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Looks like a bug has been discovered in Rock Band 2 that can randomly reset your band’s progress under a certain set of curcumstances. So far it appears that it only happens if you play the career mode with a certain combination of accounts - notably a player with a Live-enabled account, and a player with a non-Live-enabled account.

Here’s hoping they fix it before the UK release, although I actually don’t think I’d suffer from it anyway, since Marie & I both have Live accounts, and when other people play they don’t use their own accounts, they just jump in as ‘Player 3′ or whatever; so far those combinations sound like they’re immune to this bug.

The moral of the story would seem to be not to use non-Live accounts with Rock Band 2. I’m not sure why you would anyway, if your machine is connected to the internet, since a ’silver’ Live account is free anyway (and it’s still a ‘Live-enabled account’ - you get leaderboards & gamerscore tracking but not multiplayer). Still, a nasty bug if you happened to get caught by it.

Looks like the new Rock Band site is going live as we speak, they have a placeholder page up right now. The new site will allegedly let you take photos of your band to share online, get (real) T-shirts branded with your bands logo and other fun (yet entirely pointless) things. Obviously I’m looking forward to seeing that.

Since I’ve been taking a rare weekend off, I took the time to download the latest batch of XBLA demos to check out the latest slices of (hopefully) juicy bite-sized gameplay. The results were mixed.

Braid

I’d actually downloaded the demo for this a while ago, but at that stage I’d been pretty short of time, and on getting frustrated with a particular section I had tossed it aside and gone with the far more immediate Geometry Wars 2 instead. But, I came back to it, and when you’re in a more relaxed state and can take the time to ponder the game, it’s actually very good. An interesting platform-puzzler with a nice central idea (the manipulation of time), very solid game design, and a nice art style. Personally I’ve yet to appreciate the genius of the narrative, which seems a little overly self-indulgent to me right now, but people have been applauding it for where it ultimately culminates so I’ll just reserve judgement on that for now. We’ve bought it anyway; it’s certainly interesting enough to justify the purchase.

Mega Man 9

I’ve never actually played a Mega Man before, and 10 minutes with this convinced me I hadn’t been missing much. Quite why Capcom would choose, in 2008 with the full glories of modern technology at their fingertips, to replicate the graphics and sound (and I use that term in the broadest possible sense, ‘poorly modulated noise’ would be more accurate) of the NES with quite so much authenticity I don’t know. I really don’t see the point of creating a new product and making it look and sound like the emulation of an old one - surely if the gameplay is that good, smoothing off a few rough edges and making the sound not shred my eardrums would not be a heresy? Next, you discover that the difficulty level is such that it makes Ghosts and Goblins look like a cake walk. I didn’t even get to the end of the first level before grinding my teeth to powder. Maybe if you grew up with the NES and Mega Man (I didn’t, the NES was never officially released in the UK and I don’t remember even the later ports of MM being very  popular), maybe you’ll find this nostalgia captivating. Although to be honest, my experience of going back to old games (such as through the Wii Virtual Console) has been profound disappointment and shattered memories; it’s generally best to just remember your old games as fantastic, rather than to re-experience them, IMO. However, many reviews have said MM9 is great, so I will have to assume that someone out there likes this game. I personally found it to be a stupidly hard, annoying platform game with some of the worst graphics and sound I’ve sat through in a long time, and about as entertaining as paying someone to randomly stick a fork in my leg. But I guess there are people who are into that kind of thing too.

War World

Oh dear. The first thing I noticed is that it makes what I thought was a fundamental set of incredibly basic demo errors, which in themselves would make me toss it away. Firstly, although the full game allows you to choose from around 10 mechs, the demo only lets you use one. Assuming there are differences that would nuance the gameplay, any developer with half a brain would imbue the demo with 2 mechs to test at least, to allow the player to see what the kind of differences might be. Secondly, the demo is limited by time - you can play for no more than about a minute before you’re kicked out, making any kind of evaluation of the game almost impossible. If this was a quality game, hobbling the demo like this would be absolute stupidity on the part of the game developer. However from what I read, the game is a bit rubbish so perhaps not letting you see much of it in the demo is a blessing. What struck me most of all in the tiny slice of time I got to experience it was that they got the scale all wrong. If you’re going to make a game about robots, they have to be big robots. The smallest one should be as big as tall as a 2-storey house, minimum. Instead, they’ve taken the bizarre decision to make the robots only slightly taller than Bob Hope, meaning that it comes across as just a poor UT3 knock-off with robot skins. Inexplicable.

