Enjoy purchasing music on iTunes, but wish you could jam along with your new acquisitions? Then hear this: over at the official Rock Band forums, senior designer Dan Teasdale revealed a patch that just might rock your world.
Log in to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network later this week, and you may be greeted with a massive Rock Band update that will add a full-fledged music store to the game’s main menu. Without ever leaving the game, you’ll be able to view the entire library of existing downloadable content, flip through album art, listen to song previews, and even assess the difficulty level of each song, broken down by instrument — before maxing out your Mastercard. Expect new songs to be added to the existing 125-track library every week.
Want to see how it works? Game|Life’s Rock Band-o-holic Chris Kohler got a sneak peek at the Music Store last month, and has pictures for your perusal. His verdict?
Everything runs fast, the interface is very slickly designed, with neat little graphic effects as you flip through songs, and the information you can get before you buy is exactly what was called for.
Pricing, unfortunately, won’t quite be in line with iTunes. Expect to shell out about $2 or 160 Microsoft points per track.
The patch will also offer a host of other improvements to the game, according to Teasdale:
- Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans�? achievement.
- More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So�? or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.
- Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld�? or “Blitzkrieg Bop�?, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.
- Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.
- Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!
- Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only�? wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.
Taken in the context of EA’s announcement today that Rock Band has already sold a staggering six million tracks without fixes or such a convenient integral purchasing solution, the revenue potential of these improvements seems great indeed.
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