So beautiful… Should have sent.. a poet…

The fine folks over at Half-Masked have seen fit to document my nightmare with EA in comic strip form, and I’m tickled pink about it. I couldn’t be tickled any more pink if my skin were inside out and I rolled around in cotton candy. I’m the pinkiest. Thanks Half-Masked!

According to the Wall Street Journal’s well-connected Bothans, Viacom and MTV Games will be announcing today their acquisition of the rights to use Beatles songs in Rock Band. Since the Beatles seemingly invented pop music, this is no small get:

The Beatles have licensed songs to MTV Networks’ Rock Band videogame series, according to several people familiar with the matter, a coup for the Viacom Inc. unit in its battle with rival Activision Blizzard Inc. for supremacy in the world of rock-and-roll videogames.

The deal, which is set to be announced on Thursday by Viacom’s MTV and the band’s own Apple Corps Ltd., makes the Beatles the next and biggest major band to license its songs to a music-oriented videogame, joining Aerosmith, Metallica, AC/DC and others.

I wasn’t particularly amused when Activision started down the road of exclusively licensing certain marquee acts, because I knew Harmonix would have to follow suit (AC/DC) and we’d have a nice little balknization of music content across the two main franchises, just like Blu-ray and HD DVD all over again.

And maybe Activision is regretting it now as well since this sort of bites them in the ass. The Beatles. That’s like having Superman on your side – if you’re a Beatles fan, anyways. (If you’re an Elvis fan, you still need to wait.)

UPDATE – ok so it’s not Rock Band content (except when it is), but rather a new game… hrm.

(thanks mimc)

So there we were, sitting on the couch playing a quick round of Buzz, when I start to smell burning plastic.  My friends thought I was nuts.  Five minutes later, they saw smoke.

The 4-port USB hub that shipped with Rock Band?  It was smoldering.  We had hooked up the instruments and turned on the 360 not ten minutes earlier, but decided to play one more round of Buzz before getting our rock on.  Maybe the rock gods were frowning on us, maybe EA released a product with a serious safety hazard.  Who can say?  All I know is there was a small electrical fire, and had I not been in the room my house would have likely burned to the ground.

I don’t really know what I’m going to do about this yet.  I’m certainly not going to sue.  Nothing was damaged (asides from my hands when I rushed to unplug it).  Besides, I’m Canadian.  We don’t do that.

I’m absolutely going to get in touch with EA.  I’m just not really sure what the best avenue for that would be in this situation.

And I’m going to write this post.  If nothing else it’ll help spread the word of a potentially dangerous situation that might warrant a product recall.

UPDATE: I’ve contacted EA via their support site.  Their advice?  I should plug it back in and try again.  Congratulations EA, your form letter just killed me.  Hit the jump for the full back-and-forth;

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This one got a lol out of me this morning. Apparently Stephen Colbert’s homage to Every Breath You Take “Charlene” is available as a free download today for Rock Band. Good thing it’s free since it’s only 1:20 long! I do love that not all these songs take themselves so seriously, and I still get a kick out of playing Still Alive (and it got my fiancee into Johnathan Coulton) so I say bring on the novelty tracks!

Colbert has riffed on games a decent amount during his show, getting laughs out of everything from Wii Sports to World of Warcraft.

[Joystiq]

Well we’ve finally gotten it set in stone, for the low price of $4.99 you’ll be able to export 55 songs from Rock Band to join your DLC and all 85 Rock Band 2 songs. It’s both unprecedented and a pretty good deal.

Luckily there’s only a few tracks you won’t be able to bring along (because of licensing issues I suppose) and they are…

• “Paranoid” as made famous by Black Sabbath
• “Run to the Hills” as made famous by Iron Maiden
• “Enter Sandman” by Metallica.

Not bad considering they had to go and re-license all those songs. If you need a quick reminder of what songs that means you will be able to take along, here’s the original list (minus the bonus tracks).

Currently this patch is for the 360 and I’m sure the PS3 fix is sure to follow.

So yesterday we showed off a guy playing real drums along to a Rock Band track. Today a video of a Rock Band track so hard I’d be loathe to see it played on an actual set. This track is beyond crazy, but what’s simply stupefying is the fact that this guy 5 stars it on expert. That’s no small feat my friends. And the multi-camera set-up to tape it all leaves little doubt… this dude’s got skills.

If you’ve managed to beat the drum game on expert and have opened the A-N-I-M-A-L achievement and are wondering what you want to tackle next, look no further.

Remember when people were all talking about how the drums in Rock Band may actually be teaching you how to play drums? Well here it is in action. What we need is a program that’ll actually let you rock a real drum set and learn for realz… Could that Rock Band 2 Ion super set be the key?