Rock Band

This is a video of Rush playing Tom Sawyer in Rock Band on expert. Thanks to Basil for sending this in.

As mentioned in this week's podcast, here's a picture of the Clusterfuck-of-a-drum-kit that comes with Konami's Rock Revolution.

Notice that the guy playing it doesn't even know where to stand.

Harmonix started dropping hints about their next title last week. To my shock, they revealed that their next game will not use a plastic toy guitar. While I was suspicious at first, I'm excited to learn that Harmonix's next game is for the iPod. Check it out:

It looks a lot like FreQuency, no? However, unlike frequency, this game uses songs that are on your iPod.

Harmonix has created an algorythym that can turn any song into a game. I wonder how long before this technology finds it's way into Rock Band...

It's just been announced that there is no "Regular Edition" of Rock Band coming out this year. This means that you can buy the $175 Special Edition or wait until next year. This also means that if you want to play guitar and bass simultaneously in Rock Band, you must buy a copy of Guitar Hero to get the extra guitar.

It's kinda odd that Harmonix isn't selling the guitars separately. It seems that Harmonix is encouraging their customers to buy their competitors products (in addition to their own.)

So, first we had the news that the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band would have wired guitars, while the PS3 version would have wireless guitars for the same price. Harmonix blamed the disparity on Microsoft and claimed that the proprietary Xbox 360 wireless technology was more expensive.

Now we have news that the Wireless Guitars for Guitar Hero 3 (on PS3) will REQUIRE DONGLES.

DONGLES.

The PS3 has BlueTooth, a wireless STANDARD. And yet, they still can't make a wireless guitar that works natively on the PS3.

These are the 2 biggest games of the holiday season. Microsoft and Sony should be bending over backwards to make sure that they work properly. Instead, it feels like we're getting last-minute hacks.

Unless....

If the PS3 guitars require dongles because they are the same guitars used in the Mac and PC versions of Guitar Hero, that would be totally awesome. It would make the guitars cheaper to make while simultaneously making them more useful. That would be really smart.