Yeef

So ten bucks more for a wireless guitar. Honestly, I'd rather have my ten backs back and get a bundle witha wired guitar. USB extention cords are a lot cheaper than batteries/a battery pack would be and with my current setup the cord on the original wired guitars are more than long enough.

I'd prefer Europa for Santana, but Black Magic Woman is a great song.

>Only time will tell on which game will come out on top.

I think rock band will be the better game without a doubt, though that's all a matter of opinion. However, Guitar Hero II will EASILY outsell Rockband. For one, it has the name recognition, but more importantly it's on PS2 and Wii as well as the other two. It'll blow Rock Band out of the water.

If/when they do add rumble to the sixaxis I hope they put out some new colors as well if only so when i buy the new rumbling ones I can differentiate them from my old, non-rumbling ones.

I wonder what kind of bonus songs there will be, if any.

Honestly, as much as I love guitar hero I cna't really justify spending 50 bucks on 30 songs. If there's just as many bonus songs then I'll pick it up in a heartbeat.

I would LOVE to play Europa by Sanata, but I don't see that working too well for Rock Band as it's an instrumental. Hopefully it'll pop up in Guitar Hero some day.

As far as Rock Band goes, The Grudge by Tool could be fun. I wouldn't mind more Queens of The Stone Age/Kyuss or Queen either.

Personally I love achievments. It's great way to see what your friends are actually doing in-game. Like leaderboards, I think they're a fun way to gauge the differences between you and your friends. For exmple, I've gotten most of the single player achievments in Guitar Hero and none of the co-op ones, but a few of my friends are just the opposite. I think being able to compare your play style in ways like that are great.

On th eother hand, I generally dislike the idea of a gamerscore, at least on a global level. I'd love it if gamerscores were kept localized to each game, or just done away completely. A global gamerscore doesn't have any real value since the difficulty and dedication needed for achievments varies greatly from game to game. Not to mention the way different publishers hand out gamer points (in Dead Rising every achievment is worth 20 points, regardless of how easy or difficult it is. Fortunately, Capcom had the foresight to incentivize the more difficult ones by making them unlock secrets). As it is now gamerscores are little more than "XBox 360 loyalty points," but I'm sure that's exactly what Microsoft and most publishers want.

And, as a final note, I think a little disheartening to think that a video game developer thinks that 'high scores' are a bad thing. I mean, granted, when you're talking about things like global leaderboards where you're competing with people you'll never interact with directly simply for bragging rights it's a bad thing, but acing casual competition can only help a game's publicity. If people play your game and get bored with it after 2 weeks it's far less likely that they'll be interested in buying any sequels. But on the other hand when a game has a strong competitive multiplayer element people will buy the new interations SOLEY for the sake of the multiplayer. It's the reason Madden and Tony Hawk and tons of the other yearlies tend to sell so well (regardless of how much you may like it or not).

For some anecdotal evidence, I work at the mall and the Best Buy here has the full game of Guitar Hero 2 set up. Naturally being that it's a great game and free to play a lot of mall employees, including me, tend to go and play it on our breaks. We'd run into each other every now and then and have crossed paths enough that we know each other pretty well and began competing for the high scores to the point that it's almost like a little club. Of course, once the 360 version hit those of us with 360s picked it up and swapped gamertags for leaderboards and achievments that we could compare with each other. It's gotten to the point now that with the announcement of GH3 and Rock Band we've been trying to get everyone on the same page as to which versions to get so that we can all keep playing together online. If it weren't for the in-game high score list chances are most of us would've stopped playing GH2 on PS2 by now, or atleast slowed down. ANd if it weren't for the achievments and leaderboards most of u slikely would've held off on buying it for the 360.

>

That just tells me that people will claim not to be happy unless it's free. GH2 on the 360 was 90 bucks (140 with an extra controller) and it sold like crazy. I'm sure Rock Band, with all the peripherals, selling at $150-$200 would FLY off the shelves.

We've had this at Best Buy for like a week now. Seems pretty pointless when a cheapo usb keyboard goes for a lot less and is far less cumbersome,

@16

Let me get this straight, you're angry at the fact that consoles offer firmware updates now? In case you forgot, in the past instead of updating the firmware they would just remodel the system and all of the people who had the older models were SoL. Bought a launch PS2 that couldn't play DVDs properly? You either had to buy the remote and instlal the update onto your memory card (which took up a huge chunk of space) or buy a later revision. But wait, even with the update from the remote you you'd have trouble playing back burned discs, so you had to buy a later revision. Not to mention there were a few PS1 games that didn't play properly (or at allon PS2), but with no firmware updates that'll never be fixed.

"It says PS2 and PS1 backward compatibility right on the box."

I doubt it says BC with every PS1 and PS2 game on the box. It DOES have backwards compatibility, so it's not really false advertising at all.

"I could do the same thing with the PS1, N64, SNES, Master System, NES, Atari ####, Gameboy, Gameboy Advanse, DS, Coleco, etc."

Try sticking an NES game into your SNES and tell me how that works out. The reason older systems 'just work' is because they were very closed formats. Genesis played Genesis games and that was it. Same goes for every other past console. To my knowledge there have been no problems with needed to update firmware just to play a game on any of the three new systems. Any problems are with additional features or standards compliance.

"We expect this stuff from PCs because they do so much more than a console"

Such as? That argument might have worked last generation, but I can't think of too much a PC could do that atleast one of the consoles can't. Of course there are things you can do TO a PC that you can't really with a console, but as far as software is concerned there's not too much of a difference. Besides, with the exception of the Wii the architectures of the consoles is so different from their predecessors that BC is the equivalent of trying to get every windows program to work in wine, it's not going to come overnight.

As much as I enjoy the 360, I have to admit it's not a very well-built system. I know a few people who've gotten the red ring and had to send it into Microsoft. My brother's system scratched a few of his games and made them unplayable.

My own system works fine for the most part except for two things; it'll occassionally freeze on the dashboard (never happens in games though, regardless of how long I play) and also, it doesn't recognize Gears of War. Whenever I try to put Gears in it seems to think my 360 is just a normal DVD player. Every other game works fine and Gears itself works perfectly on my brother's 360. Unfortunately mine is a launch model, so it's way past the warranty so there's not too much I can do about it. If my system does end up dying I doubt I'll get another one until the end of the generation when it's ultra cheap.

Haven't had any problems with my Wii so far and of all the people I know with PS3s no one's had any problems with them.