So, last night we stumbled upon something really quite compelling.  See the title for the full expansion of AACC.

So, Rock Band 2 has the gameplay mode Battle of the Bands.  These are generally relatively simple little setlists with some constraints (e.g. play these 3 songs, you must have a guitarist, the battle is ranked by your score).  The contests are up for anywhere from a day to a week and you can play them over and over again, trying to beat your best score (though your last attempt is always the one used in the leaderboards).  When you start the competition and while you are playing, you see the score of the next highest band (I know some XBox Live Arcade games use a similar mechanic).  Pretty simple overall.

It’s incredibly fun and very addictive.  It also handles a lot of issues that we run into when playing together: not wanting to compete against other people (don’t want to be bad at the game, don’t want to deal with people in our little world of two), being able to play cooperatively and having that cooperation make us better than playing on our own, and having an objective that is achievable (competing against the next best score, not the highest score).  We can also play on our time since we’re really only competing against the scoreboard, and not some live people on the other side.

Last night we played one battle about half a dozen times (the Shooting Star battle, I believe).  Each time, we got slightly better at the song, went up in the rankings, and just had a blast.  In many ways, we were just competing against ourselves, but you get the illusion of competing against another band while in the song and you get the real overall competition of everyone playing that battle.

Highly recommended, lots of fun.  We’ll talk more about this concept in the future, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.