Wired magazine is setting up a new shop here in New York City later this week and if you’re in the area, you may want to attend. Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos will be joining Wired’s Chris Kohler at 7pm for an hour of Games: The Future of Music, a talk about the rise of music games, where they’ve been, where they’re going.  Also planned is an audience Q&A, so if you have something Rock Band related on your mind, you may want to RSVP for the event.

The new store will be located at 15 West 18th St in the city.

According to the recently released October sales numbers by the NPD group, first week sales for the newest installment in the Guitar Hero series may have been a disappointment to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and Co.  Sales for Guitar Hero World Tour in its first week (launch date October 26) were 534,000 units.  Compare this to last year’s October release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, whose sales were 1.4 million units in its first week and you’ll see the huge disparity.  Could we be seeing signs of the rock game war raging between Activision and its closest competitor Harmonix’s Rock Band series?

Continue Reading “Guitar Hero World Tour First Week Unit Sales 60% Fewer Than GH3″ »

Has anyone done the math lately on how many songs Harmonix has to release each and every week in order to hit their stated goal of having 500 songs out by the end of the year?  It’s a pretty big number and this week gets us another 10 songs.  Three different 3-packs from the Dead Kennedys, Misson of Burma, and the Century Media Girls of Metal pack which includes two by Lacuna Coil.  Also available is an on-the-cheap single from Crooked X.  Check out DLC Central for a listen and look at the tracks.  Details below.

Continue Reading “Rock Band DLC Week of 11/18: Dead Kennedys, Lacuna Coil, More” »

Harmonix has announced the latest addition to its selection of downloadable albums: The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters’ hit 1997 effort which features hit singles “Monkey Wrench” and “My Hero.” If you have only the original Rock Band, you’ll be missing out on ”Everlong” which is already on the disc for Rock Band 2. 

For a list of all the songs on the album, and to hear previews of the songs, head over to RockGamer.com’s DLC Central where we’ve got them on tap.

Continue Reading “Rock Band DLC: Week of 11/11, Foo Fighters Album” »

Two items were brought to my attention this morning that I thought I would share. Both had me thinking to myself, “Which music game company really “gets” their audience?”. The first was the amounts of money that were donated to the two presidential political campaigns. The second was two video examples of commercials for the games. I’ll show you both and you can ponder for yourself.

Continue Reading “Harmonix vs. Activision - Who Really “Gets it”?” »

Hey rockers - we just want to let you know that you’re not alone if you’re watching your inboxes every 5 minutes waiting for the email from Harmonix with instructions on how to pick up your 20 bonus Rock Band 2 tracks. We haven’t either - and we’re checking with the Rock Gods to get any info if there’s going to be a delay.

If you have followed the instructions properly up to this point, you would have already 1) gone to the registration website, 2) entered in your code from the Rock Band 2 CD insert, and 3) replied to a confirmation email that you received shortly after hitting “submit”.

With the above steps complete, the only thing left to do is wait. While we were expecting to receive this email yesterday, there seems to be a delay -but Harmonix confirms that they have “started sending out codes”. We’ll let you know more when we have it.

RockGamer spent the weekend playing music games.  With the number of releases that have recently come out, we’ve spent a lot of time covering the game news but not actually getting to enjoy the product. Well that changed, thankfully, but now back to more coverage as we review the AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack. If you’re an AC/DC fan, you’re probably going to want to pick this one up.

Most people were a little confused when the AC/DC announcement came, making the incorrect (or correct?) assumption that this was just additional DLC for Rock Band 2.  When specified that the entire track pack was a standalone game, and could be purchased only at Walmart (in the form of a disc - not downloadable), gamers fumed that Harmonix was converting to Activision’s model of making full album DLC the norm, rather than allowing the flexibility of picking and choosing individual songs.  However, gamers soon learned that if they purchased the Rock Band branded AC/DC game, they would also receive a code which would make all songs downloadable and therefore playable within Rock Band.  All of this is true.  So, the question becomes then, why have a standalone game at all?

Regardless of the why, here’s what we found.

Continue Reading “RockGamer Review: AC/DC LIVE: Rock Band Track Pack” »