Blade

A bit surprised at no Angry Young Man, but very happy with the addition of You May Be Right.

Billy Joel was my first concert, front row center in Aloha Stadium. Still the best concert I've ever seen.

Piano Maaaan!

Looking forward to next week. Hope there's a MS point sale soon.

lordwow

Mmm Billy Joel. I'll take it!

Decker

I think we figured that Angry Young Man would be the centerpiece of the second DLC pack that was mentioned previously. That is some sort of "Challenge Pack", so AYM is the obvious choice.

All through Middle School and High School I waited and waited for Billy to come to HI. Tour after tour he didn't. Finally I graduated, moved to Santa Barbara and hitched a ride 100 miles north to go to The Bridge tour show at the Forum. That's when he finally brought his tour to Honolulu.

porieux

So there are Pro Guitar upgrades for the RB2 versions of the Queen songs? Interesting that they don't show up in the Rock Band Pro area of the music store in the game. What a mess

EDIT: I was wrong. They are there, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find them. No upgrades for the ones that came from the Lego game though.

Blade

Yeah, I'm just impatient. lol

You must be pretty close to me in age. That show was during my freshman year in college. He was just here again this past year too. Great show.

Spiderbite

With the fuck-up on the Queen packs and 20 bucks for the Billy Joel pack, I think I am going to take a breather from RB3 DLC and just wait for sales from now on. I really like all the songs on the Billy Joel pack but he is one that I can wait for a sale.

Decker

I'm sorry, but what fuck-up in the Queen packs are you referring to? I guess I missed that discussion.

thelwig14

I assume he is talking about all the "upgrades" and such. Harmonix has achieved something that no business can afford...customer confusion.

I have no idea what is going on and I am going to sit a few plays out.

Shagrath

What's confusing? The upgrades only work on the DLC that you purchased them for. Therefore, your One Vision upgrade will only work on that one, and not One Vision (RB3 Version). The differences between the two upgrade files is less than 10 bytes. HMX is just too stupid and/or lazy to get it to work with both versions.

Solution:

If you care about keyboards and/or harmonies, but the new stuff.
If you only care about pro guitar, then just buy the pro upgrade for the old songs.

shaane

Looks like RB3 won best music game at the VGAs...for what that's worth. Congrats, Harmonix.

thelwig14

I know you are bff with harmonix...but if you can't see how the entire process is confusing to the average customer, then I don't know what to say.

Shagrath

HMX is just too stupid and/or lazy to get it to work with both versions.

I have definitely started to lose faith in them. I'm still playing the game a ridiculous amount of hours, because it's still fun. But there are a lot of problems. Not necessarily in the game (it plays fine for me), but with the way they handle things within the community. It's like one hand doesn't talk to the other, and it's really annoying. I really wish they would just fire the entire community team, and that will probably happen when they get sold.

flashburn

They are too busy playing hacky sack to do any real work.

lordwow

They're starting to turn into every company I've ever worked for

ltrain

I just wanted to thank people for their comments and suggestions regarding my potential drum kit upgrade. I ended up ordering the new Mad Catz RB3 set with the cymbals from Amazon and picked up the keyboard too. They were running a Buy 1 get 1 50% off deal on a bunch of games and accessories and ironically, these two things were included. So the keyboard only cost me $40 and the drums were around $125. Not too bad!

I haven't tried the keyboard yet, but the drums are pretty cool. My girlfriend had to help me put them together, because I was getting frustrated with the cymbals. The written directions inside the box were confusing!

xmiyux

So if I just buy the RB3 DLC as it is released (with none of these confusing upgrade tiers) - will the songs have harmonies (when appropriate)?

Shagrath

Yes. Anything new (or anything labeled as "RB3 Version") will have keys and harmonies when applicable.

orangecrush

Yes, their community relations is bad, but given how awesome their DLC output continues to be, I can forgive quite a lot. What other games get this kind of DLC support?