Duke Nukem 3D

Talking of nostalgia, this was fun to put on for about 10 minutes. Duke is of course basically Doom with a sense of humour, some more interesting weapons & environments, copious one-liners stolen from Evil Dead and They Live, and strippers. Certainly entertaining in short bursts, and it provoked fond memories of the deathmatch games we used to have in our youth (there were a number of hilarious pipe-bomb incidents in particular that resurfaced in my memory on seeing familiar parts of maps). But, the world has moved on - it best serves like an old family album, reminding you of the good times - so much of this kind of game relied on the technology (wow, we can look up and down, sort of!), it’s not really enough anymore to hold your interest for very long.

So, Braid is recommended, everything else only if you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do with your time and money

One of the things I like about Rock Band is that the DLC is regular, reasonably priced and à la carte - you can pick just the tracks you want and it doesn’t break the bank. Guitar Hero conversely has so far not released very much DLC, generally charges more for it (500 points for a 3-song pack compared to 80-120 points per track in Rock Band), and doesn’t give you the option of just purchasing the tracks you want - it’s the whole pack or nothing, making it much less convenient.

Worse are the ‘band branded’ retail supplements like GH: Aerosmith which are the ultimate in forced bulk purchasing, and something I’ve always looked on with derision. They’re chronically expensive, they’re all-or-nothing, you’re no doubt paying for stuff you don’t really want or need (like the modelling of Steve Tyler’s frankly shocking visage, which I imagine took every ounce of normal mapping skill on the part of the artist to capture its craggy terrain) - they’re the antethesis of the self-service, customer-pleasing DLC that Rock Band offers. You could say that Rock Band 2 is the same, but there’s 2 differences: 1) you’re getting a refined play experience, and 2) you get 106 varied tracks for your money, a massive saving over regular DLC. Together those are enough to justify it, so long as it’s a rare occurrence.

All was well until this week, when MTV announced that they would be releasing Rock Band : AC/DC (exclusively through Wal-Mart in the US) - a band-branded physical media add-on precisely in the vein of GH: Aerosmith, and that it wouldn’t be made available as DLC. Worse, it’s even more of a rip off than GH:A, costing a whopping £30 for a paltry 18 tracks. What the hell are they thinking?

If there’s a tissue-thin silver lining to this story, it’s that at least you can transfer all the songs from the disc into Rock Band 2 as pseudo-DLC, just like you can with the Rock Band 1 tracks; so at least you’re not condemned to disc-swapping. But still, you can’t buy it any other way than all in one shrink-wrapped package, and the price is daylight robbery - who forgot to tell them that when you bulk-buy, you should get goods at a lower price? Beyond the price, I fundamentally disagree with the forced packaging, and the exclusive arrangement they’re taking with this one, it’s an entirely retrograde step and entirely at odds with everything Harmonix have been doing so far.

Harmonix have stated that they don’t like exclusive content, that they dislike restricting music choice, and I completely agree with that. One of the reasons I like Rock Band is that you really do get the sense it’s made by people who know and love music more than anything else. My guess (hope?) is that it’s not them who made this call - maybe the business guys at MTV overruled them, seeing the dollar signs lighting up. Or, maybe it was AC/DC’s management who refused to allow the piecemeal DLC route; they’re one of the few remaining bands who don’t allow track downloads via iTunes (either because of greed, snobbery, luddite tendencies, who knows). Or maybe Wal-Mart dangled a fat juicy bribe in front of the MTV biz guys and led them down the dark path. I don’t know - but I’d really rather not believe that Harmonix have lost their way here, given how in touch with the customer they’ve been so far. I hope it’s a one-off special case; if MTV start doing this for other bands the way Activision has openly said it plans to, it will seriously erode my respect for the Rock Band franchise. Given the goodwill Harmonix have built up so far doing things the ‘right’ customer-friendly way with DLC, contrasting markedly with the way Activision have been doing things, the very last thing they should be doing is tossing all that down the crapper switching to an overtly corporate approach.

I don’t much care for AC / DC anyway so I can happily ignore this; had they released it via the normal DLC channels I might have purchased a couple of signature tracks, such as Back in Black, but there’s no way I’m going to buy an entire disc full; so they’ve lost a sale or two there, and I would expect that applies to others who have merely a passing acquaintance with the band. In essence, which band it is doesn’t matter; it’s the precedent that it sets which is very concerning.

