HardwareGeeks.com - Rockband 2 for Wii

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Posted by: Michael on Thu, Oct 23rd, 2008

Today I visited MTV HQ at 1515 Broadway in Times Square in the great city of New York for a demo of Rockband 2 for the Wii along with Rockband AC/DC Live. I am by no means a Rockband player, I have played it once or twice and sucked big time but I kind of enjoyed the hands on Demo that MTV and Harmonix gave me today.

Rockband 2 which is already out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 won’t be released for the Wii until December. When Harmonix was asked for the reason of the delay, we were told Hurricane Ike was to blame along with getting it to work properly with the Wii. They also mentioned that in the Wii version of Rockband 2, if you watch the photo credits for the game you will see a thank you to Hurricane Ike. So the rumors that Nintendo forced Harmonix and MTV to delay the launch because of Wii Music are false.

Harmonix wanted to make it clear that Rockband 2 for the Wii is a full version game and almost identical to the Wii and Playstation 3 versions. However for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions you can transfer 55 songs from Rockband 1 to Rockband 2 (5 dollar charge due to licensing). You will not be able to do that with the Wii. There are other things like creating custom band logos and tattoos that can’t be done on the Nintendo Wii. Also because of the way the Nintendo System works, there won’t be any patches for the game. This may be trouble some when new controllers hit the market from third parties.

Harmonix and MTV also plan to release new DLC tracks the same day on all 3 systems.

Also due to the size of the songs, it isn’t even recommended that you save any of the Rockband songs to your Wii, instead save them to a SD memory card. The Wii supports up to 2GB SD cards which can hold about 85 songs depending on the size the song. They also wanted to make it clear that unlike some reports on the web, if you have Music on your Wii and a SD card Rockband 2 will automatically find them, you will not need to navigate to where the songs are stored.

You can buy songs for Rockband 2 for the Wii using Wii points via the Music Store in the game itself.

Yesterday MTV and Harmonix announced 20 Free DLC tracks, Wii users will be able to get these 20 free tracks plus 10 more when the game is released. Harmonix and MTV also plan to make available every single song, but it may take some time to get them all converted for the Wii, but Matt Kelly of Harmonix promised they are working as fast as they can to get the songs converted for the Wii.

When I first went to the event I thought it was an NDA type event so I didn’t take a camera with me, but while we were there we were told we could take pictures so I did with my camera phone. They aren’t that great but enjoy.

Now about the AC/DC Version. I was able to play a little of it and the songs are super hard even on easy and almost all of them are over 5 minutes long. The AC/DC version will only be available at Wal-Mart and I believe two AC/DC stores one of which is located in Times Square, I am unsure where the other is located.