject like the old practice of naming your save files and make it sound both wistful and hilarious, while still making a good point about the player's role as co-author of the gameplay experience.

Publisher of the Year: Microsoft Game Studios

I say this not because of its major console releases, although Gears 2 was very good and an awful lot of people seemed to love Fable 2. In a year when Xbox Live Arcade beat the doors down, Microsoft deserves a little love. They published Braid and Castle Crashers, both independent productions made with a lot of love by their creators. Surely these weren't massive expenditures, but it still shows their appreciation for a creative vision. (Bonus points: Microsoft even put up with Dennis Dyack, which is prize-worthy all on its own.)

Developer of the Year: Harmonix

Rock Band and its sequel are both spectacular right on the disc, but Harmonix is special because of its commitment to supporting their games after its retail release. The breadth and quality -- not to mention the value -- of Rock Band's ever-expanding DLC is staggering. This company treats its property, and its customers, with care and respect.

Console of the Year: Xbox 360

Hey, didn't the Xbox 360 win this last year? Yep, well, there was no clear alternative for 2008. The Wii phenomenon is well beyond the limits of my understanding at this point, but a same-old, same-old sequel and a fitness trainer are not what I'm looking for out of my game console. The PS3 did better for itself than in years past, but its biggest exclusive title was a massive disappointment. Even the 360's exclusives weren't quite as great as in years past, but it did have more of them, and better, too. It continues to be the system you've got to have if you self-identify as a serious gamer.

(Oh hey, remember when the most consistently innovative games were coming out for the Nintendo DS? What happened there?)

Monday: 2008 honorable mentions.

Mopping up with Guitar Hero: World Tour

Above: That red ring means the pad is broken.

It wasn't specifically part of my quest to catch up on a few noteworthy releases before the year is up, but recently I had the chance to try out Guitar Hero: World Tour. My love for Rock Band is well documented, as is my recent antipathy for Guitar Hero, but I tried to approach World Tour with an unjaundiced eye. Believe me when I say I do not feel personally gratified for having witnessed -- and even participated in -- the demise of gaming's once most unimpeachable brands.

From what I can tell in one short session, World Tour seems all right -- if not immediately distinguishable from Rock Band. I was most interested in comparing Red Octane's drumkit to Harmonix's. The cymbal placement, surprisingly, made a big difference. I didn't love the feel of the cymbals themselves -- they're just rigid pieces of plastic. They don't swing freely after hits like real cymbals do. But their location above the pads felt just right, and having to cross my right hand over my left to ride a cymbal was perfect.

The kick pedal, though, was much worse. There felt like a centimeter's worth of difference between the up position and the down position. When I first sat down and tried it, I had to ask its owner if it was jammed. No, she assured me, it's just like that. I'm no drummer myself, but we had a set in my house when I was a kid, and one thing I remember about the bass pedal was that it was heavy and complicated, with joints and counterweights all over the place. Rock Band's springier pedal comes much closer to approximating that feeling than Guitar Hero's.

If those were the only differences between them, I'd be tempted to call it a push. Both of those were things you could get used to, no matter which kit you were using. But I've read that lots of World Tour users have had trouble with the pad sensitivity, and this was definitely the case for me. The red pad -- which, as in Rock Band, functions as the all-important snare -- only seemed to be registering hits about half the time. I couldn't tell if it was my placement or my velocity, but I found myself bashing the sticks down as hard as I could to try to get it to take. That led to less bounceback, and worse drumming. Without being able to compare anything else about the two games, Rock Band wins by TKO.

By the way, given that the Rock Band kit now supports third-party cymbal peripherals, not to mention the altogether more real Ion drum kit, the one advantage the World Tour kit has over it is wiped out, assuming you're willing to spend the money. And I am willing to do that? Good god no.

Confabulous

Above: Leigh Alexander, right, defends Princess Debut to a skeptical Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott, left and center.

I had the pleasure of joining Leigh Alexander as a guest on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, as part of Michael Abbott's new "Gamers Confab" roundtable discussions. We covered quite a few topics, including what we're playing now (Rock Band 2 ftw), the difficulty of keeping up with all the fall releases, the desirability of keeping up with all the fall releases, and the state of the survival horror genre. That last subject takes up about the second half of the conversation. We talked about Dead Space and Silent Hill specifically, with room to talk about classics of the genre, and what the hell makes a game scary, anyway.

