While I've been keeping up my real instrument practice decently well since I got it (I can now play "Where is My Mind?" fairly cleanly, so that's cool), I still had plastic instruments to finish up business with. Rock Band 2 is a gigantic game, with 84 songs in total and dozens of setlists to burn through arranging those songs in various orders. The last one in the game is The Endless Setlist, which has you playing all 84 in a row, starting with the easiest songs and ending with the hardest. There's no official breaks, but you can pause whenever, though this locks off the Bladder of Steel achievement if you're playing on 360 or PS3. Playing on PS2, this was irrelevant to me.

Given the sheer absurdity of the challenge, I knew I'd have to set aside an entire day to do it, and I took a week between completing stuff like the Impossible Guitar Challenge setlist and the Infinite 2000s Challenge (all 2000s-era songs in one go, 30 in total) and attempting The Endless Setlist to do it. The plan was to do it in twenty song chunks, which takes about 90 minutes given a restart or two, and then similarly 90 minutes of rest. This took me about twelve hours in total as a result—The Endless Setlist itself only takes about six-and-a-half without breaks, but I like to eat and stand up and reply to texts and not be in as much pain too much to have attempted that.

I did this one on bass instead of guitar. Rock Band 2 for PS2 finally lets you play bass in the solo tour mode (the first one did not), and the guitar songs get truly fucking insane in this game. Bass is "easier" in the sense that you don't generally play crazy solos or chordy stuff, but both do still crop up occasionally. You instead need to be really solid; there's a greater score penalty for missing on bass than guitar due to maxing out at a 6x multiplier instead of a 4x multiplier. Gold stars (which I go for over FCs) require perfection on bass even more than guitar. Faster songs have lots of strumming, so that's an endurance thing also. Bass is by no means easy at the end of the setlist, it's just more suited to my playstyle as a rhythm player than a soloist.

Anyway, I just completed it. Here's a little synopsis.

• I gold-starred everything except for eight songs, "Let There Be Rock" 61 songs in being the first I didn't manage it. That song has some really random breaks in the constant droning one-note strumming pattern that tripped me up and I was too lazy to go for again, because the song is long enough. Of the eight I didn't manage, I can definitely do "Let There Be Rock", "Almost Easy", "Souls of Black", and I think "Ace of Spades", which has the same issue as "Rock", just over less time. I've FC'd the guitar chart anyway, so who cares.
• "Chop Suey!", "Panic Attack", "Shoulder to the Plow", and "Visions" round out the eight that I didn't get, but I think I got close with "Plow". "Panic Attack", I figure I could manage if I really practiced the bridge, usually I just fart my way through it strumming too much. "Chop Suey!" is the rare case of, yes, it really is that hard to play in real life also, so I just sorta got good enough to consistently five-star it and called that good enough.
• "Visions" is obnoxious. Black metal isn't my thing anyway, and this has lots of random fast strumming switchups and weird, repetitive triplet 16th sweeps on bass that require you to be both fast (but not too fast!) and precise. (If you're not musically-inclined, triplets basically mean you're playing notes in between beats often, instead of straight, which locks nicely to the steady pulse of the beat. This means they're a lot more feel-based and easy to time incorrectly than normal fast notes.) No thanks. This is the only song in the game I haven't even five-starred. I came close tonight, but restarting and grinding for it was nuking my arms and hazarding my ability to complete the rest of the setlist, so I said fuck it and accepted the four-star.
• I managed three random batshit first time FCs, "Shackler's Revenge", "Spoonman", and fucking "Bodhisattva". "Bodhisattva" is really easy to shitmiss on because of the stupid repetitive forced strumming ascending riff. I was having trouble gold-starring it, so I just kept restarting the song, and my last run, I just never missed! One of the hardest songs in the whole game, and I got it during a marathon run, hours into it and already tired. I think it might be my best FC to date.
• I gold-starred "Painkiller", the final tune. Not the hardest song on bass by a longshot, but the triplet strumming in the choruses usually trips me up because I tend to go too fast on them. I think the fatigue meant I went slower on them and got them really clean and consistently.

At 11:15 tonight, I emerged absolutely wiped, but victorious. Not only did I complete The Endless Setlist and unlock silver bass status in doing so, but my band ranking was upgraded back to gold-star, which was the thing I was really hoping for. (Rock Band 2 ranks your band, so basically your save and game progress, on the band selection screen based on your average star ranking on all the songs you've played, and the harder songs had knocked me down to a five-star ranking instead of a gold-star one.) Maybe that's really silly, to be so excited that a game only I will ever play this save of ranks me at the top, but I wouldn't have sat with a Fisher Price guitar on my lap for twelve hours on and off if I wasn't committed to the silliness.

I think we recently passed a year of me owning Guitar Hero guitars again, after a long time of not owning one when my childhood controller broke. I was so shit with them when I first started again, but I was so hooked. I still own most of my childhood copies of the games, so I just started going through them, in some cases playing them all the way through for the first time really ever (like with Rock Band 2, which came out as I started to get bored of the rhythm game thing). We're talking the first Guitar Hero, II, 80s, the 360-exclusive DLC by way of my Rocks the 360 disc, Rock Band, now 2, the first and second Track Pack discs, the Classic Rock Track Pack, and the AC/DC Live Track Pack.

In total, that's just under 400 songs that I've conquered in the past year. Not counting restarts, failed attempts, casual replays of songs or grinds for score or for progression (say, Rock Band 2 having you play one song multiple times in various setlists), it would take you roughly over 25 hours to play all them just once. In the past year, I have gotten better than I have ever been at these games. Expert FCs used to be science fiction to me, now I get them regularly for I guess songs up to as hard as "Bodhisattva" on bass. Patterns like ascending and descending triplets, quads, even zig-zags sometimes, I can play like they're nothing now. Weird chordy indie rock rhythm playing continues to be my jam, and I've FCed plenty of my own customs.

I truly never imagined I'd come this far playing plastic guitar. Again, if that sounds silly, these games have taught me how to play drums and given me new songs to listen to, a deep appreciation of how music works, and projects to work on galore ever since I received my first copies and my guitar back in 2008. They're one of my longest-running special interests. I adore them and always will. This is all just unfinished business to me. I never beat Rock Band or 2 as a kid, but I gold-starred the entirety of the first game on guitar this summer and managed a gold-star band ranking post-Endless Setlist in 2 just tonight. That's insane.

Of course, I could go further. There's all the Neversoft Guitar Hero games and the Metal and Country Track Pack on the Rock Band side of things. I'm not going to, though; the nostalgia for the former just isn't there for me, and while I have an old emulator keyboard save for the Metal Track Pack, I just have no interest in getting my ass kicked again by "Shockwave" or "Waking the Demon" any time soon. (And Country is country, even if "Sin Wagon" is a crazy tune and "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" is the funniest song ever written.) I'm happy with all I've played and where I've gotten, and I think it's time, outside of marfGH (we're releasing Volume 1 on Christmas, by the way), to hang it up for a good long while and play something else.

Or, y'know, get back to being creative. I was doodling a bit during rest periods today. My aim is to get back to full speed with that, finish the cammy.somnol rework, and draw lots more OC stuff. Gonna stop being lame about them and start being as awesome with them as I am with this plastic guitar. That "Bodhisattva" FC ain't right.

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