14 DAY TRIAL // With most of the analysts focused on predicting the performance of The Beatles Rock Band from Harmonix and MTV Games, which is set to arrive on September 9, and of Guitar Hero 5 from Activision, which is out today, a lot of people seem to have forgotten about the long rumored LEGO Rock Band videogame that should arrive on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii and DS on December 12, as close as possible to Christmas.
The title, which will see gamers play through tracks while inhabiting a band made up entirely of LEGO pieces, will apparently introduce quite a few new tracks which, to the joy of most music game fans, can be exported and then played in Rock Band 2.
Wired broke the news, citing a source placed high in the Harmonix hierarchy. To play the songs in another videogame, players will need to move them to the hard drive, which will apparently require them to pay a small fee, similar to that paid to move songs from the first Rock Band to the second one.
It's nice to see that Harmonix is interested in keeping cross game compatibility as high as possible, even if songs from The Beatles Rock Band cannot be moved to other games because of licensing issues.
The inside source has also told Wired about the downloadable songs, which are set to arrive for Rock Band in the coming months. Players can look forward to playing “Steady as She Goes” from The Raconteurs, “Under Pressure” from Queen and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” “Icky Thump,” and “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine” from The White Stripes.
Harmonix is insisting that the music store it maintains will have more than 1,000 available tracks before the end of 2009, most of them being released for Rock Band playable in more than one title.