RT

"We've got videos for all three tunes after the jump -- go decide which ones are purchase-worthy!" They better all be, because the GH3 primitive DLC packaging doesn't give you the option to buy any separately.

Even for this one random week, $3 for 3 Rock Band songs completely kills the 3 free GH3 songs. People still play that game? It's so boring now.

"Does that mean it'll never work? No, but it doesn't seem to be planned at the moment."

Um. That's exactly what it means. It will never work. Rock Band songs are authored by using the individual tracks of the master recording. This software works by generating note patterns based on the overall sound of the song. It doesn't take into consideration the individual drum, bass, guitar, etc. parts and it has no way to differentiate between all of them.

There's no way for a program to differentiate and procedurally generate a guitar or drum track just by looking at the entire song with all parts played concurrently. And even if there were a way, you'd never feel like you're playing the song, because missing a note on guitar wouldn't stop the guitar from playing. It would either do nothing or mute the whole song, both options of which are pretty meaningless and stupid.

No personal offense to the author intended, but this is a very poorly researched and constructed article. The songs that had their prices raised were not even half indie in any way whatsoever.

Also, in response to the inaccurate "While there was no indication at the outset that the lower price would be in any way temporary"...

it was announced THE DAY the songs were released in the Announcements forum at rockband.com by Harmonix that these songs were "at a special holiday price"..."for a limited time."

So yeah, this article could use a lot of "touching up," shall we say.

What's your point? A couple of Rock Band songs are masters where GH3 got the covers. Songs can be mixed differently, and Guitar Hero only requires the string instruments to be pulled out. Rock Band requires the drum track to be split up completely so it can't use ANY masters where the drums were mixed down. There's a steeper requirement for master to be usable for Rock Band than for Guitar Hero.

Actually, move of the covers sound pretty damned awesome. And someone will likely be singing most of the time while you're playing (if you're playing the band game how it was designed) anyway, so the cover singer shouldn't matter.

The cover songs are all from late 60s to very early 80s. They're covers because the masters don't exist or they're not usable for the game.

Thank Activision for locking the Strat out of Guitar Hero III. They'll do anything to inhibit cross-compatibility. They can't be very confident in their Les Paul if they don't even trust the consumers to choose it over the Strat for GH3.

"I think my biggest concern is not being able to play online because EA unplugs the servers 45 minutes after Rock Band 2 hits the shelves."

EA isn't running the RB servers. HMX is.

Also, this issue has been way overblown. So what? You can't unlock things together online. Big deal. You can still play all the songs online head-to-head competitively or up to 4 players co-operatively.

Wow. What a stupid title for this. As if achievements even mean anything to begin with. Developers are forced to put them in all 360 games. You were expecting them to really care? I'd worry about games with thought-out achievements if that's where their efforts are going instead of into the actual meat of the game.

"Regardless, that's exactly what we see in the above video that reveals the band's contribution to EA's upcoming Rock Band."

Jesus, call it anything but EA's. All EA is doing is distributing the game. Harmonix created it and MTV Games is publishing it.