Finally, confirmation of Rock Band 2! It’s coming in September of this year for the Xbox 360, and a little later in the year for all other platforms.

• Rock Band 2 to include new online modes, songs (Associated Press)
• Rock Band 2: The Opening Act (IGN)

Both articles are rather sparse; it sounds like the juicy stuff won’t be forthcoming until E3 the week of July 14th, later this month. Still, we do learn a few key facts:

1. Rock Band 2 will support all Rock Band 1 downloadable content. This is what everyone was hoping, so glad to hear it confirmed. Let the Rock Band DLC content buying sprees continue!
2. Improved (but still 100% compatible) versions of the guitar and drums will be released with Rock Band 2. Lots of room for improvement here!
3. 80 tracks of original music on the game disc

The new guitar looks basically the same to me. I was not at all fan of the old strat, so I remain unconvinced.

It sounds like they’re focusing on polishing the overall experience. Rock Band was such a fundamentally great game that I think this is exactly the right approach:

Rock Band 2 takes all the lessons we’ve learned from making a multi-instrument music game, addresses them, then adds some amazing new ways for you to experience your music library that have never been seen in a music game before. We’ve been scouring forums and parties everywhere for what people liked and didn’t like, and I’m pretty confident we’ve addressed everything I’ve heard people ask for.

We’ve taken almost everything people have asked for in Rock Band and added it to Rock Band 2, as well as including some “first time ever” features.

There are a few intriguing hints of deeper changes to gameplay, too:

… several new modes that not only provide new ways for you to experience your music library, but also new ways for you to transition from Expert to real instruments.

I’m glad to hear they’re expanding play options. In Rock Band 1, once you finish the World Tour, Quickplay is an unsatisfying way to experience the game. There’s no way to even save your high scores in Quickplay, except in the oddball PS2 and Wii versions of Rock Band.

A leaked vidcap screenshot of Rock Band 2 also revealed a few songs from the game’s tracklist:

• Dream Theater - Panic Attack
• System of a Down - Chop Suey
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Give It Away
• Foo Fighters - Everlong
• Kim Wilde - Kids in America
• Motörhead - Ace of Spades
• Cheap Trick - Hello There
• Journey - Any Way You Want It
• The Who - Pinball Wizard
• Bad Religion - Sorrow

There are strong rumors that this will be the first rhythm game with an AC/DC track in it, as well.

Several good previews of Guitar Hero World Tour emerged this weekend:

1. IGN Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
2. GameSpy Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
3. GameSpot Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

I highly recommend reading the IGN article as it had the best information, but I’ll summarize so you don’t have to.

The biggest news was probably the first detailed pictures of the new guitar! It’s a fairly substantial upgrade over the Les Paul, which was already excellent.

It’s definitely larger than previous fake plastic guitars — probably a nod to the Rock Band Stratocaster, which more accurately mimics the size of a real guitar.

It also contains a touch-sensitive pad on the neck!

What will this be used for? GameSpy’s Sluggo explains:

The big new addition is what Neversoft is calling the “touch strip.” Essentially, it’s a touch-sensitive section of the guitar neck right next to the standard, multicolored buttons. The touch strip doesn’t stand out from the rest of the neck, so you might not even realize it’s there if you’re not familiar with your new hardware. What this touch strip does is act as a multipurpose tool for several inputs and effects. One use is finger-tapping guitar solos, but you can also swipe your finger along it, side-to-side, to mess with the sustain on your held notes and provide a sound very different from the whammy bar. You can also use it to affect the synth sounds during songs with heavy keyboard usage.

The start/select and star power buttons have been moved to the “bridge” of the guitar along with a new rectangular “star power activation” button. It not only looks more authentic, you can palm the star power button and activate while playing, if you’re not into the whole “tilt the guitar up” thing.

The Xbox button is also reimagined as a knob, again, for a more authentic feel.

The faceplates and detachable neck are clearly preserved, from what I can see of the photo. I am a fan of the detachable neck, even though it can cause button connectivity issues, because it allows us to have custom faceplates. Here’s hoping they’ve redesigned the neck connection to be more reliable.