I thought we had some pretty interesting things to say, while covering a lot of ground. Mostly it was nice to have the discussion with live people, as these are topics I never discuss with anybody in real life. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and shoot the shit about these subjects, without all the editing and hard work of a good blog post. You sort of get the impression, listening to the podcast, that we all felt that way.

Have a listen, won't you?

Midweek link love

I'm embargoed from talking about Dead Space until Monday,* which is a shame, because there's a lot I would like to say about it. And while I'd like to continue to bore you with the details of my unstoppable rise to drumming dominance in Rock Band 2, I've probably beaten that drum to death, too.

(Okay, quick digression: I'm working my way up the challenge mode on hard difficulty. I can't believe it, but after the first three tiers, I'm starting to feel downright proficient. Syncopation isn't taking me by surprise. Relatively fast rolls on the snare are nothing. I see every reason to be overconfident at this point. "Painkiller," here I come!)

So instead of all that, how about a brief link dump?

-This is why it's good to check your referrer logs. I had a couple of hits in there from a site called PixelVixen707, which I highly recommend you check out. Rachel's newly posted review of Fracture is much more entertaining than it sounds like the game was. Great stuff.

-Mike Walbridge has been on a tear lately. His write-up of Mega Man 9 is an insightful look at the game that makes a few points I haven't seen elsewhere. Mike argues that MM9 is much more forward-looking than anybody gives it credit for. I can't disagree, and yet it was the retro elements that were responsible both for what I liked and what I disliked about the game. (My review should be up shortly.)

-Hit Self-Destruct may often qualify as "brilliant," such as in this post about whether Hideo Kojima needs an editor. I was disappointed to learn that Insult Swordfighting shows up on the second page of Google results for the phrase "Kojima needs an editor." Here's hoping this post boosts my ranking!

-Iroquois Pliskin wrote a nice look at Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Sometimes there's an advantage in reviewing a game well after its release, because you're not swept up in the excitement of its newness. You can talk about what really interests you without feeling the pressure to condense the entire game into one easily digestable paragraph. (By the way, I thought my own post about Call of Duty 4 made some similar points.)

*Is "embargoed from" accurate? I don't have any idea what the proper usage is here.

I must be holding the drumsticks wrong

Yesterday, this bruise appeared on my hand and wrist:

Above: Now that's just gross

I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I'd done. I hadn't fallen, hadn't tried to catch anything heavy, hadn't smacked my forehead in response to idiocy. And yes, it does hurt a little, particularly on the bone right where the wrist meets the hand. There's only one thing it could possibly be.

It's got to be the drumsticks.

What else was I doing all weekend? Just drumming my brains out in Rock Band 2.

(This includes completing "Give It Away," btw, and nearly five-starring it. I was feeling confident until "We Got the Beat" added 10 times as many kick drums as anything else I'd played to that point.)

That still doesn't explain the bruise to my satisfaction. It's not like I've got the sticks in a death grip, pounding away on the skins as though they'd killed my parents. I hold the sticks pretty loosely between my thumb and forefinger. I hit the pads lightly, for fear of annoying the neighbors. There's just no way I'm rocking hard enough to cause bruising. But what else could it be?

Above: One more look

Not that mere injury will keep me from continuing to rock out. Rick Allen lost an arm and kept playing the drums. What kind of a wuss would I be to let a bruise stop me?

Beat not happening

Above: Livin' the dream

Seems like it's always two steps forward and one step back in Rock Band 2. I'd mentioned recently that I seemed to be stuck between medium and hard difficulty on the drums. At this point, drumming on medium is almost boring -- which is not to suggest that I'm hitting 100% on most songs, just that I feel like I've got a handle on it and I'm ready for something new.

On my first attempt at increasing the difficulty, I attempted challenge mode on hard difficulty. Did all right for the first couple of songs, and then got trounced by "Give It Away," making it perhaps 20% of the way through the song before failing out. I retreated back to medium.

Last night, I quickplayed a few more songs on hard, and found to my suprise that I was owning them. During "Go Your Own Way," I couldn't believe my limbs were actually keeping up. I felt like they were doing all the work on their own, with my brain acting as a spectator. I earned five stars. That was also the case on a few other of the easier songs. Flush with confidence, I returned to my saved challenge game and restarted "Give It Away."

Well, this time I only failed after about 40%. There is a fundamental conceptual shift from the beats I've been playing succesfully, and the beat in "Give It Away." It's as hard as moving to hard mode on the guitar for the first time, when you have to learn to shift your hand up and down the neck. Instead of being iteratively more difficult, it requires you to learn an all-new mechanic. That's where the challenge and the fun both come from.

