The Recent Update

Here’s the official list of features and fixes in the software patch now available for download.  This comes directly from Harmonix (www.rockband.com):

• (New!) Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.
• Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.
• More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.
• Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.
• Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.
• Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!
• Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.

I LOVE the new Music Store interface – so much better than the resident XBox one.  And I appreciate the faster load times and better phoneme recognition.  But the new patch frelled my calibration something fierce, and that was a total PITA to recalibrate.

I notice there are new clothes for sale – anyone know if that’s part of the patch or just something Harmonix pushes out occasionally?  Also, and I may be losing it, but I could swear that some of the songs have been altered.  I don’t know if, when you hit a certain level of stars/fans, the notes you have to play are different even on the same level, or if Harmonix is modifying the gameplay so the songs are level-correct.

~ by raqband on March 30, 2008.