Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House

The Instruments: The Drums

The Rock Band 2 drum kit is definitely an improvement over the Rock Band 1 kit. Unfortunately, the area that needed the most TLC, the kick pedal, really isn't that much better. While disappointing, we definitely prefer the RB2 kit to the RB1 kit.

Looking down on the RB2 kit.

Both kits uses pads (called triggers) that the gamer hits with drum sticks in response to the game. The pads are statically mounted on a frame with an XBox 360 controller in the center. There is one kick pedal that sits below the pads and is use by lifting it up and pressing it down to simulate playing a kick drum on a real kit. While the RB1 pedal is flimsy plastic, the RB2 pedal is slightly reinforced.

This is the new pedal. Much like the old one.

One of the weak spots, however, is the hinge that attaches the moveable part of the pedal to its base. This is where one of our RB1 pedals broke (The other pedal broke in half), so while the RB2 pedal will be less prone to a certain type of breakage, it is by no means much of an improvement in terms of absolute strength of the pedal. It does seem that they made the pedal a little "softer" (the spring doesn't seem to push as hard) so there may be less stress on the hinge, but this does sacrifice the feel of the pedal slightly.

Squishy spring feels like slamming your foot into dry sand on the beach. Not satisfying.

But we still like the RB2 kit more, and here's why.

Mmmm ... Tasty bouncy rubber covered pads. Not perfect, but much better than the first attempt.

First, the pads feel much better. They are more responsive and at least a little quieter. The tone of a stroke (that's what it's called when you hit a drum with a stick) on the pads is much lower pitched and much easier on the ears as well. It's less distracting and allows the music to be less affected. The framing feels a little more sturdy than the RB1 kit as well, but we never really had any trouble with the the original kit in that regard so it may not be that much of an issue.

Can you see the bubble on the red pad? What's up with that?

And while there are some advantages with the new kit, there is a bit of an issue with the pads as well. Either the top layer of our pad shifted a bit and bunched in the middle or the softer rubber used stretched and dimpled in the middle. Which ever thing happened, we've got a slight bubble of rubber on our red pad. And this was only after a week or two of usage, as we switched to the ION kit as soon as we received it.

Other bonuses are the fact that the pads are somewhat pressure sensitive and the RB2 kit allows for the addition of cymbals for the yellow, blue and green triggers. Though these symbols count as the same color and you can hit either to play the game, when doing fills or playing in the drum trainer or freestyle modes, hitting the cymbal pads will produce cymbal sounds. The yellow blue and green pads act as toms and the yellow blue and green cymbals act as cymbals (hi-hat, ride and crash respectively). The ION kit comes with cymbal pads, but it stands to reason that because the RB2 kit has connectors for such devices that there will be an add on available at a later date.

The cymbal additions would be great for some things, as putting the yellow hi-hat cymbal to the left of the red snare (for right handed gamers) would put it in the position most drummers are used to. The advantage of this, however, is totally destroyed by the fact that the game sometimes changes the mapping of different cymbals and toms to different colors depending on the song and/or difficulty level. This means the hi-hat isn't always the hi-hat (sometimes the snare is the hi-hat) and sometimes the ride is actually an open hi-hat (which is even more frustrating).

The down side of pressure sensitivity is that it isn't all that sensitive. The range of volume is from sort of loud to loud and not much in between. While it does make for a little tiny bit of dynamic control, it simply does not add anything to the experience. It is a step in the right direction, but we need whole lot more flexibility to get excited about this feature.