Rock Band 2 observations

* Big, huge, superepic props to Harmonix for curing my "Brick Wall Syndrome." (BWS)

Lemme explain: Inevitably on one of these games I'll run into a song I simply have absolutely no hope whatsoever of playing. On GUITAR HERO 2, it was "Carry Me Home" by Living End.

GH3 stopped me dead with Slayer's "Raining Blood" (I'd last about 13 seconds) and "One" by Metallica. (The latter really pissed me off b/c it's one of the most brilliant songs ever recorded and I'd always get about 5 minutes into it before the furious change would thwart me. At least Slayer saved me the time by kicking my ass really early.)

The original ROCK BAND had a whoppin' three on the final setlist: "Flirtin' With Disaster" by Molly Hatchet, "Green Grass and High Tides" by The Outlaws and the timeless "Highway Star" by Deep Purple.

All of the aforementioned songs became known as brick walls. My progress was immediately halted and I had no recourse save ramping the difficulty down to Hard and starting the whole freakin' game over again. Along with a bruised ego, it also made for some boring freakin' gameplay as the Hard setting is too easy. On top of having fewer notes to hammer out, they scroll down way more slowly than on the Expert setting; Way too slow, in fact. So slow that I would miss notes by getting impatient and belting them out in anticipation of when they'd finally arrive at the bottom of the screen.

Harmonix came up with the genius solution of allowing you to choose the difficulty of each song you play as you play them instead of picking a setting at the beginning and being locked into it. I'll never be able to play prog-metal icon Dream Theatre's "Panic Attack", which is arguably the hardest freakin' song ever included in one of the games. At least as hard as "Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce on GH3. But no worries, I can take things down to a more manageable Hard, beat the song, then continue doing my thing on Expert without losing my progress. Nice.

They also solved the second problem associated with BWS by adding a Hyperspeed Mode, which, on Hard, makes the notes scroll a little faster than they would on Expert. I love you, Harmonix programmers.

* Five most fun songs to play (In no particular order)
"Everlong" by Foo Fighters

"Anyway You Want It" by Journey (Most of it anyhow. The second solo is insane.)

"Hungry Like The Wolf" by Duran Duran (Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are.)

"Alex Chilton" by The Replacements (Trust me: You know this song even if the title doesn't look familiar.)

"You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morrisette (Would've never thought this would be included in a game like this, and definitely would've never thought it would be so fun to play.)

* Axl Rose has graced us with one of the songs off of the Chinese Democracy album that he's been working on for 10 FREAKIN' YEARS NOW. Think I'm kidding? Everyone in G'N'R quit in 1994, Rose replaced them and began recording this thing in early '98. We're actually going on 11 freakin' years now, and, while we're doing the math, this would be Guns' first original studio album since the Use Your Illusion double albums dropped...In 1991. Yes, "November Rain" is older than some college kids.

ANYWAY, with no actual release date in sight for the album, "Shackler's Revenge" has debuted on the game and if this is what this album is gonna sound like then he can take another 11 freakin' years working on it. Hard to describe, but it sounds like Axl Rose doing his best impersonation of Trent Reznor circa-'94. Starting to think that the sheer, Godly brilliance of Appetite For Destruction was an abberation considering all the vastly inferior music these guys have recorded in various bands during the 20 years since.

* Why are Tenacious D songs so insanely hard to play on these games? It's Jack Black's joke band, for cryin' out loud.

* I really want my $75 figurine.

OK, gotta get back to work. "Carry On Wayward Son" ain't gonna beat itself.