Posts Tagged ‘DLC’

Earlier today, we found out that next week will feature a three-pack from post-grunge rockers Shinedown, and we’ve decided to host a Xbox 360 DLC pack giveaway featuring one of the godfathers of grunge that may appeal to fans. Originally released in July last year, the songs included in the “Celebrating Soundgarden On Tour 2011″ pack are…

• Blow Up the Outside World
• Burden in My Hand *
• The Day I Tried to Live *
• Fell on Black Days
• Outshined *
• Rusty Cage

* Indicates Pro-Guitar/Bass chart availability for an additional $.99.

If this is something that you want to try and win, here’s what you gotta do. To enter, post a comment below listing your favorite band to come out of the 90s grunge era. Standard rules apply: one entry per household only, Xbox 360 only, codes are redeemable worldwide (as far as I know). Please include a valid email address in the appropriate field (not the comment itself, or include Twitter account if you don’t want to take off your tin foil hat) with each entry so we can contact the winners.

We’ll let this run through the weekend so everyone has a chance to enter and randomly choose a winner sometime on Monday after noon (Central time). And since we ALSO have a number of 160 MSP codes, we’ll randomly give out a “consolation gift” to one random entrant, as well!

Good luck! And thanks to Harmonix for providing us with codes to giveaway!

UPDATE: Congrats to T and Easy Content Services for winning the Soundgarden DLC and 160 MSP code, respectively.

After last week’s DLC announcement, I was reminded that we did have a credible rumor saying that Men at Work might be coming as DLC. So NOW I can say that we really have no inkling as to what may be coming next. Let’s find out…

• Shinedown – Bully
• Shinedown – The Crow and the Butterfly
• Shinedown – Second Chance *

* Denotes Pro-Guitar/Bass chart availability for $.99.

[Official announcement]

The official @RockBand Twitter recently tweeted a link to an announcement over at the RockBand.com forums from @HMXHenry about some temporary changes coming to DLC. Starting on April 1st,  players on the PS3 (Europe and Australia only) and the Nintendo Wii will experience a temporary interruption in new DLC and RBN DLC offerings.

Existing DLC will still be available (and available exports will still be possible) to those outlined above, but due to changes in publishing arrangements as a result of Harmonix becoming an independent developer once again, new DLC will be taking a break for a little while. There is no announced date as to when service will resume, but Harmonix expects service to return to normal sometime in the summer.

Players on the Xbox 360 and North America PS3 players should not be affected by these changes.

UPDATE: Based on some of the community feedback, we’re adding additional clarity to the article… for those that read the articles before providing said feedback, anyway.

Harmonix has updated the effective date of the DLC outage to April 3rd, to convince people that this is not some sort of April Fool’s Day prank. The DLC normally scheduled for that day will be the first in the scheduled down time. The estimated downtime is being quoted at this time by @HMXHenry as roughly “three months,” and could (and will) change depending upon how proceedings progress.

Also, Harmonix is noting that the process to update the publishing arrangements is about a year old, and some console makers/regions are more timely in their legal wranglings than others, so anger directed at Harmonix is clearly misdirected.

Once everything has been resolved, while there are no guarantees, @HMXHenry expects that the backlog of missed DLC should be made available in increments to help those affected catch up to everyone else.

[Official announcement]

For this week’s pick, I thought I would turn to one of the more popular pop/rock songs that a lot of people thought of when Rock Band introduced keys to the mix. After it was missing from the setlist, I assume it was only a matter of time before the song would show up in Rock Band, as we mentioned in this article here on the site.

Caesars (originally known as Caesars Palace) are a Swedish indie rock band. They formed in 1995, and have released six albums and around 20 singles. The band has only one song in the Rock Band platform, and it’s their breakthrough single (and most well known) Jerk It Out.

Originally released in 2003, Jerk It Out appeared on the album Love for the Streets (in Sweden) or otherwise known as 39 Minutes of Bliss in the rest of the world. The re-release of the track went to #8 in the UK Singles Chart and No #40 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The song is featured in many places, with most people recognizing it from one of the first iPod shuffle commercials, but was released for Rock Band in December 2010.

The most ironic thing about the song is the 3-tier keys, which begins that instantly recognizable riff at the beginning of the song and continues throughout. The 2-tier guitar, the 2-tier bass and 3-tier drums kick in next, all of which provide variety and good charts which never seem repetitive throughout the song. The drums have a mini “solo” at about 1:45, and shortly welcome back in bass and keys into play. To sweeten the deal, at about 2:30, you get a guitar solo which lasts to nearly 45 seconds. People who like harmonies will enjoy this song, as the 3-tier vocals will give you plenty to do for all three singers. Beware, however, as there is some added effect for the vocals, and getting your pitch right may be a challenge.

Here’s your full band HD playthrough, provided by RBA regular thenewnoelisoncruz.

And here are the Pro-Guitar and Pro-Bass playthroughs too, provided by redhed002 and normallife, respectively.

Do you like video games, movies and TV shows? Then I would appreciate it if you would have a look at my growing fansite, The Tribute Pages which features loads of tributes of video games, TV shows and movies. Thank you!

Last week, we got word of the DLC announcement a little early straight from the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t appear that we’ve seen any slip ups this week, so we’re back to going into the announcement blind. Anyway, here is what’s on tap for next week:

• Men at Work – Down Under
• Men at Work – Overkill
• Santana – Smooth *

* Denotes Pro-Guitar/Bass chart availability for $.99.

[Official announcement]

In a case of “Well I could have told you that,” it looks like Joystiq is reporting that per a conversation with John Drake at the Game Developers Conference this week, Rock Band DLC isn’t going anywhere any time soon, despite what some of the pessimists would like you to think. Logically, I would have found it very odd that Harmonix invested the time and capital to create the Facebook app to track DLC, leadboards, and requests so accurately, just to have new DLC end a few months after it was implemented.

From John:

“We’ve been really pleased with the continued performance of Rock Band downloadable content. We’ve delivered over four years of weekly DLC and over 3,500 songs for the music platform, and we have no plans to stop weekly releases any time soon.”

What I thought was a little more surprising in the Joystiq piece was that they went ahead and confirmed that we will NOT be seeing a direct sequel to Rock Band 3 this year titled “Rock Band 4,” however they remind us that we will be seeing some sort of downloadable title coming this year. So while no “Rock Band 4″ this year is disappointing, Harmonix does have big plans for PAX East. They haven’t showed their cards yet, but I’m confident we will see something come the first full weekend in April in Boston.

[via Joystiq]