TS

@Chico

"isn't affected" or "is unaffected"

Whoops!

Glad to hear DLC for Rock Band is affected by this. That's obviously their Golden Goose/Egg revenue stream.

Harmonix did a survey last year about "what's the next big band you'd want in a game" with 5 choices; I'm wondering if that's a project that's in development or if they were just testing the waters. As much as I don't like full-band games, Beatles & Green Day were a lot of fun. And since we got to import Green Day into the RB platform, it was a double-bonus. If they do another stand-alone game like the Beatles, it would probably kill the genre for good. But as long as they ensure that we can get it all into one place, then they should be able to keep on rollin'...

Until GameFly fixes their actual service, the number of distribution centers won't matter. I've tried them 3 times so far; each time, during the trial period, I never received my first game in time to actually play it before I had to decide to pay for a full month or cancel. Then when I did pay for the full month, I only ever got to play that one game (when it finally arrived). They waffled on refunds twice and even tried to charge me full price for a game that my queue indicated they'd received back.

Steer clear of GF. I've been using Blockbuster Online for over a year and it's awesome. Very quick shipping turn around, very broad array of titles, great price... and if you do have a Blockbuster store nearby, you can swap out a title that way too.

@davidjtate

I liked the number of years showing too... except that it wasn't accurate. I signed up for Live back in 2002 when it first came out, migrated my account to my 360 in 2005... and the tally didn't reflect that. Right now it says "2" when it should say "8" (and yes, have always been a paying Gold member)...

@The Blank Mage Returns

I know 14 households with Rock Band (including my own). Of those:

12 are on Xbox
1 is on PS3
1 is on Wii

I'm not surprised by this news in the least...

Man... these comics are so bad almost every week... ugh...

@Jenks

RB3 could be amazing... if they'd fix some of the game breakers...

- Ability to play Guitar, Bass, & Keyboard without the lame All-Instruments mode, which doesn't work online, and which automatically queues up a vocalist, even if there isn't one
- Vocal Overdrive activation
- Console freezing during certain cut-scenes (it's a plague, ask around)

The thing that doesn't make sense to me... for regular gamers...

Most of the time, the 4 colored buttons are not for actions you need while shooting/fighting. They are for things like reloading, changing weapons, or toggling some other item in your arsenal, which is generally not timing-critical. You don't "lose anything" by moving your right thumb off the stick for a split second.

So what do you gain with this? That you can reload faster? Uhh, most games have your character auto-reload when the last bullet fires. And if you reload mid-cartridge, you'll do it when you're not in battle (for the most part) anyway.

It was interesting that one of the blurbs in the video read: "not a mod, so you won't get banned, because it's not detectable". Something tells me that, if Microsoft really wanted to, they could do a study on "how fast someone can press buttons" and then have some stats tracked while you play. If you're doing actions 75% faster (or whatever it is) than is possible on a normal setup, they'll come after you.

Now obviously there are merits for this if someone has a disability or disfigurement of their hands. By all means, give it a try...

@SeriousSam24

Are you kidding? It's a great business decision. The more people stay home and download things without the help of retail outlets, the less they are relevant for ALL gaming needs. This is a way to drum up business, even if the actual trip to the store is unnecessary...

Maybe GameStop knows something we don't. Like perhaps there will be a time when an exclusive piece of DLC will be released in batches. Then you have to pre-order to be a part of the launch day batch. Make no mistake, businesses will find a way to stay relevant, even if there's a small segment of their audience that gets alienated to some degree...

@WiNGSPANTT from TopTierTacticsco

How are books not interactive? They might even be MORE interactive, because any reader's imagination is going to go much further, deeper, darker, and depraved than any video game images will ever explicitly show.

Video games are very much like movies in terms of the images and dialogue/text. The only difference is that we get to push buttons that have the story unfold slightly different for each gamer. In the end though, a video game is essentially a movie that's been chopped up into enough pieces to give a gamer something to do for 4-5 hours or so...