Also, I bought the RB3 cymbals and put them on my RB2 drum set. I am glad I got them over the RB2 cymbals. They are pretty sweet, but they make me realize how much I such much more than just the 4 pads did. I think I need to play a lot more because after about half an hour, my right leg starts to get really tired.

xmiyux

Thanks for the info.

We normally just use RB like a karaoke game and just sing. Harmonies have been useful.

The way they are doing the DLC now is really confusing. I consider myself to be relatively well informed on video games and it confuses me. I can only imagine what the average consumer thinks.

PopcornTreeCt

Just to comment on this... isn't much harder to add new missions, characters, weapons and levels to pre-existing games than to add songs? Don't get me wrong, having new songs released consistently every week is awesome but it's not comparable to other games.

porieux

Has anyone else noticed that if you are doing harmony vocals with two players, you can't have a playlist with songs that have both 2 part harmony and 3 part harmony? Even though with two people you can select a song with 3 part harmonies and play it with no problem as a one off, when I tried this earlier with someone else it dropped all the 3 part songs from the playlist. I don't get this at all. I also don't see why you can't mix in songs with no harmony part and have it just let both people sing the solo vocal, but the 2 vs. 3 part is especially frustrating.

orangecrush

I think of it in terms of other music games. How does it stack up against Guitar Hero, Lips, Sing Star, Karaoke Revolution, etc.? I think it blows them all out of the water. I don’t expect non-music games to pump out DLC every week, but I still think Rock Band does it better for their genre than any other game in for their respective genres. The only other game that came remotely close in my mind was Fallout 3.

Matt

This just in from the "this is fucking awesome" department:

Pac-Man Fever (full album) coming to RBN

The title track from the 1982 album by Buckner & Garcia, “Pac-Man Fever” helped permanently place the 80s video game classic Pac-Man into the pop culture lexicon. The song “Pac-Man Fever” was released in December 1981, and became a top ten hit, peaking at #9 in March 1982, and earning Gold certification.

Authored by Ozone Entertainment, the entire album carries on the theme of video-game related songs, listed in detail below, as well. The release of this album is being released in celebration of Pac-Man’s 30th Anniversary!

“We are very excited to be working on bringing this classic album to Rock Band,” said Owen Douglass, owner of Ozone Entertainment. “With the release of all the fantastic new Pac-Man games this year, it shows that the character is still very relevent after all these years and people still love to play his games. We wanted to reintroduce today’s gamers to the song that defined the peak of Pac-Man’s cultural success, as well as the entire album which celebrates some of the other great titles of gaming’s past.”

“We are very excited to have our album released on the Rock Band Network especially in light of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary,” said Jerry Buckner. His partner Gary Garcia added, “We had a lot of fun recording it and hope our fans have fun playing along with all the songs.”

All eight of the songs from the album will take advantage of the new features introduced into the series by Rock Band 3, including Pro Drums, Standard and Pro Keyboard, and Vocal Harmonies. They are expected to hit to Rock Band Music Store on the Xbox 360 in early 2011, with potential future releases on the Playstation 3 and Wii consoles.

1. “Pac-Man Fever” (Pac-Man)
2. “Froggy’s Lament” (Frogger)
3. “Ode to a Centipede” (Centipede)
4. “Do the Donkey Kong” (Donkey Kong)
5. “Hyperspace” (Asteroids)
6. “The Defender” (Defender)
7. “Mousetrap” (Mouse Trap)
8. “Goin’ Berzerk” (Berzerk)





(Because I'm a Pac-Man Fever nerd--these are all probably from the 1999 re-records and not the 1982 originals.)

Michael Corvin

RBN? So basically we're never getting these songs are we?

devilshalo

Do warm up songs before you go into heavy bass pedal action. For instance, warm up with a Boston song, not Avenged Sevenfold. And then mix up your set lists so you give yourself a recovery song(s) to rest.

25 to 6 to 4 still kicks my ass... but at least it's not Subdivisions.