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The 50 Best Games: 48 - Rock Band 2
Music games had their time in the spotlight that was unlike almost anything else on the market. That time was ultimately fleeting as the limp, aging return in 2015 of both Rock Band and Guitar Hero serves to prove.
But after years of Harmonix cutting their teeth on the excellent PS2 games Frequency and Amplitude, forcing large plastic guitars into people's living rooms with the first two Guitar Hero games, and finally testing the limits of the average household storage capacity with the full band, Rock Band is the perfect expression of that original idea.
High school was full of Rock Band nights where we would gather and play a host of songs from the stellar on-disc soundtrack or dive into their storefront and download some songs that we could all agree to play. And even more often, I found myself sitting at home after school just playing the drums for hours. For someone like me, who had aspirations of drumming in my youth only to abandon it, it was a sublime melding of drumming and video games on top of just being one of the greatest party games ever made.
And while almost any version of Rock Band is worth playing, Rock Band 2 specifically hold a special place in my heart as the game that really capitalized on the spark of original Guitar Hero in a very personal way.
