Back in Rock Band 2, I proceeded far enough to pick up roadies and a sound guy, which unlocked the remaining cities I could see. I think there’s still at least one more city, though; I can see one on the horizon of the map that I can’t navigate to, and haven’t gotten the unlock-all-cities achievement either.

I also got my first four-star and three-star results, the first from that Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld song (I really should delete that one), and the latter from Next To You by The Police, which is full of those long series of rapid notes that really throw me off.

I got in a bit of Rock Band 2 before lunch today and managed to finally get a plane, letting me play in North America now. There’s a long ways to go though, as there’s six or so cities visible but still locked.

I also did another music video, and switched to another character for a while so she could earn some money for clothes. You don’t share money with bandmates or stand-ins, so they have to earn it on their own, and I’m going to fill out the rest of the band with my own characters. So far we seem to be leaning towards “nerdcore”…

I made a fair bit of progress in Rock Band 2 tonight, getting a tour bus, a new manager for Western Europe, a merchandising girl, making two music videos, and unlocking a bunch of other cities (all still in Europe so far).

I’m mostly doing the single songs right now, rather than the multi-song gigs. The multi-song ones often have random songs sprinkled in them, so I’ll save those for ‘off’ days to lower the chances of inadvertently running into the same songs too closely together.

Didn’t really have time for more than a small handful of songs in RB2 tonight, as I spent most of it getting things set back up again on the PC.

One thing I wish they’d improved that they didn’t is the stats collection. At the end of the songs it still doesn’t tell you things like how many total notes there were, your percentage isn’t permanently tracked, the setlist in tour mode doesn’t show your score, the five-star range is still fairly large… It makes it hard to tell later on which songs you still need to improve at a lot and which you’re already close to the best you can do. (Expert difficulty has the gold stars, but that’s a looong ways away for me.)

It was finally time to fire up Rock Band 2, and it’s turned out to be more than just another set of songs to play. The solo mode now works within the band’s world tour mode, where you’re gaining fans and stars to unlock more gigs and venues instead of just playing through a bunch of tiers. You also get the option of playing bass and still advancing the tour mode, whereas in RB1 you could only do solo bass in quickplay mode. Some of the gigs are also random picks out of the entire library, RB1 and DLC included.

There are also a bunch of challenges that I didn’t get around to trying; I just played enough songs tonight to unlock a few more cities, but probably still have a long ways to go. The mix of songs seems to be decent so far, though nothing’s really stood out yet.

I also took another shot at some songs on Hard in Rock Band tonight, and managed to pull a few three and four-star performances out of the downloaded songs. When I got back to the career mode though, I was once again stopped cold at Suffragette City. I just can’t seem to keep up with the combination of minor variations of chords and jumps to entirely new chords in time, or it’s too quick for me to realize where my fingers should be. I can put it into practice mode and nail it 100% at half-speed, but start falling apart as I get to 80% or so, and don’t seem to get much better at it even if I only gradually increase the speed.

Oh well, I should probably be saving my energy for Rock Band 2 anyway…

So instead I caught up on Rock Band tonight, as I’d bought a few songs over the previous weeks but hadn’t yet had a chance to actually try them out. The metal songs (from Dream Theater and Killswitch Engage) were as challenging as expected, but the Devo and Duran Duran songs were a bit easy on guitar, in comparison. The Duran Duran songs actually work out pretty well on bass, though.

Not too much longer until Rock Band 2 now…