Rock Band: The Next Great Franchise - Page 196

Man that sucks. PSN is going to be 20+ songs behind, and who know's how long it'll take to catch back up.

the Frampton song will be a doozy to complete on expert guitar I'm sure (13 minutes I think)

Limited PSN is up in California. No store yet, but you can play online multi-player, if you're into that (I think) and it won't keep bugging you to sign in for Netflix and VUDU .

Now that it's available, and PSN is back up, and some of you have had it for a few weeks, what are your thoughts on the guitar? Durability? Sound quality when played through a guitar amp? For those of you familiar with guitars, how does it compare to other Squire guitars, like a Squire Bullet Strat or a Squire Deluxe Strat? Lastly, can you still use lefty mode with the Squire? Just curious as I play lefty, but it would primarily be for my son, and might get me to also learn righty, which would come in handy sometimes...

Thanks

It's "Squier"--proper surname, not the word for a Knight's assistant (though I suppose that can be a surname too). The misspelling always grates on me though I try to ignore it, but you did it 5 times in one post.

Dammit! I was going for 6! So do you have any experience with the instrument?

Not yet--I have two other pro guitar controllers but I won't be able to resist buying one of these eventually. Sorry for the little outburst .

There is endless discussion of the guitar/controller in several threads in the Rock Band subforum at RockBand.com.

You should also check out an excellent 3-part video review of the instrument by the guitarist of a band called "Rose of Jericho" who have several DLC songs in RB:

I don't have time to post anything substantial right now or for the immediate future, but I have owned the Squier since it was first available in the beginning of March, and I'll try to post some in-depth impressions at some point.

In the meantime, the capsule summary is: it doesn't sound great as a guitar, but it's amazing.

Ozzy 8 pack coming May 31st and us PS3 owners will probably be lucky if we can even get them.

Even if the PS Store is up and the RB songs have been caught up, I'm leery about updating to the 3.61 Firmware after reading reports of a lot of older PS3s overheating and shutting down.

I agree. Harmonix has always had a closer relationship with Microsoft than they have with Sony, and I think this issue with the PSN is not going to help bring things any closer. It will probably be quite a while before the DLC is caught up and hopefully this doesn't cause HMX to slowly pull out of the PS3 market. I've got a strong feeling that the initial DLC updates in the PSN Store will be purely for Sony products and FPS games, while RB DLC will be one of the last things to catch up due to Sony's dictator like QA process.

Yeah, there isn't really anything credible here past the bolded part. Harmonix is limited by Sony's approval process, and Sony is going to be very motivated to get back to business as usual. I expect we'll be caught up in a few weeks to a month at the most.

I have a 60GB I bought about year after launch and it updated just fine. For the record.

That's good to know. Thanks.

On another subject, I just went back and checked the songs I want since the PSN went down. It comes out to roughly $50. I was kinda hoping on not putting anymore money on my CC this month so I would be fine with a gradual release of the songs we're missing. It would still be the same amount, but I wouldn't have to shell out the whole amount all at once.

Yeah, I know, I could limit myself and get it eventually. If you knew how impatient a person I am, you'd know I couldn't do that.

I have a 60 GB that I bought about 4 months after launch and I have the same concern, but I took the upgrade.

What I've heard is that it's overheating while running certain games. Since I rarely play games on my PS3, I'm not too worred. My housemate/landlord borrows it occasionally to play MLB: The Show (having sold his broken one and not replaced it ); I'll have to ask him to set up a table fan to blow on it.

I'd like to see Harmonix sell RB songs for half price during the flood of releases while catching back up.

If there never was an outage, I'd probably of bought the entire Pantera pack out of boredom. Now I might buy 1 of the songs.

Single song releases like Faith No More might not get any downloads while people try to get caught up with the more popular choices...

My red pad is getting off,..like an Air bubble. Anyways so I dissamble it and put some glue but it's effect ran off rather quickly. what's the best glue to use?

I had that happen. I pulled the pad back and used silicone. It held.

The Peter Frampton song was worth the wait.

It's on my list .

