Still yet more Rock Band!

Just so we’re clear, both The Beatles: Rock Band and LEGO Rock Band are worthy additions to anyone’s game collection. Anyone who likes plastic instrument games will find a lot to enjoy in both titles unless they just really can’t stand the Beatles. Or LEGOs. Which is impossible. (Obviously.)

But let’s see if we can’t detangle the mess Harmonix has made with the import feature in their games. You have the original Rock Band, which you can import into Rock Band 2, except for three songs, one of which has since been made available as DLC. And then you have the DLC, which works with either game. So as a base, every Rock Band player has access to RB2, most of RB1 and their DLC.

Now, less than half of that base works with LEGO Rock Band, because Harmonix wanted to keep the game as kid-friendly as possible. So they threw the entire song database up against some arbitrary guideline which allows this song which uses the d-word but not that song. And of course any song with the f-word is a big no-no, even if said f-word was already bleeped out. Fortunately they didn’t have to put RB2’s tracks through this process, since they can’t be imported at all.

Not that any of this particularly matters. Since LEGO has no online play it’s really only good for working through the story mode. If you just want to jam with your friends you’re better off importing the tracks into RB2, which lets you play all your LEGO songs, even if they’re in the same playlist as something with naughty lyrics. So you’re still free to enjoy all the music you paid for (except those three tracks they left off of RB1, naturally), albeit not through the new interface.

Then we have Beatles, which you can neither import nor export. Supposedly this is because the tracks in Beatles have features other RB tracks don’t, such as harmonies and dreamscapes. Those reasons are of course bullshit; more likely it’s because Harmonix wouldn’t have been able to secure the license without promising they wouldn’t soil the sanctity of the Beatles catalogue by having John Lennon’s voice coming out of a black chick with a pink mohawk.

So now RB players have two isolated playlists; one with every song they’ve ever paid for (except three) and one with about fifty Beatles songs. So they’re still better off than, say, Guitar Hero players who have six or seven isolated playlists to worry about, but not as well off as they probably should be.

Why does this bug me?

There was a time when Harmonix made some noise about treating Rock Band as a platform. As in, they wanted to present a medium through which players could play all the music they made available. Furthermore, this goal was projected into the foreseeable future; they couldn’t imagine the Rock Band series changing so much that the already-released backlog woudl be incompatible.

Well, it looks like they finally hit that snag in September ’09, and again in November, because they’ve now released two games my old music doesn’t completely work with. I suppose the argument is that neither of these games were true sequels, which sounds like a No True Scotsman to me. Are we to assume that they can continue fracturing the way I’m able to play my music as long as they leave the number 3 off of the box?

I realize that there are acres of red tape and flaming hoops that must be jumped through in order to secure the licenses for the music used in these games, and then more beyond that with the ESRB and no small amount of angry mother groups scrutinizing what’s going into their family-friendly product. I know the high-ups at Harmonix would have things differently were this a perfect world. I do applaud them for trying, and I think they’ve mostly succeeded in presenting the music game “platform” they promised.

But there’s a part of me who is not so reasonable, who looks at the hundreds of dollars I’ve sunk into my hard drive-devouring playlist, and knows there is nothing preventing it from being rendered completely obsolete and irrelevant with a single press release or game show. It’s not a big jump from “DLC doesn’t work in Beatles because Beatles has harmonies” to “DLC won’t work in Rock Band 3 because Rock Band 3 has harmonies”. I don’t want to find myself in the quagmire of a Guitar Hero player who trades his fifty or sixty songs for fifty or sixty different songs once a year.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my little LEGO guys just got abducted by aliens and have to save the planet from an incoming meteor with the power of rock.