I don't know the terminology -- maybe Dan Bruno can help with this -- but the problem I'm having is that "Give It Away" starts to insert the bass drum in between hits on the pads. Other songs have done this, too, even on medium difficulty, but they haven't tripped me up in the same way. Usually that's because you at least ride one of the pads the whole way. Here, you ride the blue pad most of the time, except for one hit where the bass pedal takes its place. You sandwich that kick between two other beats: the blue pad by itself, and then the blue and red pad simultaneously. I can't make this work in my head. Playing at 80% speed in practice mode helped a little.

No doubt I'll get past this, sooner than later. That's how these games usually go. By Monday I'll probably be talking about how I ripped through several tiers of songs on hard mode. At least, that's the plan. But this is the difference between difficulty that entices and difficulty that discourages. Rock Band 2 gives you endless avenues for improvement, while dangling the carrot right in front of you. When I say that Mega Man 9 demonstrates, more than anything, how much games have changed, this contrast is what I'm talking about. Games today are your friends.

Let there be rock

My review of Rock Band 2 is up now at thephoenix.com -- and while it's still a 360 exclusive, at that!

It's a very positive review, and yet I think my enthusiasm for the game still doesn't come through all the way. I've given two other games a higher rating this year (Crisis Core and Braid got a 9.5; this got a 9.0), and yet I'd be hard pressed to say this isn't actually my game of the year so far. I fell into the trap of thinking that because it's not so different from its predecessor, that must be a strike against it. Well, it isn't. This game rocks.

That was driven home for me when I invited my brother over to play. He'd been a big fan of the first two Guitar Hero games, but had never played Rock Band. Sure, I'd been enjoying the hell out of it, especially since I'd never owned the original. But to see the reaction of someone who'd never played the drums before at all reminded me how much freaking fun it is. There's still no other way to have such an experience, unless you're actually in a band. Playing Rock Band 2 ought to be mandatory.

Some more Rock Band 2 impressions

The quirks of World Tour mode are bugging me less as I've gone along, and some commenters were correct that Challenge mode seems to do exactly what I wished World Tour did, presenting chunks of songs in increasingly difficult tiers. I still think you shouldn't have to unlock songs if you want to play them with your friends, but we're stuck with that for now.

Otherwise, the gameplay is just terrific. My drum skills are at the point where medium difficulty is a little too easy, and hard difficulty is just about within my range. It seems like Harmonix has calibrated the difficulty levels exactly -- the toughest songs on medium seem about equal to the easiest songs on hard. It's a simple and logical progression for the low-talent drummer. (By the way, I tried using the drum trainer and it seems like it's helpful, but less helpful than learning those same patterns in the context of songs you know.)

I had my doubts about whether online play would work for this game. Not because of the precise timing required -- latency was probably a bigger issue for the original Halo than it is here -- but because I thought at least half the fun of playing Rock Band is doing so with other people in the room. That's still the optimal setup, but playing with friends online turned out to be a blast. I think it helped that we both had avatars that looked (somewhat) like ourselves.

There are so many songs available that it's hard to criticize what's there. It got easier to skip some of the worse songs as I progressed through World Tour. And there are some real gems, too. It's nice to finally see the Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. get their due in a game like this. I might have picked a different AC/DC song, but other than Led Zeppelin there is no band that needed to be in the game more. And one day I will tell you about the time I played the solo at the end of "Alive," and in the process became a being of pure light.

Without having the original drums handy, I can't tell if the new ones are any quieter. They still seem loud, but it's more of a rubbery thud than the high-pitched clacking I seem to remember from the first kit. So far, the neighbors haven't complained. These drums are supposedly "velocity sensitive," and I'm wondering how good a drummer you need to be for that to matter at all. I'm still at the point where I accidentally miss the green pad when it comes up. The kick pedal still slides back and forth along its bar, too. I need to appropriate the solution my friend Pat came up with and clamp it in place.

Finally, that gorgeous guitar. Without question, it's the best-looking fake plastic guitar controller I've seen, and at this point I've seen more than I ever expected to. Feels great, too. The problem with the original Rock Band guitar was the mushy feel of the strum bar, compared to the precise "click" you got from the Guitar Hero axe. You still don't get that click, but the edges of the strum bar's range feel more solid this time. It's easier to play those fast strumming sections purely by feel. Initially, I also had trouble shifting up and down the neck without spaces in between the fret buttons to guide me, but as I've gotten used to it I think this design actually makes it easier to slide back and forth quickly.