I think I am going to pass on the Ozzy pack, though. I only want three of the songs, of course two being exclusive, and there are three songs I don't really like. Not good enough.

http://www.rockband.com/blog/rock-ba...g-this-sunmmer

make sure to save some star power for the final solo... nothing like spending 13 minutes and failing on the last part!

A couple of excellent 80's tunes should be a big hit around these parts: http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=220658.

Yes, please!

some good tunes (especially the "Live" ones)... but I don't play this game enough anymore to justify spending $2 per song. All of my friends are tired of it too... so I feel guilty buying new music

BTW, it appears that manufacture of the Squier has been discontinued by Fender--see this thread in the RB forums for details.

If you were thinking about buying one, you might want to buy it soon--as supplies dwindle they'll be going for much more than the list price (I ordered one from Buy.com yesterday--already had a MIDI Pro Adapter bought for something else).

Pro-guitar/bass never really appealed to me so it's not a real sad thing. I'm psyched with the upcoming music for next week. While I don't play the game nearly as often as I used to, when I have friends over and we have a few beers in us, we'll see the guitars hanging on the wall, the keyboard on the shelf, and the mic on the floor and throw the game in. I've got 1100 songs to play now, so it's really still the best thing out there for a party setting. I'm psyched about the tracks coming out, and the Ozzy pack was full of win.

So it still hasn't been properly released outside the US, and now it won't ever be? Nice!

Thanks for passing along the info.

Yeah, it appears as if HMX was caught off guard by this as well.

Clarifying the Squier issue, the same thread on the Rock Band Forum indicates that Fender HAS NOT discontinued the Squier. They have simply opted to not take requests to fill back orders at this time, meaning the guitar/controllers will trickle out as they get them made, and people just need to be on the look out for them at the stores. Manufacturing continues, and support continues... it's just a more complicated and precise piece of equipment than the standard plastic controllers, and it is going to take a while for them to catch up with demand.

Your interpretation of HMX's statement (Fender hasn't made any public pronouncement) is pretty much unique. In that thread it's generally accepted that Fender has ceased production because they believe there's more than enough of them in "the retail channel". Though they haven't announced discontinuation, they are apparently not manufacturing them.

Have you read that thread? The thread was opened by someone outside of the US who was told by a vendor that the product was discontinued; multiple other people in Europe responded saying that their preorders were cancelled and their deposits returned. New orders are not being accepted in Australia, but apparently a shipment has been received for filling at least some of the existing preorders. (I think that the UK got one shipment as well, some weeks ago before this controversy erupted). I found 7 US e-tailers listing them one week, including Sam Ash, Sweetwater, Musicians Friend and Guitar Center; the following week all of them had removed the entry, some with pages stating the the product was discontinued. Except for support information, the product pages on squierguitars.com (product description and spec-page) have been removed and the instrument does not appear in Fender's price list any longer; search for the product's model number on either Fender site and you get no matches.

Meanwhile, there's an apparent wealth of them in the US. People keep reporting seeing a few of them at their local Best Buy stores. They are not flying off the shelf here anymore. We've speculated that there's probably a fairly high rate of product returns. They'll certainly get some returns from people who didn't realize how hard it is to learn to play. Out of the box, the instruments commonly have some sort of film on some of the fret contacts which prevents them from registering, as well as the B and e strings needing adjustment before strums of them are easily recognized (you can get them to register if you strum them very hard). If you participate in the online forums, it's easy to learn how to deal with those problems, but most people who aren't aware of the information in the forums would just return them. I got one of these on the 11th and had both problems, but I'd been reading about them for months on the rockband.com forums and dealt with them. (The string sensitivity adjustment screws which I tweaked aren't even mentioned in the manual).

The fact is that there's a demand for them outside of the US and nowhere to get them. Fender doesn't seem to care. When contacted (in the US ande elsewhere) Fender's offices are still saying that the product is discontinued.

Buffalo Springfield – “For What It’s Worth” X
R.E.M. – “Man On the Moon”
System of a Down – “Aerials”X
System of a Down – “Hypnotize”
The Vapors – “Turning Japanese” X

Athough these singles end up costing more versus bundles, I prefer these kinds of releases with a mix of genres.