Blueshadow’s Bon Jovi Blog

E3 started yesterday and has brought with it a whole lot of news….

You can check out the Brutal Legend press conference from E3 over at GameTrailers. It’s got a brand new trailer for the game in it, along with a new “Brutal Thoughts” clip. This is the first trailer to actually show Lionwhyte. He looks pretty cool and the scream is impressive, but Halford’s British accent doesn’t quite fit with the look. He does have some good lines though. Actually, it sounds like everybody does. The more trailers we get, the more the humor element of the game comes through, and it’s well done. And by the way, Keeper of the Sacred Beer Tree is pretty much everyone’s dream job. (At least for the people who will play this.)

Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any sign of Dio yet, although I had heard that he was going to be in Brutal Legend. I had thought that he was going to be the bass-playing mystic, but it looks like that’s going to be Lemmy’s character. It’s possible that I got my information on that from a bad source. However, the video does show a lot of the other characters from the game, including Halford’s other character. This was also the first time that I’d seen Lita Ford’s character, and the Ozzy announcement was new, even though I can’t say it’s a surprise. They’ve done such a good job getting talent for Brutal Legend that I’m not surprised by anyone showing up anymore. And at that rate, how could they have a metal game and leave Ozzy out?

I just hope that they didn’t cut Dio to appease Ozzy. I realize that the whole Heaven and Hell thing is causing some trouble between those two right now, but it’s not like they had to be in the studio together.

Unfortunately, it has also brought us the announcement of the Beatles edition of Rock Band. Now, if you read my earlier post about the Guitar Hero band games, you’ll have an idea of how thrilled I am about that. Honestly, I though Harmonix was better than that and wouldn’t follow Activision’s lead on this one, but I guess I was wrong. These band-based games just end up being monotonous. It would make much more sense to sell themed track packs–call them mega-packs or some other fancy name if they still need to make a big deal out of releasing a whole pile of tracks from one band–but integrate them with the existing games. That way, playing through a career for awhile doesn’t get so monotonous.

I realize that the band games do include different venues–and that’s fine, but how much value do the venues really add to the game? Once you’ve gotten to Hard or Expert it’s not like you can really pay attention to anything but the track anyway. And even at that, that’s solvable too. I’m sure that it must be possible to add downloadable venues to the games. Throw those in with the track pack and then it can be a sub-game. They could even give it its own achievements, like other expansion packs have on the 360. They can make just as much money, if not more, off downloadable content. I might have bought the Beatles tracks as downloads for Rock Band 2. I won’t be buying them as a separate game.