Rock Band: The Next Great Franchise - Page 199

They are $3 on RockSmith ;-)

What exactly would you expect a song to cost? Singles are $1.29 on iTunes and these songs have six to eight charts spread through four difficulties with animation and lighting. It's one thing to say that you don't want to buy a song, but to say that $2 is too expensive absolutely blows my mind. Perhaps you'd like them to train little Indonesian kids to chart the songs and then maybe even the kids can MAKE the music too, because who needs to have artists and labels that need to get paid too?

I'd buy a lot more for $2 if I could play them on my iPod. Every $1 song I buy from Amazon or iTunes gets a lot more play simply b/c I use that format more often than playing Rock Band.

I understand it takes labor and licensing rights but that has little to do with what I find to be its worth. Again, I have no problem with them charging $2 a song; it's just not the right price point for me unless it is a song I absolutely love.

That is completely different than saying that they are overpriced.

I had stated overpriced from a value proposition.

It's more that the songs that come on-disc with the games are a bargain than it is that the ala carte DLC is overpriced. And of course, they're only a bargain if you like a significant subset of them .

That is true. There is a large selection of songs (more of an issue in the Rock Band series than Guitar Hero) that I have no interest in playing or rather playing anymore anyway. I am glad Rock Band 3 has a rating system so I can more easily sort the songs I like.

Also, several of you are probably more "power players" who play Rock Band a lot and so each DLC gets a lot of play. I play Rock Band for a spell over the course of a few days/weeks and then many months go by without playing it, rinse and repeat.

Stupid question: how do you re-string the Squier Strat? I have two regular electric guitars including a Strat copy but the bridge is unlike either of them. I couldn't find any info in the little manual and my searches haven't come up with anything either.

youtube videos for squiers you wire them from the back... on these, they are on front.
Bend the new wire a bit and push the wire threw the right bottom right side so it comes out the top facing slot.

Took me 2 sets of strings as I was a n00b too.
The whole wrapping and clipping takes some practice.
Dont cut trim the wire too short in case it comes undone !
Do it after all 6 are wired and tuned.

It should be mentioned here that Rockband DLC for Europe will be down for 12 weeks.
HMX is reorganizing and they have to reregister with SCEE and get new servers and what-have-you.

12 weeks is a long time. 6 weeks last year after the breach was painful.

April 1st to July 4th.

Also, do yourself a favor and buy one of these.

HMX announced a new RB-related arcade game today on X-Play, a game similar to their portable games, for play on Xbox and PS3 with a pad. There's some info about it here.

Announcement trailer:

It's basically a 25 song RB3 expansion pack, with a free game.

(and instead of releasing a costly disc game that loses money, it's all DLC)

As long as it's not too pricey it should be an easy addition.

It's only clear that its 25 tracks are exportable and that any other exported/downloaded songs on your machine can be played in it. It's not clear that there isn't some additional fee for exporting its songs or whether it will be able to play RB3 songs, since RB3 isn't exported for play in other games (there being no other games which can use RB3 songs yet). We need more information!

Here you go:
"Rock Band Blitz adds 20 new songs to the Rock Band catalogue. Harmonix has announced “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” by Quiet Riot, and “Always” by Blink-182.

Rock Band Blitz also supports most of your existing catalog of Rock Band songs, which includes purchased songs and exported tracks from every game except Rock Band 3 and The Beatles Rock Band, neither of which have an export option. I asked Harmonix about the possibility of playing Rock Band 3 songs in Rock Band Blitz in the future, and the developer said there are currently no plans but it hasn't been ruled out completely. In the meantime, you can play Rock Band Blitz’s 20 new songs in Rock Band 3. So if you want to throw on a neon pink shirt and rock out to “Jessie’s Girl” on keyboard, you’re free to do so in Rock Band 3 after picking up Rock Band Blitz."

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/ro...and-blitz.aspx

Either the I think that GameInformer is misinformed--the product manager interviewed on X-Play yesterday said that there were 25 new songs. (EDIT: Apparently the guy in the interview was wrong--Harmonix's PR says 20 new songs. EDIT: EDIT: I just noticed that it says "over 20" and "20 plus"; I guess they don't know exactly how many there'll be yet. They have at least 3 months to figure it out ).

Interesting. Perhaps the game comes in two files, the executable and a song pack. Either that or they'll put out a patch to RB3 to allow it to dig songs out of an executable (or already added that in the last patch).

unless they have a killer song list, this isn't going to get new users or even current users playing again.... based on the songs they have announced... I'm not holding my breath for the rest.

WII DLC is already converted. No 12 week RB outage for them.

Only SCEE in Europe has the 12 week delay.

Love the Iron Maiden epics pack this week. Combined with the Flight 666 pack from last year, that's 18 Maiden songs in my RB catalog, including half of the Seventh Son album, and almost half of Dickinson's first 3 Maiden albums. Never thought I'd be playing "Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" in this game. Love it.

I bet they could have pulled off an Iron Maiden: Rock Band game with the band's large international fan base. So many great stage sets to recreate, so much great music to choose from. Oh well -- I'll happily take the DLC.

- Jer

There's one more Iron Maiden song coming with the Rock Band Blitz pack.

Yep, looks like it's "The Wicker Man" from Brave New World. Hope it's the single version with the extra vocal callbacks...

- Jer

I'm not much of a hair band fan but I just jumped out of my seat when I saw that Still of the Night is being released tomorrow. I'd given up hope that I'd see it, so quite a shock and nice surprise!

When I saw you post over on the RB forums, I said "Damn, there's a name I haven't seen in quite some time."

Oh, and ditto on this song.

Yeah, I've been pretty quiet lately . Been enjoying the hell out of the DTXPLORER I finally got off my ass and bought (both in and out of Rock Band), although the enjoyment has been tempered by a fairly crappy ongoing hard drive experience I'm not going to go into... anyway hopefully that's all behind me now.

I had to look that up to see what it was. Damn, that's cool!

It's pretty low end as far as electronic drums go, but it's such an enormous step up from the Rock Band kit! It's also pretty compact for a drum kit which is important as I don't have a lot of space. It works beautifully in the game although unlike fancier kits I can't map the hi-hat pedal. I managed to get mine used from Guitar Center for < $400 and my only regret is I waited this long to take the plunge.

There's also a lot of versatility. I can play Rock Band with it (duh). I can also pull the cable and play it in practice mode, with the drum set audio mixed in instead of the game audio. That's amazing because you hear what you're actually playing mixed with the song, but you still get the note chart. Finally I recorded a bunch of songs (still have a lot to go) without drum audio and picked up a cheap MP3 player and I can play along that way, but without the drum chart. Much harder, of course, but more rewarding.

We tried the practice mode with or Ion drum kit, but the lag is horrible. Do you not experience the same thing?

When I'm playing it I have it hooked up to a little (SD) LCD TV that despite being LCD has almost no lag, in fact the latency is calibrated as negative. The audio out of the PS3 goes directly into the drum kit audio input and there is no latency there either. A nice fancy HD set with high latency will definitely kill the experience. But the TV I have is probably like $100 or so nowadays and IMHO it's definitely worth it. This is all me playing solo; on the rare instances when I play with someone else I just use the RB kit hooked up to my TV downstairs.

If your HDMI TV connection has too much audio lag, you can hook up the composite cable that came with your PS3 and connect the analog audio plugs to a different input on your receiver. Enable multiple audio output in your PS3 settings and recalibrate your music games against the HDMI video with the alternate audio input, and your audio lag should be gone.

With this setup you have to play music games on the alternate input, but you'll still want to do everything else on the regular input so the audio and video stay synced.

- Jer