Rock Band 2!

So. Antwon and I took a vacation last week.
Rock Band 2 came out last Sunday (9/14).
If you think these two items are connected… you are correct. The process went something like this: “Hey, we haven’t taken vacation since our honeymoon. We could plan a roadtrip, but we’re feeling pretty stressed out and burned out. Hey, how about we just take a week off and hide in the apartment? Awesome. Oh, and Rock Band 2 comes out 9/14…”
Rock Band 2 is awesome. It is made more awesome by the insanity we went through to get a copy at midnight on 9/14.

I started calling various places (Game Stops and Best Buys, mostly) about a week in advance, but none of the ones I reached were having midnight releases. This is understandable — RB2 was only coming out for XBox and it wasn’t even a bundle. But still, annoying!
The night of 9/13, I had a dinner shindig with some friends, and when I came home, I was itching for a midnight release. So, I started hunting for a place that might have RB2 for sale and be open past midnight. They wouldn’t be having an event or anything, but surely they’d have a copy and sell it to us at 12:01am, right?
Some Blockbusters are open past midnight, and they sell video games. I found one up in Berkeley (about an hour from us) and they had a single disc they would sell us — but store policy is not to accept holds on Saturdays, so we’d have to drive up and cross our fingers that nobody had the same idea. I found another Blockbuster in San Leandro (about half an hour away) that also was open til 1am and had one copy. So we headed out.
Finding it turned out to be an adventure — see, when I mapped it, Google Maps put it at a different location than Blockbuster.com did. I (foolishly!) believed the store website, and we wound up driving around a housing development which did not contain a Blockbuster.
Fortunately, I remembered where Google Maps had said it was, and we managed to find it without too much hassle.
BUT!
When we arrived, I was waiting in line to talk to someone when we noticed a geeky-looking fellow with a Blockbuster employee walking toward the back of the store and talking about Rock Band! OH NO! OUR PRECIOUS SINGLE COPY! We hustled after and were told that yes, the guy was there to buy Rock Band 2. We had a little back and forth:

Us: We called earlier!
Him: So did I!
Us: Well… when did you call? We called an HOUR ago!
Him: I called at 5pm today.
Us: Damn. Um. Well, we drove here from Santa Clara!
Him:San Mateo.
Us: OK, you crossed a body of water, you have us beat. Dammit.

But the employee thought they might have a second copy, so we hung out while the employee and (after a while) a manager hunted for the disc(s). As it turned out, they did not have a second copy.
BUT!
The manager had called another San Leandro Blockbuster and they had a copy, and were willing to stay open past midnight to sell it to us. SCORE!
BUT!
When the manager told us how to get there, his directions weren’t terribly clear, and we wound up driving for a while in the completely wrong direction. FAIL. We did find it eventually, though, and the wonderful employees were indeed still there and they unlocked the door and took our money and handed us our precious copy of RB2.
YAY!
So we went home and played and got the special game achievement for playing between midnight and 9am on release day. HOORAY!
We then spent a whole week playing RB2 until our arms (and in my case, legs — damn kick pedal!) were sore. Good times. RB2 has some definite advantages over RB1 — just about all the things that made us irritated at the first game are fixed in this one, and all the good things are still there. Yay!
And they all rocked out happily ever after.