So Cash Industries

So I’m sitting in the lounge at the student center at the University, pondering what to do with this massive four-and-a-half-hour gap I have between classes (don’t ask). Then, it dawned on me. I could write a blog post. And so this blog post was born.

I’ve really been indulging in a lot of Rock Band 2 in the last month, and I’m really enjoying it. Now’s the part where I rave about all of the things that should’ve been in the first game.

Single player and online World Tour! Now I can make tons of money all by myself and I’m not stuck playing the same setlists over again. Plus, I can just drop right into my friend’s band and rock out with him.

Bands don’t require a leader anymore! That concept was just dumb. One character that always had to be there when you did the World Tour? I have several characters I play as.

No more crazy randomly-generated bandmates when yours are absent! Just assign your characters to stand in, and they’ll always be rocking out with you, whether you’re alone or rocking as a group.

Characters aren’t limited to one instrument anymore! Again, also a dumb concept.

All DLC is compatible with all Rock Band games! You can even transfer the disc tracks from Rock Band 1 to Rock Band 2, for 400 Microsoft Points. That’s 55 songs out of the original 58. The songs you can’t transfer are:

- Enter Sandman – Metallica
- Run to the Hills – Iron Maiden
- Paranoid – Black Sabbath

One thing I noticed in RB2 was the guitar and bass difficulty seem more realistic (and so therefore, a lot more intuitive) than Rock Band 1. It looks harder at first, but you get used to it. Still, fuck Visions and I hope it dies in a fire. Even on Hard it’s diabolical. I get to about 11% and then I fail. At least the Expert notechart has hammer-ons. Fuck that song. If you can beat Visions on Expert in any way, shape or form, you’re a fucking freak.

To correspond with the launch of RB2, Harmonix launched their new website for Rock Band last Monday. You can take high-res pictures of your band members, get it printed on T-shirts, posters, make figurines, etc. It’s all really cool. Here’s a nice, juicy high res shot of my band, Blue Team.

Give you ten seconds to figure out which one is me.

It seems Harmonix is right on par with Valve when it comes to meeting expected release dates that they announced weeks in advance. The website was three weeks late. Now, I’m sure developing a system that can look at a player’s gamesave, see all of their characters and be able to render them in any pose is a massive undertaking, and I’ll give them credit for that. But, they KNEW that as soon as the site went live, there would be a TIDAL WAVE of players trying out the new features, and, as expected, the system was taking upwards of up to nine hours to render one picture. Of course, coming to the site, you see the massive “BETA” label at the top of the page. Why are people allowed to write off slipshod performance by calling it a beta? If it’s a beta, don’t release it yet! I’d rather have something that works perfectly later than something that only works half of the time now. I’m looking at you, Valve, and your Team Fortress 2 beta. Yeah, that’s right.

But I digress.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Castle Crashers. If you’ve ever played Alien Hominid, it’s done by the same guys, who are also the big head honchos over at Newgrounds. If you don’t have Castle Crashers, it’s $15 on the XBL marketplace, and it’s pretty much a two-and-a-half-dimensional side-scroller beat-em-up. It’s a lot of fun. The music in that game is fucking awesome.

Finally, Dead Space comes out next Tuesday. Who’s gonna be up till 4 AM in the dark, being scared shitless by that game. Me, that’s who.

So now I have about THREE hours to go until my next class. Anyone seen any good movies recently? Get any good Spy kills? Beat Visions on Expert 100%? Ha, I kid, because that’s fucking impossible.