If you're reading this paper, I feel safe assuming a few things about you. You probably dislike Sarah Palin (yet could see yourself sleeping with her), you probably enjoyed Fight Club (yet swear to your friends that you prefer the novel), and you probably dig Rock Band.

That assumption saves me a lot of time, since Rock Band 2 is essentially Rock Band with a new haircut. You pick up a fake instrument, strum, sing, or drum along to (relatively) popular rock music, and remain blissfully unaware of how silly you look.

This time though, Harmonix and MTV Games have made the whole thing goddamn gigantic. Not only are you able to import tunes from the original Rock Band into the sequel, but also the ever-growing downloadable music store boosts the game's potential library to more than 500 tracks. The character customization and offline gameplay modes have also been beefed up, though all of that is easily trumped by Rock Band 2's newly improved online multiplayer modes.

In the original game you had the option of linking up with friends around the country to virtually jam through a facsimile of the single-player game. That's still present in RB2, but now you're also given a list of high-score challenges in which you can compete against bands from across the country. Setlists for these events are chosen by the developer and change weekly. I'm not doing it justice by describing it without any exclamatory swearing, but this Battle of the Bands mode is worth the price of admission alone.

Rock Band fans shouldn't need me to tell them to buy RB2. Everyone else should have stopped reading when I mentioned angry gubernatorial sex.