Note to Baz: I wrote the majority of this post before you accused me of ignoring the story because of my raging Rock Band bias

Looks like I could be getting my wish and Rock band 2 will be out in the UK before the end of the year:

Yep, that’s a UK official Microsoft ad saying it, so I think that’s pretty certain (for 360 at least). So it’s November - unsurprisingly the very time that GH:WT comes out - makes sense.

Woohoo - looks like we can look forward to having 500 tracks to choose from this side of the pond too, instead of a just the measly 400 (!) we’d have with RB1 + DLC. All the refinements to the little niggles should be great too (like drum fills that use the samples from the song, better quickplay etc) We still don’t know what the 20 free DLC tracks are in RB2 yet, my guess is they’ll wait until the GH:WT marketing machine starts up in the USA (which I think is next month), and use that as an extra card.

I’m actually getting better at Won’t Get Fooled Again on Hard on the drums. Every time I play it I can’t help but admire Keith Moon; his drum parts are just so far out there in comparison to almost any other. He might have been a nutter, but he was a genius with a pair of drumsticks.

Oh, Love Spreads is as good as I hoped too, huge fun on guitar and drums and definitely one of my new favourites. And we have a full album of Chili Peppers next week - in a way it’s a shame they chose Blood Sugar Sex Magick, By The Way or Californication would have been my personal choice, but still, it should be good.

I just watched the Little Big Planet beta video that VG247 posted, and I have to say well done to Media Molecule for creating a game with a definite British feel to it (as well as it still looking damn interesting). I complained a while back about the overt Americanisation in so much of the output of British studios in recent years, losing a lot of the regional quirkiness that I think enhances content from any country, so I’m glad to see the spirit is not dead. In particular I liked the use of the ‘gallery’ music from Take Hart, which is hugely appropriate. Great way to get the credits actually watched too. LBP remains the one exclusive that piques my interest on PS3 and I’m looking forward to having a play with it on a friends machine.

I’ve read that Fable 2 has a definite British slant to it too, I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out next month.

For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.

Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) - some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.

Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting - after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.

Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper - that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced - we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform.  All these things are interlinked - the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (’core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more - both as producers and consumers - and to see what works.

I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me - we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.

Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?

Finally! I’d already had She Bangs the Drums in GH3, but it’s not one of the Roses’ best tracks and the GH3 implementation was, typically, not that much fun.

There’s a small handful of tracks on Guitar Hero : World Tour that I would like to see in Rock Band, and one was Love Spreads by The Stone Roses. Luckily next week’s Rock Band DLC includes this track, so that’s one crossed off my list. It’s still not one of my favourite tracks, but it’s still quintessentially Stone Roses and more interesting than She Bangs the Drums - I’m certainly looking forward to the Harmonix take on John Squire’s riffs and Reni’s drums.

The Stone Roses did a massive amount to shake up the tired 80’s music scene and were in the vanguard of early Indie in the early 90’s, but are still ignored by a lot of people today. A combination of poor management, dodgy legal problems and their own incredible stupidity meant they didn’t realise their potential, but I remember the first time I heard Fool’s Gold - in 1989/1990 it was just so different. For anyone interested, the BBC did a documentary about the Roses which is fairly informative although I think they dismiss their second, admittedly 6-year late, album (Second Coming) a little too quickly; despite them being out of fashion by then and no longer fresh (since the sound had already been copied & furthered by others by then) I think it’s still good.

Now, Harminix/MTV please can we have Fool’s Gold, Waterfall, What the World is Waiting For, Mersey Paradise, Daybreak, Breaking Into Heaven.. hell, almost anything. Tell you what, I’ll just give you my wallet now, ok?

You’ve no doubt heard about the first tests of CERN’s LHC today, but the folks at Reddit are clearly ahead of the game on this and are making sure that the scientists are adequately prepared for the discoveries that may be around the corner. They’ve taken the prudent step of sending CERN a crowbar, a copy of the Half Life Strategy Guide, and a ‘training headcrab’, together with a simple note:

“Get this to Gordon Freeman. He’ll know what to do.”

When pan-dimensional hell breaks loose, we’ll know who to thank for our ultimate salvation.

I just read that EA has decided to drop the RRP of Rock Band in Europe ahead of the PS3 / PS2 / Wii release this Friday, to £109 instead of £129 for the instruments edition (game is still extra).

This is good, but I’m not sure whether it will be reflected in the practical price you pay; Play.com were already selling the instruments bundle for less than this lower RRP (£99) right from release in May (on 360), and Amazon matched it fairly quickly. Whether they will also reflect this RRP price drop I’m not sure, I guess it depends if anyone goes first.

