Five or six years ago, you couldn't walk into someone's house without tripping over a few sets of plastic game instruments. Rock Band and Guitar Hero were everywhere, even on mobile devices, and thousands of songs were rolled out to make sure we kept pretending we were rock stars. But now, another big nail has been driven into the coffin. The Rock Band Network is dead.
As revealed earlier this year, Harmonix has scheduled the final Rock Band DLC pack to be released on April 2nd, ending over 275 weeks of continuous content updates. That leaves players with a paltry 4,000 songs to jam out with until the end of time. Wait, that's quite a lot of music, isn't it? Doesn't matter, still sad.
For fifty bucks you can get a music game developer. That's way cheaper than buying a Rock Band or Guitar Hero bundle. The investment group, Columbus Nova, reportedly paid Viacom $49.99 for Rock Band developer Harmonix. The music game industry has been dying a pretty hard death over the past 18 months. When Viacom put Harmonix up for sale in November you could actually hear other publishers laughing at them. Viacom looked like that kid who is desperately trying to trade a banana for a snack pack at the lunch table. EA reps mentioned something to the extent of "catching a falling knife." Clearly, Jack Burton doesn't work at EA.
This one time, at band camp, I shoved a flute...in front of my Rock Band mic and beat "Avenged" by Sevenfold on Expert. And so this spunky young lady has done just that, by playing her flute into the standard Rock Band microphone with the correct pitch and notes she was able to score a 98% on expert.
The Rock Band iPhone app has been released, and is priced at $10. That may seem a bit steep for a iPhone app, but since the game includes twenty songs, that's actually a decent deal for the music alone.
Music games are great fun, so it's only natural that folks want to play them on the go. Previous efforts haven't exactly been strong in the co-op aspect, either implementing it poorly (Guitar Hero: On Tour) or eliminating it entirely (Rock Band Unplugged). That trend looks to change with Rock Band for iPhone and iPod Touch.
We have yet another user-submitted Co-Op Couples article in the form of a great read from brainp0wa. Continue reading for the first fun chapter of a two-part Co-Op Couples series.
If you don't feel like dropping 180 large on the swanky new Rock Band 2 instruments and bundle, perhaps a $99 (Wii, PS2) or $119 (360, PS3) price tag suits you better? Online retailer Amazon.com has dropped the prices on these bundles which includes the Guitar, Microphone, Drums and a copy of Rock Band 1; which of course is fully importable into your Rock Band 2 experience on the 360 and PS3.
If you are like me, one of the things you were most excited about was when Harmonix announced Nevermind from Nirvana as a full downloadable ablum on Rock Band. There's just one problem, Harmonix never said such a thing. In a day and age where news is reported in split second blog posts, a lot of times things get taken out of context. Rock Band 2 was on display at a certain social gathering tonight, and Harmonix Community Manager Sean Baptiste was there. According to Baptiste, they never specifically announced Nevermind would be available, it was simply given as an example of classic albums that could appear on the service. According to him a press release or any other official material was never put out. But fret not, he said just because it was never officially confirmed doesn't mean it can't happen. So it looks like you and four of your buddies won't be jamming out to the best Nirvana song ever (that's Drain You in case you didn't know) - but there's still hope.
Rock Band might very well be the best co-op game available today. There, I said it. I wanted to avoid all possible hyperbole, but the fact is that my previous statement could be true. As I discovered this week, Rock Band has some serious co-op chops.
If you don't need the entire game, perhaps you are just looking for a spare set of drums? Good news! The drums are also on sale.
Several bits of news have come up as of late regarding the world's loudest co-op game, Rock Band. Joystick reports that a jaw dropping six million songs have been downloaded since the game's release. 6,000,000. To put things into perspective, that is like an album going platinum, 6 times over. By anyone's measure, Rock Band ...
