You've Got Your Legos In My Rock Band
As much as I've praised Harmonix's approach to music games, the existence of Lego Rock Band stands as the greatest "yeah, but..." to my appreciation. With Activision going for a more family-friendly audience with the upcoming Band Hero, it makes sense for Harmonix to try the same. It still feels a little hokey though. Since they're targeting a new audience that doesn't already own RB, they could at least put the LRB songs up as DLC for the rest of us. Yes, you can buy LRB and export the songs, but what if you only want 3 or 4? Looking at the full setlist that was posted today, I can see maybe going for "Ghostbusters", "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" (one of my favorite songs, but doesn't it have no guitar?), "Song 2" and "The Final Countdown" (Illusions, Michael!), but I'm not going to pay $60 (+ $10 export charge) just for those.
It was announced that LRB will have access to the same DLC store as regular RB, albeit a filtered version that only makes "approved for all audiences" tracks available. With age tiers now coming into play, I'd like to see Harmonix move in the other direction and start offering uncensored versions of songs. Right now, songs are either radio-edits (sample lyric from Alice in Chains' "Man in the Box": "Shove my nose in spit") or have the curse words blanked out completely (sample lyric from Tenacious D's "Master Exploder": "My voice is [long pause] POWERFUL!!!") Since the game doesn't penalize using wrong words or singing where there are no lyrics, players doing vocals can use salty language at their discretion. But it'd be nice to have the uncensored tracks available for when you're playing guitar or drums by yourself so you don't have wince every time you hear sanitized vocals.