It is still hard to escape the feeling that this isn't exactly a full-fledged sequel, and more of a spit-and-polish, but I had that same initial impression about Guitar Hero II and look how that turned out.

Rock Band 2's lockbox

One of the problems with going away for a week is that you may return to find somebody has already said what you wanted to say about Rock Band 2. That Variety post isn't all of what I wanted to say about the game, but it's an important point that's been bugging me since I started playing Rock Band 2: Why do I have to unlock the songs I really want to play?

I should say first that I'm not sure whether Tour mode is any different, better, or worse than it was in the first game. I've only played multiplayer quickplay in the original. But Tour mode in the sequel strikes me as curious. Progression in Guitar Hero games was always logical, if a little boring. Complete a group of easy songs, then move on to a group of slightly harder songs, and repeat until finished. Here, the conceit is that you are actually in a touring rock band, and you have to travel around the country earning fans and money. As a result, it's actually quite difficult to know what you've already unlocked, and what there is to unlock next.

The menus are tough to navigate in tour mode. Each city has three venues, and each venue has multi-song setlists in addition to single-song selections. New venues and new setlists are marked as such only temporarily. I am continually finding things I haven't completed only by taking the time to scrounge around. This could have been organized better. I know the flat list of quickplay mode is unexciting, but, damn it, it works.

Beyond that, the structure of Tour mode means that you have to play some songs multiple times before you earn enough stars to unlock new stuff. I'm having to play songs I don't like repeatedly in order to earn enough stars to unlock some more songs I do like. I suppose the "mystery setlists" are just random, but it's almost as though the game knows I don't want to hear "Conventional Lover" again as long as I live, and has a sadistic streak.

The thing is, in practice I don't really mind having to play everything one time in order to unlock other stuff. I don't think it's necessary in a game of this type, but I'm willing to go with it when it's as simple as it is in the Guitar Hero games. But in Rock Band 2, there are levels of needless complexity I just don't care to master. I seem to be earning virtual fans with each successful show, but so what? I just want to play some music.

Far be it from me to impute selfish motives to the people who made an otherwise fantastic game, but here's what I think happened: Harmonix put the time and effort into making this robust, detailed Tour mode with its endless features and leaderboard options. Whether or not they discovered in testing that many players didn't care about this mode, they didn't want to see their efforts go to waste, so they decided to force everyone to grapple with Tour mode anyway -- even though most people who play the game want to dive right into the rocking, accoutrements be damned.

Which is not to say that Tour mode is a total bust for the solo player. There is some sense in making more of a "game" for the single-player mode. Nor am I yet to the point of using a code to unlock everything on the disc. For the multiplayer, though, it's just nonsensical to hide the game's best songs from the users. That's not the kind of game Rock Band is.

This does not assuage my fears

Chris Dahlen got some hands-on time with Rock Band 2 for the AV Club. Among his terrifying findings (all direct quotes):

• Rock Band 2 is an expansion, not a reinvention.
• In the band world tour... you'll have more variables to play with. You can hire staff – promoters, your mom – to support your band or find new gigs. A risk and reward system will complicate the business end: hire a sleezy accountant and you may clear more money from a successful gig, or you may get robbed if you underperform.
• Harmonix has skipped user-generated content for the forseeable future

None of that is encouraging -- particularly the middle part, which reminds me of all of those bloated features that found their way into the Madden games, like picking your custom player's parents, putting him through college, making him do squats, and helping him to score in double-digits on the Wonderlic.

I should say that after airing all my concerns about Rock Band 2 on Monday, I've come around somewhat. The simplest thing I didn't consider is the usefulness of the disc-only version this time around. Rock Band owners won't have to splurge to get almost all of the benefits of the new version, as they did last year. If you consider that the disc will house over 80 songs, according to Chris's article, then you're saving a bundle on song costs alone -- if, that is, you would have chosen to download all of those tracks a la carte. That's a big "if."

While I still think it's something of a kiss-off to people who bought Rock Band last year that newer, better peripherals will be available in September, ultimately it's not a dealbreaker. Even so, I still think that with the DLC spigot spewing cash into Harmonix's coffers, they would have been better off releasing these iterative improvements as updates to the original, while they toiled away on the real sequel.

