There’s been a lot of Rock Band 2 news, probably because the game is a bit closer to launch. A quick check of current release dates shows the following on Amazon:

The game alone is $60 whereas the “special edition” includes drums, guitar, microphone, and the game for $190. Ten bucks less if you buy the Wii or PS2 versions. Although the “special edition” will not be available on September 14th, oddly enough, the Standalone Rock Band 2 Drums and Standalone Rock Band 2 Guitar will.

The Guitar Hero World Tour release schedule is considerably simpler:

I checked on EBGames / GameStop website and it confirms these dates to the exact day.

So if you have an Xbox 360 (and platform allegiances aside, for rhythm games there is no contest — the Xbox is the best choice due to controller compatibility and DLC experience), you’ll be playing Rock Band 2 before anyone else, and over a month before you can play Guitar Hero World Tour regardless of platform.

To me, Rock Band 2 is by far the superior overall game — so I’m anxious to get it as soon as possible. One caveat: it is unknown (and currently unlikely) that the Wii version of Rock Band 2 will support DLC, whereas GHWT has confirmed DLC support for the Wii. So if your only console is a Wii, you should prefer GHWT at this point.

That’s not to say that GHWT doesn’t have charms of its own. Check out this video Joystiq captured of the development team kicking out Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher at E3.

As a genre addict, I’ll definitely be buying both games.

Via Engadget, a shot of the official Rock Band 2 cymbal add ons. These Cymbals plug into those mysterious red, blue, and green plugs on the back of the new Rock Band 2 drumset.

Pricing is supposedly $30 for a pack of 3 cymbals, or $15 each. They are from Mad Catz, technically, but they will be licensed as official first-party add-ons. As mentioned earlier, the cymbals can be played interchangably with the same colored pad, but they do appear to be independent inputs. Rock Band can distinguish which one you’re hitting during fills — hit a tom and you hear a drum, hit a cymbal and you hear a cymbal.

It disturbs me a little that the cymbals are add-ons — so learning to rely on the physical motion of hitting a cymbal will be unnatural on a “stock” Rock Band drumset.

My current strategy is to try out the Guitar Hero World Tour drums, which include cymbals, to see if I enjoy playing that way or not. I have to buy the full GHWT kit because I definitely want the new guitar, and at that point it’s almost as cost effective to buy the full Guitar Hero World Tour band kit for $190.

Similarly, the new Rock Band 2 Drums are available as a standalone kit for $90, but by the time you factor in the $60 price of the game, you’re already at $150 — and fairly close to the price of the Rock Band 2 Special Edition which includes game, new drums, new guitar, and microphone for $190.

Wondering what, exactly, the difference is between the new Rock Band 2 drums and the original Rock Band 1 drums? Me too. Engadget has a great set of photos from E3 that reveal all the new features. Let’s examine them one by one.

Reinforced bass drum pedal — check.

Neoprene or rubber drum surface for better “bounce” and less noise — check.

Fully wireless (look ma, no wires in this picture!) — check.

The one disappointment I have is that the new Rock Band 2 drumset offers no additional reinforcement of any kind between the green and red drums. This means the red and green hits will be vulnerable to excessive vibration and might be unreliable under intense expert-level drum play, as they are on the original version. I hope my drum reinforcing struts will work on the new kit; it looks nearly identical in shape, so I’m thinking they will.

But there is one exciting new feature which you can see hinted at in this photo — green, blue, and red plugs on the back of the drumset.

These are for the add-on cymbals you can attach to the drumset. According to a source from E3, the cymbals can be hit at any time instead of their respective tom pads, but during drum fills, the game knows to play cymbal or tom sounds depending on which you hit. We have yet to see any information on pricing or availability of the add-on cymbals for the Rock Band 2 drumset.

Still, I’m encouraged that two out of three major flaws with the original Rock Band drums are being addressed with the new Rock Band 2 drumset:

1. Reinforced pedal
2. Improved drum surface for better durability, bounce, and less noise.
3. Structural support for the “hanging” red and green drums

I guess two out of three ain’t bad.

Per the official Rock Band 2 press release, Rock Band 2 will support “exporting” the Rock Band 1 tracks:

The Disc Export Feature gives owners of the original Rock Band the ability to export most of the Rock Band disc tracks and upgrade them into Rock Band 2 gameplay — the first time ever in videogame history!

This is exciting news indeed! Rock Band 2 will be a much better platform to play the original Rock Band 1 songs, plus, I don’t think anyone will miss not having to reboot their console every time they want to play “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Wanted Dead or Alive”. A few more details have emerged on this feature from the E3 show floor:

• The export will not be free; there is a one-time charge of around $5 to export the songs. This is probably to prevent abuse of the feature. If it was free, anyone could borrow a copy of the disc and magically add ~50 songs to their Rock Band 2 playlist.
• Harmonix is not sure they will be able to re-license all the Rock Band 1 songs for Rock Band 2. They’re hopeful, but they assured reporters that in the worst case scenario, only 3 to 5 of the original songs would go missing. Word on the street is that Guitar Hero artist exclusivity may interfere (Aerosmith, Metallica).

If you consider the 80 tracks in Rock Band 2, plus 50 more exported from Rock Band 1, and the 20 free downloadable tracks Harmonix has promised in September — that’s a grand total of 150 playable tracks out of the box on day one of release! And that’s before you factor in the impressive DLC library, too.

Per a late-breaking entry on Wired’s game blog, Guitar Hero: World Tour will work with the Rock Band drumset! Well, at least on the Xbox 360, anyway.

At Activision’s E3 press conference Tuesday, Guitar Hero director Brian Bright told the crowd that if they already owned guitar controllers and drum controllers from “previous games” on the Xbox 360, they’d work with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Here’s how it’ll work. Speaking with Bright after the conference, I found out that the game’s five-button drum track, shown above center, will be compressed down to four inputs if a Rock Band drum controller is inserted.

There’s also a MIDI jack on the back of the drum kit, Bright said, which will allow gamers to play Guitar Hero with any electronic drum kit by simply plugging it into the controller. You can also hook up a second drum pedal if you want to play two bass drums.

This is a surprising turn of events, as previous Guitar Hero games have gone out of their way to ensure incompatibility with Rock Band peripherals, despite Harmonix’ calls for (and implementation of) open guitar peripheral compatibility. I presume this means Guitar Hero: World Tour will also work with Rock Band guitars, too.

Still, the prospect of being able to limit yourself to just one set of fake plastic drums instead of two is big news indeed. Kudos to the Activision team for not being jerks about it this time around.