That's exactly what it sounds like. Pay a premium to get early access to some tracks or wait for the full album 2-14 months later.

I prefer the RB route of releasing classic albums already out.

With Metallica, REM pack, and Oasis...I hope this isn't a sign of GH simply being new release stuff.

To be fair, even Activision isn't classifying any of those songs as "Modern Hits"

DAMN! I'm loving the shit out of DIG OUT YOUR SOUL and those 3 tracks are easily my favourites (Bag It Up especially)... I want the whole album but need more details because I don't want to buy 3 tracks twice - maybe they aren't planning on offering any 'full album discount' since it does state you can buy single songs off the album at a later date....I wasn't that excited about GH:WT but that news has got me FUCKING PUMPED!

Here's hoping that GH gets their DLC prices down to the same level as RB DLC. It didn't make sense to buy a GH song for guitars only for 2.49 and a complete band version of a song on RB for 1.99.

Exactly. I am crazy curious to see how GH attacks this. More expensive? The same? Cheaper?

Here's to hoping they undercut them on the pricing and go for an average of 1.49 per song. At least we'll probably get more free songs out of them if they continue their previous behavior.

I saw accessories at Best Buy and Gamestop today(drumsticks, faceplates, guitar straps, etc.)

Tool has their own venue which is this weird eye thing, pretty trippy. YOu can only play their songs in that venue, as far as I know they didn't want 'imitation video game character' versions of themselves

I tried to play one of their songs on Expert drums and failed pretty quick...

I really don't understand these artists and their restrictions on their stuff. This and the ACDC thing just seems so odd to me. If an artist is so fussy they don't want their songs in any place but their own venue or they refuse to sell individual songs as DLC then why even agree to do a damn video game? It just seems like they dislike the audience and medium and are only throwing us a bone.

If they don't want the huge piles of money that comes from increased album sales and radio play for being in extremely popular games then they should just stay away. Not playing by the accepted gaming setup irritates me.

Because they are "artists". If you knew any artists then youd know that they are very particular about how their stuff is represented.

The reason Activision caves to an artist like Tool is because they have a major fanbase to draw in. Plus the venue represents Tool better to its fans I think. They are weird and abstract and all that non conventional type stuff. Plus they hate MTV and its a kick in the groin to HMX.

The one thing that has me disappointed about Guitar Hero 4 is the fact that there are so many of the same songs that are on Rock Band 2.

13 from my count.

Most of the rest of the track listing looks good, but I've been playing these 13 songs for a month, and really don't like most of them...so it sucks that I'll have to play through them again.

= J

It's a minor point. Popular songs are popular songs. Are you no longer playing them in Rock Band because you already have?

We had a breakdown when the official list was released for duplicates on the RB platform, both on disc and available as DLC. I think since then Love Spreads was added as RB DLC as another potential duplicate.

From what I understand with the new GH, you don't "have" to play any song. There are gigs like RB's tour challenges that you can play over a different path and not necessarily every song.

Preorder from Gamestop, I think, you get a cheat code that will unlock all the songs from the outset and then you can quickplay the uniques to your heart's content and skip the others.

I know several artists and i understand wanting to exactly control ever aspect of your creative work. I just assumed that if someone was like that they would have the desire to stay out of the games entirely.

For my friends and I, the appeal of the new game is half for the instruments, and half for the new songs. I just wish there weren't so many repeats from RB2, that's all. If they really wanted, say...a Dinosaur Jr. song, they could have, and should have, picked one that wasn't already on a competing platform. One or two might have been okay, but when over 15% of your songs have already been released on the other game, that's really pushing it.

And on a side note, when are we going to get The Final Countdown on one of these games?

= J

Yeah, but how do you propose they go about doing that? It's not like Activision and Harmonix have round table discussions to go over each of their respective song lists for each game. How do you know that RB inked a deal with Dinosaur Jr. before Activision did? You don't. What if Activision had planned on including that song many months before the RB2 setlist came out, and had obviously spent the money necessary to acquire the rights to use it. Are they supposed to just say "oh well, it's in RockBand 2, so let's just pull it from our game-even though we have already paid for the use of it?

The key is this has been planned for months. They knew the setlist for RB2 months before they finally announced theirs. They could have easily shuffled out some of the repeats and thrown in some replacement songs from their pool of potential DLC. You know they are working on plenty of that as well. Heck, for all we know they've did shuffle out loads more songs in this manner. We will only know once they start releasing DLC.

Actually, i'd say you don't know how "easy" it would have been to shift things around. I'm sure there's a lot of contracts and legal matters with specific bands and record labels about being included in the game and on the actual disc.

I stated it earlier in the thread but because of release schedules, it looks like Neversoft is at fault when in reality they both are. There are 14 duplicates, so just look at it as if you are getting 7 fewer songs in each game.

Even if you can't get past it, the fact remains if you ignore the 14 duplicates you are still getting 71 new songs. That is still 20 more than GHIII and RB1.

I blame the record labels for the song repeats mostly, they know which songs they have given out already and frankly a lot of times they want to just give you the songs that are already ready to go because it's easier. It's also cheaper for the game creator though, since you don't have to pay a sound engineer to go prepare the splits for you, so the game companies could be at fault there for trying to save money.

The funny thing about TOOL is most of my memory of this particular group comes from the weird videos that I saw on MTV when I was younger.

As popular as these games are you think they would have teams of people working around the clock getting songs ready for release. Im still suprised we dont have more content available because of this. This should be an easy process by now.

A) Contact band for rights.
B) Agree on contract.
C) Create tracks for song.
D) Release song/s.

How difficult is that really? There are hundreds of bands making thousands of songs and we have altogether in both RB and GH what maybe 400 or so songs to date? And they have been doing this for how long now? 3 years or so?

Another thing that is getting problematic is the issue of previously released songs not being available on newer game releases. There is no reason not to have ALL GH:3 content on WT at this point. Or GH:A for that matter. They should have been redoing all those tracks in conjunction with getting new material ready for WT.

Same goes for GH1 and 2. The argument is that well HMX owns those rights. Well how come they are not in RB then? So those songs will remain on some lawyers shelf indefinately? Thats just not acceptable.

If this new "music medium" is to have any longevity they really need to start working out these details.

No. Not everyone buys both games. Say Guitar Hero got the rights to do Stairway to Heaven or some other very popular song that would be really in demand, and it was also made available to Rock Band. Should Harmonix just say "Nah, we'll pass. That song is going to be in the next Guitar Hero?"