Impromptu Game Night

After about a month of not gaming, it looks like there’s going to be some of that happening tonight. So the time I was going to use for this blog post got cut short. Excellent news for me, not so much for you. That’s life on the edge, baby.

I had a post drafted about Rock Band 3 that I haven’t finished yet, coming on the news that new DLC for the game won’t be compatible with old Rock Band titles. I hadn’t quite collected my thoughts on it yet. which is why it hasn’t been posted, but the jist was that, once again, I was trying to feel out whether Harmonix was the benevolent company I imagine them to be, or if they’re becoming the kind of double-dipping corporate monstrosity I feared in this here post.

It’s a tough call. On one hand it seems like there’s no reason new DLC shouldn’t work with the old games; just grey out the keyboard, the pro instruments and the harmonies, right? The rest of it should work fine. On the other, there might be a thousand little legitimate reasons why the new plug doesn’t go in the old socket.

Then there’s the consideration of old DLC. Will it eventually be updated to include the new stuff? If so, will we get an upgrade pack, or will we have to re-buy our entire collections? And if we do that, will the new-old stuff refuse to plug into the old game as well?

So today when I saw Harmonix’s official comment on the recent leaked Rock Band 3 track list, I had to laugh. These guys are still very clearly having fun. They could have come out with both guns blazing, doing damage control in a way that would make loyal fans like me turn up their noses. Or they could make a gag of it, which they did. The list is out there, people are excited, no harm, no foul. Laid back and friendly — that’s the Harmonix I like.

In the end, the Rock Band 3 list looks great and since it’s a day one purchase in my house those DLC concerns won’t be no big thang.