Maybe it’s because I never really played the original Rock Band that much, despite having bought the whole kit, but actually playing Rock Band 2 is a whole lot of fun. I’m working on guitar skills at the moment on my single-player World Tour and have actually gotten up to hard difficultly on most of the early songs. You know, medium level should really be called "Easy" and hard level should be called "Normal," because when you play on medium, the buttons you actually press are highly abstracted from the notes you actually hear. Often you’ll hit one button, but hear three notes played. It doesn’t happen as much on hard. Then again, if hard was "normal" and medium was "easy," I don’t know, maybe people would have as much fun feeling accomplished.

This past weekend, I decided to look into the Rock Band Community Site, which I had registered for with the original Rock Band, but never actually visited. The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is the Merch Booth and Unleash Your Band feature. Basically, linking your game to the community site lets you order custom-made, 6 inch, real life miniature statues of your band members to display in your household. It’s neat stuff that I think a lot of people will go for, if they know about it. Wouldn’t you? I mean, what’s the point of totally customizing your character, if no one is ever there to see it? This is really smart marketing, though the $60.00 ~ $80.00 price tag is a bit much for me at the moment, but I wouldn’t be against some of the custom band member T-shirts that you can also craft at the Merch Booth.

As for the rest, it seems Rock Band could really become somewhat of a Rock Band centric Facebook. It seems like every game is trying to go in this direction. I hear the Resistance 2 community site will have Facebook-ish features too. I guess we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know what I think once they’re all out and ready.

Anyways, check it out for yourself. Here’s a link to my Rock Band page, if you’re interested in following my band progress in pseudo-real time. Comment if you want to ROCK!