The microphone is unremarkable. Nothing to report there; your typical USB handheld microphone. It sure would be nice if the microphone was wireless. It’d also be nice if it had built in controller functions, so the vocalist didn’t have to locate a controller every time he or she wants to make a selection. But not this time, unfortunately!

A few new bits of information on the drums:

• The cymbal “pie slices” can be rotated and repositioned to taste.
• To activate star power on drums, hit the yellow and orange cymbal at the same time.
• Drum heads are 8 inches, slightly larger than the 7 inches of Rock Band drums.
• Drums have a silicone surface, so they’re (reasonably) quiet right out of the box; no modifications required.
• Wireless! Yay!
• Speed sensitive; slam and you get a loud note. Tap and you get a soft note. This will make drumming much more expressive.

On to the game itself:

• Brings back all the characters from Guitar Hero II, in addition to the ones featured in Guitar Hero III — hello Clive and Pandora!
• Added sixth bass note on top of the five colored buttons; you can strum with no buttons held for an “open strum”. This should make playing bass more interesting, I hope.
• Five careers: Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Band.
• Boss battles have been restructured as call and response, and their role minimized in the main game. Thank goodness they listened to the criticism on that one. Boss battles in Guitar Hero III were universally hated by most gamers, including me.
• New “Beginner” difficulty that’s even easier than easy, suitable for children or total neophytes. This’ll be a nice option for parties and people who protest they can’t possibly play well enough to join in.
• If you get stuck on a song in the career mode, you can downgrade your skill level without restarting the whole career. Nice.
• Quickplay will now earn you cash and bonuses for your character, as long as you’re logged in. Even more reason to practice!
• You can create song sets as “gigs” of up to seven songs for your band, rather than being kicked back to the song select screen after each song.

There’s also a very complex music studio for creating your own “songs”, minus vocals. I applaud the effort, and it looks impressively complex, but I’m skeptical this will be much more than a fairly involved toy. I doubt it will result in anything musically interesting for the average player. I’m much more interested in a strong collection of DLC.

Based on these previews I’m really looking forward to Guitar Hero World Tour. Many of the features they’ve announced are features people have been clamoring for in the still-unannounced Rock Band 2.

In particular, the hardware looks outstanding, and it exploits the one big weakness of Rock Band — the sub-par, flaky guitar and drum hardware. Somehow, I’m doubting Rock Band 2 will include any new hardware, so the Guitar Hero franchise appears to be solidly extending its lead in this area.

If you enjoy Rock Band’s World Tour mode, eventually you’ll get around to the fabled Endless Setlist.

The Endless Setlist is a gig in Moscow. But not just any gig. This gig is 58 songs in length — that’s right, fifty-eight songs!

In order to complete this gig, you must play all 58 songs included with Rock Band — at medium difficulty or higher — without powering down your console or exiting from the gig.

Sure, any band can enter the Hall of Fame in World Tour. But few bands have the intestinal fortitude to complete the grueling Endless Setlist. It is the ultimate gig, the pinnacle of World Tour mode.

(Pro tip: be very, very careful when navigating the menus if your band foolishly chooses to embark upon the Endless Setlist! The disconnected controller menu is particularly dangerous since it contains only two menu items, one of which will exit you from the setlist. Also remember that the Xbox has a dashboard setting to automatically power off after some hours of inactivity. We kept our Xbox running overnight after completing 40 songs, so as to complete the rest in the morning, then woke up to find it had powered itself off. So we had to start over from the beginning, and our 58 song set was really more like a 98 song set. Sigh.)

What do you get for all that effort? A lot of cash (we got around $32,000), a few new fans, and an achievement:

	10	Vinyl Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Medium. requires 600 stars; play all 58 set songs, and the game cannot be saved, only paused thus “endless”
	20	Gold Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Hard.
	25	Platinum Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Expert.

You’ll get a nice message about how you’ve achieved Legendary Status and your in-game icons will be upgraded to a different (and cooler) visual style to represent the difficulty your band completed the endless setlist on — either platinum, gold, or vinyl.

Oh yes, and if the endless setlist is the last gig in Moscow, you’ll also get the “Big in Moscow” achievement for an additional 10 gamerpoints. And a crappy t-shirt of Rasputin for your character.

