Music
Via CrispyGamer, Harmonix have confirmed what I pretty much suspected, that there will be no Rock Band 3 in 2009. I’m not surprised, they already have the Beatles game in the making for 2009, and unlike Activision, Harmonix aren’t in the business of spamming the world with as many rushed sequels as they can manage before the general public gets bored. To be honest, I don’t think there’s much they could do to improve Rock Band 2 anyway, it’s a highly polished game and DLC keeps it fresh (and to be honest, I have so many tracks that we already have almost too much choice when we play - not that it will stop me buying more).
The MacWorld Expo 2009 is on at the moment, and yesterday was the keynote, which was interesting despite the absence of the turtle-necked wonder (get well soon Steve). By far the best news was that the entire iTunes library is going DRM-free by the end of March 09. As of yesterday, 80% of the songs are DRM-free, and the remaining 20% will have their DRM removed in the next 3 months.
I had a nice surprise from my wife this Christmas, a spangly red kidney-shaped surprise in fact - a POD 2.0. I’d been recommended one of these some time ago, but had put it on my ‘future purchases’ list since I didn’t think I was really good enough to justify buying myself one yet. I wasn’t expecting anyone to buy it for me, so it was a pleasant surprise to unwrap it.
Yay, almost as if they read my last post on the subject, Harmonix have stopped overlooking Snow Patrol! Next week on DLC we’ll get ‘Take Back The City’ from their new album, A Hundred Million Suns. I’d post a video of it here, except that YouTube says that it’s ’not available in your country’. You know, that same country the damn thing originated from. Grr, getting really irritated by that message these days.
They seriously do. Next week, while predictably there’s a 3-pack of slightly toe-curling but at least somewhat unusual Christmas numbers (and with no Slade, thankfully), they’ve also lined up 3 more Foo Fighters tracks: This is a Call (from debut album ‘Foo Fighters’, 1995) Times Like These (from ‘One by One’, 2002) DOA (from ‘In Your Honor’, 2003) I’ve been crying out for DOA for ages, so this is great news.
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.
Hmm, I really haven’t had a lot of time to blog lately, I seem to be playing catch-up with something or other whenever I’m at the keyboard (due in part, of course, to the fact that I’m at the keyboard less than I used to be). However, I thought I’d take a few minutes to share my opinion of Guitar Hero : World Tour now I’ve had a chance to play it 4-player at a friend’s place.
When Harmonix promised at E3 that 500 songs would be in Rock Band by the end of 2008, that seemed an awfully ambitious number. But over the past few months the DLC release schedule has been going nuts, including many full-album releases, such as the very welcome The Colour and the Shape, and the not so welcome (in our house anyway) Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? . So it seems that 500 songs wasn’t so much of a challenge after all - as of right now, according to rockbandcontent.
I haven’t been able to get Journey’s ‘Any Way You Want It’ out of my head for 2 days now. That’s one of the more nefarious results of picking up Rock Band 2 this week. It’s had to fight tooth and nail with Left 4 Dead for play time, especially since it’s another primarily co-op game (and the other major one, Gears 2, has already been relegated to the Xmas list), but we’ve squeezed a few hours in so far.
My new guitar arrived this weekend 😀 It’s a Pacifica 112V, and I picked the Old Violin Sunburst finish. I’m really impressed by the quality of it, considering this is a beginner / intermediate guitar and will leave you with change out of £200. Everything feels really solid, and there are nice little touches like the polished fretboard and the chunky, satisfying chrome tone & volume knobs. Even the guy in our local guitar shop (who has a ton more experience than I do, obviously, and is a high-end Strat user) commented on how impressed he was with the quality, since this was the first of the newer model they’d had in.