Now that solo world touring is available, the solo tour from Rock Band is a thing of the past replaced, somewhat, by challenges. Challenges are specific tasks offered up to get your band members cash and bragging rights. Unlike the sets in the World Tour, challenges are targeted towards particular instruments, or towards having a band. Like in the World Tour mode, challenges seamlessly bring together every song in your library, be it downloaded content, exported songs from Rock Band or songs from the Rock Band 2 disc, going so far as to create specific challenges for certain song packs, like an all Jimmy Buffet challenge. As you go through the challenges they change in difficulty until you're the undisputed king of thrash metal. Well, you or your nine year old cousin, but we won't tell if you don't. Bass players finally get some love in the Challenges too and are no longer the red headed step child of the music game genre.

A subset of the challenges is the Battle of the Bands challenges which are constantly revolving sets of challenges created by Harmonix. The rules are simple; you take part in a challenge and then upload your score to Harmonix. If your score is eclipsed, you'll be notified and you can try again and put up a higher score. As the pages of the calendar fly off, the challenges change so that the fires of your competitive spirit are constantly fueled with a steady supply of rock. Limited time challenges also make an appearance in the World Tour mode with festivals appearing for finite amounts of time as real life events take place. Who knew that the GameStop conference in Austin rocked so hard? I know I didn't.

The same Quickplay and training options are still available if you're not looking for anything more than picking up some instruments and goofing around, however the all important "No Fail" option means that you're no longer in danger of getting fired because you screamed at your company's president for failing out in guitar seven seconds into Blitzkrieg Bop. The Quickplay selection is limited to what you've unlocked in either the challenges or the World Tour mode, and odd choice given how much the game skews to parties and non-gamers, however you can either a) use a code to unlock all of the songs or b) buy downloadable songs which can be used as any time.

Once you have all of the songs unlocked you'll be treated to quite the eclectic bunch of tracks, all masters ranging from older, more mellow tracks by Fleetwood Mac and Squeeze to fast paced, full frontal rock assaults from Megadeth and Metallica. The collection is an odd one, no doubt about it, with certain tracks seemingly chosen to illustrate a band's more obscure tracks rather than the radio friendly hits. The songs all work well though, and if you're playing a song that you absolutely hate on one instrument, you'll love it with another. With the 80+ songs on the disc and the 50+ songs you can export from the original for a five buck fee, there's plenty to play and that's before you buy more songs, or get the 20 additional free songs promised by Hamonix. Heck, the new songs are worth the 60 dollar price tag alone, coming out to less per track than what you'd pay to download most songs.

The difficulty of the songs seems to have been stepped up a notch with the exception of the talking parts. Talking in Rock Band was an exercise in frustration and the cause of many failed 100% attempts. In Rock Band 2 any speech seems to net you 100% on expert even if it's just unintelligible gibberish. It does take you out of the moment, but there are only a few spoken tracks, so it's certainly not a deal breaker.

The create-a-rocker mode serves up the same character generation as the previous outing with some extra masks, and other small details provided to personalize your characters. Your band also shows more personality this time around with the singer sharing vocals with band members and band members playing to one another. The changes to the performances are subtle, but still a hell of a lot of fun to watch if you can ever take your eyes off of the note chart to see what's going on.

New to the training mode is the Drum Trainer, a selection of 76 beats and 45 fills all designed to show you once and for all that drumming are no joke. Each beat or fill loops endlessly allowing you to take the piece at speeds from 60 beats per minute to the Ulrich-ian 180 bpm. Once you've practiced a beat or fill to your heart's content, a press of the d-pad will bring up the next one. Playing around with the drum trainer is a heck of a lot of fun and brings a warm fuzzy to your heart when you see that you can complete even the simplest of beats at 180 bpm. That is until the next one comes up, you forget to lower the speed and your pathetic flailing results in one drum stick embedded in the ceiling and one embedded in your cat's eye. Sorry Dr. Scratchles!