A Couple of Rock Band 2 Notes

First, has anyone seen this Rock Band show that VH1 did leading up to the release of Rock Band 2? I hadn't seen it until I tripped over it on InDemand just now. Sebastian Bach and Alice Cooper judged a competition to whittle 15 RB2 players down to (I don't know? One band? Two bands?) Weird. The "episodes" are really short, and I wish they were full-length 22 minutes instead of the 7-8 minutes they are.

In other news, I played a little RB2 over the B's nap today with the sole and vain intent of gold starring as many songs playing Vocals on Expert as I could. I got a few! (Some of them are DLC and not RB2 songs, and these don't count the DLC that I'd already gold starred in RB1, as I didn't re-do those.) I am confident that many of these that I succeeded on would be the LAST ones you all would guess.

I now have gold stars on:

1) Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)
2) Drain You
3) Give It Away
4) One Way or Another
5) Hangin' On the Telephone
6) Today
7) You Oughta Know
8) Limelight (Original)
9) Tom Sawyer (Original)

Yeah, um...hmm. You gold star what you can, you know? Not necessarily your favorite stuff. You Oughta Know is actually ridiculously easy to gold star on vocals. I got a 97% and I didn't even think I was perfect on when to use overdrive and I still got the gold stars. Thanks Alanis!

I Guess I Have to Buy Singstar Now?

Good news: Queen music in a video game. Bad news: It's for Singstar.

So, hey, the good news is that there's now a music game that features Queen. The bad news is a) it's apparently for PS2?!? (wtf) b) there's no track list for it yet c) it's singing only and not for one of the "whole band" games. Not as fun, Sony, NOT AS FUN.

I suppose there's a few upsides. It's not going to be in Guitar Hero, thus forcing me to buy it, because, you know...Queen. I lied. There's only one upside, and that's it.

Does anyone know what the chances are that a PS2 Singstar game will run in emulation mode on PS3? I mean, I read an article on the Playstation blog that makes it sound like I can play songs from a PS2 Singstar game if I own a copy of a PS3 Singstar game, but DO NOT WANT. I just want to buy the one game with my Queen happiness in it. (I also know that the 40gb PS3 doesn't have any emulation software on it at all, but I'm pretty sure we just have a puny 20gb PS3 that should have it.)

**shakes fist at the world...why didn't Rock Band get there first?**

Songs I Wish Were In Rock Band

Now, please keep in mind that I don't listen to a lot of rock music. This list is going to be heavily weighted to the paltry number of groups that I enjoy, but here goes.

(No whining that the songs would be "too hard" to sing. Not everything should be able to be sung and five starred by everyone on Hard or Expert. Singing is hard, dammit, and a few of the songs in the game should be for the Big Kids who can do them.)

First, let's get the Queen out of the way. That there is a game called "Rock Band" that DOESN'T have a Queen song in it is pure madness. Here's my wish list for Queen songs for Rock Band. (Thank you, Wikipedia, for the handy list to jog my memory.)

1. Another One Bites the Dust (c'mon, EVERYONE would fight to play bass on this)
2. Bicycle Race (for the WIN)
3. Bohemian Rhapsody (stop laughing, everyone loves to sing along to this, and the keyboard solos on a song already in the game...you all know the one I mean, BOSTON...are at least as long)
4. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
5. Don't Stop Me Now
6. Fat Bottomed Girls (a two pack with Bicycle Race!!)
7. Flash (if only for the comedy value, and yes, this one's a bit of a joke and I don't really want it)
8. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy (how anyone ever listened to this and didn't suss out that Freddie was gay is BEYOND ME)
9. I Want to Break Free
10. One Vision (thrown in here for my husband)
11. Play the Game
12. Save Me
13. Stone Cold Crazy
    
14. The Miracle
15. These are the Days of our Lives
16. Tie Your Mother Down
17. Under Pressure
    
18. We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You (two-pack!)
19. Who Wants to Live Forever
    
20. You're My Best Friend

Okay, I forgot two songs originally, but I just added 'em. Anyone who gets this on a feed reader can see the edit. For everyone else, I'm not tellin'.

Styx songs:

1. Too Much Time on My Hands
2. Don't Let it End
3. Heavy Metal Poisoning
4. (Heck, I'd be pro-"Mr. Roboto", but I don't think many people are with me on that.)
5. Why Me

Other Blondie songs:

1. Heart of Glass
2. One Way or Another
3. Rapture (if I have to rap through Sabotage, you bastards have to rap with Blondie)
4. The Tide is High

Misc:

1. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones (hey, we've got Blitzkrieg Bop already, right?)
2. One Week - Barenaked Ladies (heck, ANYTHING by BNL would be okay by me)

So, what else do we want?

Rock Band Online Play, Plus One Funny Link

First, the link. Halloween is only months away, so if you have a 5-6 year old, consider these costumes when your child is trying to talk you into letting them be a firefighter or a princess AGAIN.

("Trick or treat" sounds a LITTLE like "exterminate", doesn't it?)

Also, I've been playing some Rock Band online multiplayer. When you can 95%+ songs as a singer on Expert, I've found that's pretty much like being a healer in an MMO. There's no chat (come on, PS3, even Mario Kart Wii lets me choose phrases from a rotating menu so that we can have some sort of rudimentary communication system) so it's hard to tell, but I do get a fair amount of friend adds after playing as a singer.

There are some fairly well-established proto-communication techniques at work in PS3 Rock Band, though. One of them was told to me by the good Dr. Heimlich, which is the idea that you waggle up and down on the difficulty setting menu when you don't want to do the song the leader has chosen. It's also interesting to watch (or be involved in) the delicate negotiations that occur between the two people using the guitar to see who plays guitar and who plays bass. That's usually a pause-move to the one you want-wait to see if the other guy moves there too sort of affair. I actually prefer most of the bass lines so most of the time I would imagine the other person relieved at 'getting' to play guitar when I indicated that I wanted bass, although I did get overruled a couple of times. Frankly, if you can play on Expert on the guitar, I'm fine with you taking whichever one you want and I'll play the other one on Medium.

But still, frustrating to play and have no way to communicate other than by waggling on menus, just out-and-out leaving the group, or adding someone as a friend if you enjoyed playing with them. Seriously, how hard is it to add a menu of prefab phrases? Please? Otherwise, it's pretty fun, especially when you get to watch someone kill songs on Expert, which I normally only get to see when I play with the aforementioned Dr. Heimlich.

And yeah, though there are a lot of power players there playing on Hard or Expert, there are a lot of people who play on Medium, too, which makes it less embarrassing when I want to play guitar or bass and have to play on Medium if it's anything higher than the first two difficulty categories.

It's a good time, really. As soon as we get our drum pad replacement (It broke on day 60 of its 60 day warranty, which EA is now enforcing! Yikes, that was close!) I might give them a go, though I still find the placement of the first two drums disorienting. But that's the subject for another whiny post.

You May Have Played Too Much Rock Band Around Your Toddler When...

...she looks at you, says, "Sing...Maps?"

And then sings, "MaaaAAAaaaa--aaaAAAaaa--aaaAAAaaaps!"