Most gamers are familiar with the sensation that an inanimate object somewhere in the immediate area has an insatiable need for their blood. Heck, that was the basis of almost every NES game ever created. Statues were always a particular favorite of game developers. (If you had a Legend of Zelda game, the name ‘Ironknuckle’ should ring a bell, and maybe trigger some indigestion too.)
These days, it feels like the game itself wants to torture me.
Greg Dean actually summed this up neatly some time ago in his webcomic, Real Life. You see, Rock Band 2 always seems to select one of the same three songs (all of which I dislike) whenever I select a Random Setlist of some kind in Career Mode.
Unlike Mr. Dean, I don’t have any particular beef with Weezer. My musical enemies are ‘Let There Be Rock’, ‘Supreme Girl’ and ‘Shackler’s Revenge’. (I don’t like ‘Wave of Mutilation’ from the first Rock Band either, but that’s just because my singing is poor and I failed it about thirty times while just trying desperately to get through the Vocal Tour on medium in single-player mode.)
I do actually like both AC/DC and and Guns N’ Roses. Rock Band 2 just effectively poisoned ‘Let There Be Rock’ with too many repetitions. I know that there aren’t that many ‘challenging’ songs for the guitar in the game, but it doesn’t need to put ‘Let There Be Rock’ in every single Challenging Setlist that I pick in Career Mode. And it’s always there. That’s fixable, but I still haven’t gotten around to buying a hard drive for the 360 so I can download more tracks.
‘Shackler’s Revenge’ is different; the problem is that the song is just not that great. It doesn’t really sound like old school GNR–and it doesn’t have its own voice either. It’s just blah. I guess that I should thank the developers of Rock Band for putting it in the game. Having to play through it an unforgivable number of times in my Career effectively made it clear to me that I was not going to purchase Chinese Democracy, no matter how long we’d had to wait for Axl Rose to produce something. It was ultimately proof of what I should have known. What made Guns N’ Roses great to start with was Slash, NOT Axl Rose. And now they’re releasing all of Chinese Democracy for Rock Band. Note to self: after getting the Xbox hard drive, do not buy this either.
And ‘Supreme Girl’? I haven’t got an excuse for this one; I just hated the song the first time it popped up, but I needed the stars and the fans, so I played it. And I kept on playing it every time it came up, for the fans and the stars. Thankfully it doesn’t come up all that often.
Somehow, the Rock Band games don’t give me the Bon Jovi tracks all that often. (Of course, if I had my way, there would be a Bon Jovi edition of Rock Band being released instead of a Beatles one.) Ultimately, though, this is actually a consequence of the best feature of Rock Band 2.
The original Rock Band had a different mode for single player careers that let me jump over songs I didn’t like, which meant that I only ever had to make it through them once. Rock Band 2 lets single players as well as multiplayer bands play through the full career mode, which is really cool, actually. In the first game, if I wanted to play a Band Career, I had to convince someone else to play with me. Unfortunately, while I live with a bunch of other people, none of them ever really want to pick up a controller and join in. One was traumatized by their first video game experience (the Cheep Cheeps of Super Mario Brothers, circa 1989 were her undoing). The rest couldn’t care less. But in Rock Band 2, I can have a full Career experience anytime I feel like it.
Even better, Rock Band 2 lets me customize my entire band when I’m playing by myself in Career Mode. That means that I can make my band look exactly like Bon Jovi, without making my friends gripe about having to play as a character who looks like Richie Sambora. You’d think that it was a fate worse than death.
But I can play ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ with my Richie Sambora character, with a band that looks exactly like Bon Jovi in Rock Band 2, which totally rules. (Well, maybe not completely like Bon Jovi. Keyboards aren’t an option, so Dave now plays bass, at least in my band. Sorry Hugh.) And besides, the Guitar Hero series is still too pretentious to include any Bon Jovi in their lineup for any reason other than Rock Band induced peer pressure.
So ultimately, Rock Band may hate me, but I still love it to pieces. I’d say that it was my favorite video game of all time, but the number of hours I spent playing Ocarina of Time in high school is pretty hard to beat. But it’s definitely second.