http://www.1up.com/do/gameOverview?cId=3168258
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168627
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| Harmonix Announces Rock Band 2 September release to bring new songs, modes, fully backward compatible DLC. By Steve Watts, 06/30/2008  The arms race of multi-instrument music games rolls on. Though it was a safe bet that Harmonix wouldn't let Activision have the genre all to itself this fall with Guitar Hero: World Tour, it's been made official with today's announcement of Rock Band 2. The sequel will be coming to the Xbox 360 in September of this year, with versions for other platforms (presumably the PlayStation 3 and probably the Wii as well) coming later in 2008. Unlike World Tour, which is handicapped by is predecessor's focus on guitars, Rock Band 2 will play all previously-downloaded DLC and support all the current Rock Band instruments. And though your current set of plastic instruments will work fine, the company promises the new drum and guitar peripherals are both upgraded and backward compatible. What exactly those upgrades mean is a mystery for now -- maybe a five-head drum? As for game content itself, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos promises that the company has "now had the benefit of the last eight months to listen to our fans' requests and to build upon that foundation." This hopefully means some key features demanded by fans -- such as an online World Tour mode -- will be present, but we won't know for sure until more details hit. The game will be shown off at this year's E3, so expect tons of new info soon. |
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168627
Quote:
Previews: Rock Band 2 The curtain opens on their sophomore show. Guitar Hero may have started the rock-and-roll rhythm game craze, but in the eyes of many, Rock Band stole the show. Sure, someone got to play guitar, but along with that you had a bassist, drummer, and singer. Viola, the ultimate party game was born. In the ensuing months after its release, the game also set a new standard for downloadable content, not only offering a tremendous selection of titles, but incorporating the system for buying them directly into the game. In fact, it got everything so right that you had to wonder exactly what they'd do for an encore. OK, maybe everything wasn't quite perfect. At the top of the list of improvements in Rock Band 2 sits a new and improved World Tour online mode. Most importantly, yes, you can now go online and play it pretty much however you choose. Your band travels with your gamertag, not your in-game character, and for that matter band leaders are no more. You can swap players in and out and change instruments whenever you like. To go with those improvements, Rock Band 2 rolls out a new Battle of the Bands mode to give you ample encouragement to get online and play as a band -- the Harmonix team will come up with new challenges each week for bands to face off over. The prestige of getting to represent your friends list in the world competition ought to spur on some epic battles among "friends." Offline solo play is also receiving some refinements. One of the most convenient is the ability to build your own set lists in Quickplay mode. So, taking some of the newly revealed songs -- if you wanted to play a set of Everlong, Ace of Spades, and Any Way You Want It -- you could cue that group up and then when you started playing you wouldn't have to keep going back to the selection screen between each song. Also, continuing the theme of making everything more refined, the new game sports a unified song selection list in which all your content -- disc and download -- looks the same complete with album art. For the stat keepers, that's 70 tracks shipping in the new game, plus all your DLC from Rock Band, which is cross-compatible. The instruments also receive upgrades, the most noticeable being that they're all wireless. This should provide tremendous help in avoiding jam session disasters caused by tripping over the wiring to the drums when you're rocking out. As for specifics, the new drum set features softer pads with better rebound and (maybe more importantly for late-nighters) quieter response to being struck. They are also velocity sensitive, enabling the game to differentiate between you lightly tapping the ride cymbal and smacking the crash. Upgrades to the guitar are more technical with the addition of precision components into their construction, especially the strum bar and fret buttons. The new guitar also gets a small photo sensor built into its neck. When used with game's calibration program, it reads a series of flashes on the screen to perfectly sync the timing to any delay that might be caused by your display. Break the new features in Rock Band 2 down line by line like this and they appear to fill the press release for a new game adequately. Take a step back to view the game as whole and the differentiation between this and the original version seems to quickly blur. All the refinements, even the improvements to the online World Tour, fall well within what you might reasonably expect to be possible in a title update. That leaves the new instruments, which just by being wireless will probably attract plenty of sales. We'd just like to see more reasons soon for that new number on the end of the title. |
