So, last week Harmonix officially announced Rock Band 2, the sequel to the super awesome band simulation game Rock Band. I was immediately excited to hear about this, I’ve spent a LOT of time playing Rock Band, and have downloaded a considerable amount of music for it as well. You can check out all the details from Harmonix's official announcement, but I'm going to give you a quick list of what I’m excited about in the upcoming release:

Backwards Compatibility
You will be able to use all the downloaded content from your original Rock Band, as well as import the music from the first game disc, giving you a HUGE library of music to play.

86 New Tracks + 20 Free Downloadable tracks
With the release of RB2 Harmonix will be releasing 20 extra songs online for free to download making the total number of songs, not including your old music from RB1, is 106. That's a LOT of music! Just using music as a factor alone you're paying roughly 60 cent's a song.

Instruments
They have learned from their mistakes and made adjustments to improve the instruments. The guitar fret buttons are less noisy, and the strum bar is less "Squishy". The drum pads are not much less noisy and a little bouncier, to improve stick action. They have also put expansion ports on the drum kit to allow a cymbal expansion kit to be added on to really give that rock star drummer feel.

I'm pretty excited for this game, The visuals don't seemed to have changed much, if at all. Which isn't a problem in my eyes. I'm hoping for some improvements to the online play for the PS3, better player searching and what not. I'd like to see duals available for more than just two people. Imagine having 4 drummers going at it at the same time! A battle mode would be cool as well. Some way to compete against somebody on a different instrument as well would be fun. We will just have to wait to see.