There was such a massive backlash against the Rock Band pricing in Europe, which is somewhat understandable but lessened somewhat when you take into account that a) the shockingly high £189.99 RRP isn’t actually what you end up paying (I paid £133), b) we always pay more in Europe anyway, thanks to languages and regulations, it’s why $59.99 games are £49.99 here when they should be more like £35 c) the US exchange rate has come off its highs now, denting the conversion calculations to some degree; but as yet I’ve heard pretty much no consternation about the GH:WT price, which - shock - is pretty much comparable. Play & Amazon have it listed at £159.99, which is £20 more expensive than they’re selling Rock Band for (before any potential reduction from today’s announcement) once you add in the game. They are however bundling a bass guitar which would normally cost an extra £30-60 (depending on which one you buy) so that does make it cheaper if you had needed to buy all 4 instruments. But, if you already own a guitar from GH3 I’m sure you’d rather have the £30-60 off rather than the bundled bass - but of course the reduction in price wouldn’t be anywhere near that large without the bundling, since they’re no doubt doing it at cost. My guess is that eBay will be awash with unwanted GH:WT wireless bass guitars come the November release date.

Whichever way you slice it, there’s not that much difference in the prices. These games are expensive, which sucks, but if you want this unique experience, you have to pay the ante; bitching about it and crying ‘boycott’ will in practice do very little except deny yourself that experience while all the people who do choose to save up for it have a great time. Supply & demand rules apply - despite the vocal boycott brigade, most people will make their own decisions on whether they think it’s worth it. I’m glad I had a load of PS2 Guitar Hero stuff to sell on eBay to help fund my Rock Band experience, but even if I didn’t I would still have bought it, and I haven’t regretted the outlay one iota. The disc hasn’t left my 360 since May and we’ve had hours and hours of collective fun with it. The way I look at it, it cost me the equivalent of about 3.5 normal full-price games, and I strongly believe it’s given me at least that multiple in enjoyment compared to any other single game I own - more so when you add in the collective enjoyment on social occasions. And I don’t see us stopping playing it any time soon - GH2 lasted us a year, and that was without the weekly DLC that makes Rock Band so rich with variety. It may just be a silly game with expensive plastic instruments, but my goodness it delivers a damn fine dollop of fun

One of the latest items of news in the music game scene is that Sting is now confimed to be lending his likeness to Guitar Hero : World Tour, along with the already announced / leaked likes of Ted Nugent, Billy Corgan, Jimi Hendrix, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Now, I can imagine marketing men getting excited about being able to include famous characters in a game, in a wonderful brand marketing / halo effect / leveraging synergy moment, but I look at these announcements and really can’t give a rat’s arse. I wondered if it was just me that thought this feature was completely pointless, but it appears I’m not alone.

See, I play music games because ‘playing’ along to tracks you love, particularly with a bunch of friends, is a huge amount of fun. I don’t play them because I want to ‘be’ Slash, or Sting, or Ozzy, or anyone else. I don’t want to be them, I just like to play some of their tracks. If anything, embodying some of these rockers in a game would put me off; let’s face it, some musicians, despite being very talented, are total wankers. There are plenty of bands I can think of that I like, but would never want to socialise with even if I had the opportunity. Personally I don’t hold being a bit of a twat against them if they make great music, but would I want to pretend to be them? No thanks.

Of course the ability to compete against & then play as rock stars arrived in GH3, and not only was I not interested in playing the characters in that game, the way they were introduced was one of the worst mechanics in the entire game - the boss battles. These were so irretrievably awful and painful to play that I can only conclude that either the entire QA team was completely retarded, or that they raised the fact that the boss battles were a rubbish idea but were overruled by those higher up because it was a great bullet-point on the box, even if in practice it was crap. I’m betting it’s the latter, and I’m also betting that these same people are responsible for using precious resources on getting more rock stars faces into the game, resources that presumably could have been spent elsewhere on the core game experience. It makes sense from a marketing point of view, but makes absolutely bugger all difference to the actual game.

Suits: 1 Game players: 0

I’m still reserving judgement on GH:WT until I get to play it, but focussing on stuff like this when they haven’t even confirmed the setlist yet seems like an odd set of priorities, and after GH3’s many rough edges they still have everything to prove to me. A lot of people concentrate on Red Octane’s hardware (which is looking good) as GH:WT’s advantage, but since instruments will now be interchangeable I don’t buy this so much; the experience delivered by the software is paramount. We’ll see.