Rock Band Battle of the Bands, Round Two

When last we left the Battle of the Bands, GameSpy's rockers -- "NinjaPlease!" -- were sitting in third place out of ten sites, trailing 1UP and GamePro. But that initial round was four 1v1 matches, with players struggling to break 100,000 in each round; here, we'd be playing four songs as a band, where anyone could very likely potentially break a million points on a single song. So the paltry 30,000 points that separated the top five sites didn't seem like it would hold up for long.

The rules for round two were simple: After logging into the special ScoreHero.com interface and readying up, we'd be shown our first song and would have 15 minutes to complete it and upload a picture of the final scoreboard, and would repeat the process for all four songs. Unlike the first round, everyone was free to play any difficulty they wanted, with the obvious catch being that lower difficulties might lead to lower scores.

Finally, we kicked things off and found our first song would be Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." There was some debate over what instrument everyone should be playing, and ultimately I ended up pulling double duty, singing on Hard and playing Expert guitar, with our drummer playing on Medium. As it turns out, singing and playing an instrument is more than possible, but still very complicated even if you know the song; you need to keep one eye on the guitar note chart while keeping the other on the lyrics to make sure you're doing all the proper inflections the game is expecting. We ended up 5-starring the song, but having our drums on Medium cost us -- NinjaPlease finished 4th overall on the song with 550,000. That wouldn't have been so bad, except 1UP demolished the field with a score of 944k.


After that, it was decided that I'd switch to the drums the rest of the way, having already burned through Rock Band's solo campaign on Hard. The next tune was The Strokes' "Reptilia," a song that gave almost everyone fits singing. The drums were pretty manageable, however, as three teams (GameSpy included) had players put up 99% on Hard. This song was closer all around, with 1UP taking the top slot with 829k and GameSpy coming in third with 738k.

The third song sent shockwaves of fear through the band: "Next To You" by the Police. You see, by the time you reach this song in Rock Band's World Tour mode, the entire band is forced to play on Hard -- and we'd failed it every single time. So not wanting to deal with the oddly-timed Stuart Copeland drum part on Hard, half the band dropped down to Medium and it paid off with a 5-star performance. It wasn't a great score -- 435k -- and it was only good enough for 5th place overall, but we felt we'd dodged a bullet simply getting through it.


Finally, it was time for the last song of the round, a song we felt really good about: Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz." On Hard, the drum part can look incredibly intimidating with numerous extended snare rolls, but the entire band rallied for a whopping 1.28 million points, the highest single score by any team to date. As it turned out, that score was good enough to vault NinjaPlease! into second place overall, trailing only 1UP in the overall standings heading into round three next week.

So now many questions remain for GameSpy's rockers: can we catch 1UP? Should Sluggo stay on Hard drums or switch to Expert guitar? And who can we slip some money to find out next week's songs? Check back next week for more on Rock Band and the ongoing Battle of the Bands!