I got 3 big name games over the holidays, Fallout 3, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2. The one I had been greatly anticipating was Fallout 3, and I did spend a good amount of time with it, but the best description of it really is 'Oblivion with guns'. Enough said.

The other two games are similar, especially with GH's addition of vocal and drum tracks. Unfortunately they made a few other changes that did not make the game better. They also copied Rock Band 1's gig and solo playthrough system. This makes the game much more unwieldy and you have vastly less choices and have to play songs you don't especially like. You also have to solo play all of the instruments to get all the achievements. But the worst is really the music choices- it was nice to have a LOT of cameos- Sting, Ozzy, Billy Korgan, Ted Nugent, Zakk Wyld and a few more, but I'd say 50% of the songs are on the level of hard core heavy metal.

Rock Band 2 is way more diverse. You have a good selection of 70's, 80's, 90's and modern hits, all of them master tracks. And World Tour mode is vastly improved. You can play solo in World tour if you want, making venues much easier to unlock. A few other features were added, challenges and Battle of the Bands, both of which are pretty fun. Also, your characters look better and feel like real Rock Stars, while every Rock star I made on GH looked deformed and didn't feel right. The premade stars all work fine on GH though, so I stick with them. My one complaint with RB2 was that it promised 20 free downloads. I expected to be able to choose, but it's basically a 20 song download pack, and none of them are famous songs. But that's a minor quibble with a game that already has 84 huge songs, of which I was already very familiar with about 70.

So My daughter and I are diligently playing RB2 and even getting my wife to sing a song or 2 (like Spirit in the Sky and One Way or Another).

I start another new job on Monday, so wish me luck!

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