I’ve already griped about how Harmonix and Activision are milking their respective Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises by adding silly gimmick or band-centered games. (You can read about them in the posts on E3 and the one specifically about band games. Lately it seems that Harmonix is even worse than Activision about this kind of thing.
Evidently Harmonix went to the trouble of at least adding something that passes for meat to the Beatles edition of Rock Band. (You can read about the harmony vocals feature at the official site.) Unfortunately, I don’t see the three-part harmony vocals feature getting much use. I don’t know about other people, but I have a hard enough time getting anybody to take vocals on Rock Band when I organize a multiplayer game. That’s even with using the No Fail mode from Rock Band 2. (If I’m not the one doing lead vocals, that’s pretty much a necessity.) Getting three people to do vocals, two of which won’t be the melody? In my group of friends, fat chance of that happening. It’s a cool feature, but not a selling point any more than the drum trainer in Rock Band 2 was a selling point or the ability to create your own tracks was in Rock Band World Tour.
GameFocus has an article with a list of the released track titles for LEGO Rock Band. These include You Give Love A Bad Name. Effectively, this means that Bad Name will never be made available as DLC for Rock Band 2. If people really want any of the songs on this game, they’re going to have to buy the game. The problem is that buying games to get a few tracks gets really expensive. The only track in the whole list over at GameFocus that I really want is Bad Name. If they were available as DLC for Rock Band, I might buy Final Countdown too.
Ultimately what will sell any of these games will be how badly people want the songs in the game. For those of us who have already bought plenty of these games, we would rather have these songs as downloadable content for the games we already own. Pretty pictures of the Beatles or LEGO bricks don’t add much to the gameplay as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather have Bad Name and the Beatles tracks as downloads for Rock Band 2. I certainly won’t be buying either of these games, and I won’t be asking for them as gifts.
Related posts:
- Rock Band: Bon Jovi?
- Bon Jovi DLC for Rock Band
- Bon Jovi Greatest Hits for Rock Band 3
- Review: Rock Band 3
- Rock Band 3 Songs Announced
Tags: Bon Jovi, Guitar Hero, Rock Band