One more thing about that lack of user-generated content. I'm sure that whatever Harmonix has up their sleeve regarding this "indie initiative" is going to be a positive feature. But Chris's article seems to suggest -- and Ryan Stewart's Phlog post concurs -- that the coming wave of mostly crappy Guitar Hero IV user-generated tracks is a bad thing.

Sure, most of it will be crap. That's to be expected. The sheer volume of it will ensure that, in absolute terms, much of it will also be good -- some of it surprisingly so. The best will rise to the top, just as happens on sites like YouTube, thanks to community involvement. This is a good thing. And it goes further toward democratizing music than does an exclusionary model by which, if you're some kid dicking around in his room instead of playing in a "real" band, no one thinks you could possibly create something worthwhile.

Rock Band 2: Why now?

Give me a choice between Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and I'll take the former every time. This despite the countless hours of entertainment the first two GH games gave me. That was the past. Now? Activision has ruined Guitar Hero. I don't know how to put it more plainly than that.

(Bill Harris does know how to put it more plainly, laying out in exquisite detail the destruction of the Guitar Hero brand.)

I'll grant that when Harmonix was at the GH reins, they still pinched off a stinker, but that one had "contractual obligation album" written all over it. Besides, by that point, they were hard at work on a much better game: Rock Band.

In the meantime, Activision had dished off Guitar Hero development to Neversoft, a company that knew a little something about running quality brands into the ground. (But let's be fair to Neversoft: The first several THPS games, which they created, were freakin' fantastic.)

This resulted in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, a game which was pleasant enough in its own right, but lacked the secret sauce that made its predecessors so great. Ultimately, it seemed that its developers weren't trying so much to replicate the feeling of playing these songs, but were trying to shoehorn them into a traditional skill-based gaming style, in which harder equaled better.

Most troubling was what GHIII seemed to portend. Instead of focusing on the music, the developers added features like the gimmicky boss battles, which no one enjoyed. Inevitably, the sideshow became the main attraction, and we were treated to Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Edition, which I have not played, and the full-on belly-flop of Guitar Hero: On Tour, which I have.

In the meantime, Rock Band came out and just pushed music. Each week, new tracks were available for download -- not costumes, not backgrounds, just songs. Some songs appeared in both games. In each case, the song was harder to play in Guitar Hero, and more fun to play in Rock Band.

Why?

Insult Swordfighting reader Iroqouis Pliskin actually asked the folks at Harmonix. It's not just how Harmonix draws up the note charts, although that's a big part of it. Song choice is also crucial. Their emphasis is less on pushing new, hot tracks. and instead "reflects a curatorial esteem for musicianship," in Pliskin's words. (Not that this excuses that bland new Motley Crue song.)

Strangely, with Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4 poised to do battle this fall, it's Guitar Hero that seems more innovative, and not because they're stealing Rock Band's idea (except they're putting the cymbals above the drum pads, so it's, like, totally original). No, they're including a create-a-song feature, the first really good idea the series has had since the original, and the logical next step. I don't know how well it will work, but I know I want to try it.

By contrast, Rock Band 2 will have one feature it really should have had the first time around, and everything else new has only been hinted at. Maybe you'll be able to import tracks from your iPod. Everything else seems evolutionary. Improved peripherals are fine, online World Tour is helpful, and other than that we haven't heard much. (In fact, after paging through Google Reader, I'm not even sure if I've hallucinated the online World Tour functionality.)

My question: Does any of this stuff warrant a sequel? Particularly a full-priced sequel, to be released less than a year after the original? I'm not sure I follow the logic. Rock Band's DLC is a financial juggernaut. People are quite happy to keep forking over a few bucks for new songs. Much of what Harmonix seems to be promising for the sequel could probably be implemented on the software side via downloadable updates. Improved peripherals are welcome, but they hardly seem to justify the sequel treatment as would new instruments (I'm dying for some keyboards over here).

I'm afraid Harmonix might be applying an Activision-like squeeze to their property -- releasing a new game not because the world is ready for one, but because it's another calendar year and that's just what you do, dammit. Rock Band wasn't cheap, at about $170 for the game and all its controllers. Will the sequel also cost that much? What does that say to people who bought the game last year, expecting it to serve as a platform for years to come? Yes, I'm aware that both games will likely support future DLC. But by definition, Rock Band 2 will have to have exclusive new features, no?

Harmonix has earned the benefit of the doubt several times over. It's possible, even likely, that there are some terrific surprises in store. Still, one thing I never felt when the original Rock Band was announced was even a semblance of doubt. Rock Band 2 seems like too little, too soon.