DLC
I could hug Harmonix. They have lived up to their original promise to providing a large, ever-expanding and varied collection of tracks on Rock Band with the kind of fervour that I think even fans have been surprised by. Apart from a couple of odd cases (Lego Rock Band and Beatles: Rock Band - the former puzzling, the latter due to brand management insistence that The Beatles should be revered as gods and can’t be seen mixing with peasants) Harmonix have avoided fragmenting the content available as much as possible and the result is a lot of people who have no reason to buy another music game; in fact there’s a positive incentive not to.
RockBandContent.com is being shut down because the maintainer hasn’t got time to do it anymore, which is a shame because it’s a really nice site for browsing the increasingly crushing number of Rock Band tracks available and finding videos of people playing the charts before you buy. However, I found over time that the best videos came from corporalgregg2, who always posts full-band videos which saves a lot of time over the individual instrument videos, as well as being very good so you can actually hear the song with everyone playing on Expert 😀So I’m just subscribed to him from now on for reviewing the new songs as they come out.
So, following my 360’s demise I was looking up the practicalities of using an alternate borrowed machine temporarily until the repair is turned around. I’ve bought a lot of DLC (mostly Rock Band, but also quite a few XBLA games, Gears maps etc), and I know the license for them is associated with the machine, so I looked up the license transfer tool. All seemed pretty sensible and reasonable - I’d have to download everything again, but that’s no big deal.
Cool, another relatively unknown (in the US anyway) British band is getting their start in Rock Band next week; Glasvegas with their track Geraldine. It’s a really good song, so great that it’s in there. Should I be ashamed that I’m glad Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” is in there too? Probably. And… Spongebob. Yeah, that Spongebob, it’s not some quirky ironic punk band or something. Bizarre - one for the kids though I guess 😀
This week’s Rock Band DLC has gone a little bit country, which induces me to grimace at horrible, horrible memories of when Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus were on the radio every other day - thank goodness that particular fad has passed before I was forced to go all Van Gogh on myself. But still, music is personal after all, and if you want to listen to hokey tunes with madatory banjo solos, that’s your business.
I just happened to see some PSN DLC track prices for both Rock Band and GHWT on a Kotaku article, and they left me rather puzzled. You would have thought that these prices would be fairly homogenised by now, but bizarrely enough I found no fewer than 3 different prices, depending on what system and game you were looking at. Here we go: “Police Truck” by the Dead Kennedys (Rock Band)
Some of the Rock Band full-album DLC I’ve been really looking forward to is finally getting released next week; The Colour and the Shape by Foo Fighters. Finally I can play Monkey Wrench again (it was in Guitar Hero 2 - although only in cover form), plus the bonus of classics like My Hero, Hey! Johnny Park and - well, there really aren’t any bad tracks on this album. The only shame is that I have the remastered & extended version of the album, which includes an extra 6 tracks, but none of those have made it in, it’s strictly the original version of the album.
Well, Harmonix confirmed the list of 20 ‘free’ DLC tracks included in the Rock Band 2 retail bundle, and here it is: The 88 - “Sons and Daughters” Authority Zero - “No Regrets” Between the Buried and Me - “Prequel To The Sequel” The Cab - “Bounce” The Chevelles - “Get It On” The Cocktail Slippers - “Give It To Me” Dealership - “Database Corrupted” Endeverafter - “I Wanna Be Your Man”
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 (!
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.