Our band Jooky! just completed the endless setlist on hard guitar and hard drums, and I reckon it takes about 4 1/2 hours in total if you don’t take any breaks. We did it in three sessions, with about an hour break in between.

The songs are mostly in difficulty order, but not quite. Here’s the actual Endless Setlist:

1. 29 Fingers
2. Say it Aint So
3. In Bloom
4. I Think I’m Paranoid
5. The Time we had
6. Mississippi Queen
7. Here It Goes Again
8. Creep
9. Blood Doll
10. Wave of Mutilation
11. Should I Stay or Should I Go
12. Maps
13. Gimme Shelter
14. Brainpower
15. Sabotage
16. Blitzkrieg Bop
17. Celebrity Skin
18. I’m So Sick
19. When We Were Young
20. Black Hole Sun
21. Wanted Dead or Alive
22. Learn to Fly
23. Seven
24. Orange Crush
25. Main Offender
26. The Hand That Feeds
27. Day Late, Dollar Short
28. Epic
29. Suffragette City
30. Ballroom Blitz
31. Dead On Arrival
32. Pleasure
33. Train Kept a Rollin
34. Are You Gonna Be My Girl
35. Paranoid
36. Timmy & the Lords of the Underworld
37. Welcome Home
38. Go With The Flow
39. Dani California
40. Nightmare
41. Don’t Fear the Reaper
42. Reptilia
43. Electric Version
44. Vasoline
45. Detroit Rock City
46. Can’t Let Go
47. Next to You
48. Cherub Rock
49. Tom Sawyer
50. Enter Sandman
51. Green Grass and High Tides
52. Outside
53. Highway Star
54. Foreplay/Long Time
55. Flirtin With Disaster
56. I Get By
57. Run To The Hills
58. Won’t Get Fooled Again

If you’re frightened after scrolling this far, you should be. It takes a special kind of crazy to complete the Endless Setlist.

I suppose it was inevitable — someone achieved a perfect score on the most difficult song in Guitar Hero III, Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames”, on Expert difficulty.

It’s an astonishing 3,722 note streak for a final score of 987,786!

I can’t even finish the Expert campaign in Guitar Hero III due to rampant skill level inflation in the series, and I’d have no hope whatsoever of completing “Through the Fire and Flames”, which is absurdly difficult.

Kudos to iamchris4life!

I hope this doesn’t result in even more skill inflation in future installments of Guitar Hero. I sort of wish they’d add a new skill level beyond Expert for the ScoreHero crowd, something like “Insane” or “Professional” skill level, rather than constantly moving the Expert goalposts.

After writing about The Fake Plastic Rock Stage Experience, I immersed myself in the strange, fascinating world of stage lighting effects.

I found out two things that drove me to buy my own stage lights:

1. Many stage lights are sound activated and include their own embedded microphones, so they “just work” out of the box.
2. There’s an emerging set of DJ lights that use low-power LEDs instead of hot, dangerous 100 or 200 watt bulbs.

That’s a perfect combination for our rock band room! No messy cables (other than the power cable), no extra heat, and it will automatically sync up to whatever music we’re playing. I couldn’t resist!

I finally settled on the American DJ LED Color Changing Light Bar. Here’s a short video clip I recorded of it in action to some music:

There are two sound activated modes:

1. Mode 1 switches between all the available colors
2. Mode 2 has 40 different “programs”, with lots of variety. You’re seeing one of those programs in the above video.

As you can see it’s plenty bright — almost too bright for our smallish room with the projector! Fortunately, I can select some of the less bright sound activated modes so it doesn’t overwhelm the video screen. It’s also programmable via the DMX-512 programming standard, though I’m not sure I’ll ever bother because the sound activated modes work so well.

It includes convenient wall mounts, but it also has large hand screws on each side so you can quickly unscrew it and take it to your next fake plastic rock “gig” as well. I grabbed it and took it with me to a recent remote Rock Band jam session, and it went over great!

The American DJ LED bar wasn’t exactly a cheap accessory — I shopped around and found it for $180 shipped — but it sure feels about ten times more freakin’ rock in that room now with the awesome extra lighting effects!