That game was self-contained. If you wanted to play The Beatles' songs in another version of Rock Band, tough, you couldn't. But Green Day: Rock Band will do nothing of the sort, and will feature "a fully exportable track list that will allow users to play the songs in "Rock Band" and "Rock Band 2" on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation".

Wii users, meanwhile, will just have to make do.

Amazing how the power of technology can make the band appear as if they aren't too old for this stuff.

Rubber Soul isn't just one of The Beatles' best albums. It's perhaps one of the greatest albums of all time, constantly making such lists in periodicals such as Rolling Stone which are in the know when it comes to this sort of thing. Only three tracks from the album made it onto the disc for The Beatles: Rock Band, and quite frankly "Drive My Car," "I'm Looking Through You" and "If I Needed Someone" just weren't enough. The album has so many amazing songs, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," "Nowhere Man," "Girl," and "In My Life," all of which will be available next week as part of the Rubber Soul Complete the Album Pack. The eleven songs will set you back $13.49 on the PlayStation Network or 1440 Microsoft points, with individual songs available on both consoles as well as the Wii.

This is the Beatles album that holds the most memories for me, particularly with the song "Michelle," which my family would sing to me when I was a little girlish-looking baby. I'd post a picture, but the Kotaku comments section can't handle that much "Awwwwww."

Rubber Soul Complete The Album Pack Track Listing:

· "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"
· "You Won't See Me"
· "Nowhere Man"
· "Think For Yourself"
· "The Word"
· "Michelle"
· "What Goes On"
· "Girl"
· "In My Life"
· "Wait"
· "Run For Your Life"

"We can confirm that 39 positions were eliminated today at Harmonix as part of re-structuring to better align our staffing to best suit our product development plans and schedules moving forward," an MTV Games / Harmonix spokesperson told Kotaku in an e-mailed statement. "Those affected were primarily in QA. The others affected ranged from administrative to other various roles within the company."

Kotaku received word independently that at least one staff designer was among those laid off.

But the Rock Band publisher indicates that sales of Rock Band were not a factor, pointing to a shift in out-sourced and part-time QA at Harmonix rather than full-time testers.

The Beatles: Rock Band has sold more than a million copies worldwide according to the company, though the music gaming category has been softer this year. At an investors conference in New York yesterday, EA CEO John Riccitiello, whose company distributes Rock Band, said that packaged sales of Rock Band (meaning discs and instruments, not the vigorously downloaded add-on songs) was down by "hundreds of millions of dollars." Downloaded songs remain hot, with more than 60 million songs in Rock Band's 1000-song library paid for and downloaded date, according to MTV.

The Rock Band Network is a service that allows people to turn listenable music into music that is playable in Rock Band, empowering any musician or fan with the proper rights to expand the Rock Band music library and make some money off sales to gamers of the songs they work on. The Network is currently in closed beta.

The November launch of the service on the Xbox 360 that was suggested by Harmonix to Kotaku this past summer isn't happening.

An MTV Games spokesperson broke down the current roll-out plan:

"We're working hard to get the Rock Band Network open public beta release of tools up before the end of the year, with our RBN storefront launching in early 2010. Exact dates still TBD. The tools necessary for bands to start authoring and prepare their content for review are already live on Creators.rockband.com/tools/download. The open beta launch will add access to the currently private website where all of the RBN community activity and peer reviewing of tracks will take place. People who join the Rock Band Network (bands, fans or otherwise) will be able to play and preview any song before it hits the store, so they should stay tuned for the official launch."

So the closed beta continues and it sounds like it will open up to the rest of the public by New Year's. If you want to buy the songs people are coding, however, you'll need to wait until 2010.

The RBN is planned for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Originally, the 360 version was supposed to launch first. There was no word today about whether that is still the plan.

[PIC]

Today Harmonix and MTV Games proudly announced reaching and surpassing the goal they set back in August, with more than 1,000 songs from from nearly 400 different artists available for purchase and play between the Rock Band Music Store and the songs included on the Rock Band and Rock Band 2 discs. This week also marks the 105th consecutive week of new Rock Band DLC releases. Impressive!

"When we launched Rock Band two years ago, we made a promise to create a music gaming experience that delivered on a weekly basis more songs and artists than ever imagined," said Alex Rigopulos, co-founder and CEO of Harmonix Music Systems. "We're extremely proud to pass this remarkable milestone of over 1,000 songs in Rock Band and will continue to innovate and bring more of the best music to Rock Band players all over the world."

With the impeding launch of the Rock Band Network Music Store, which will allow bands to upload their own music for purchase, expect that number to explode in the coming months. Enjoy the milestone while you can, cause we're more than likely going to leave it in the dust real soon.

The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band complete the album DLC pack for The Beatles: Rock Band is now available for the Xbox 360 and Wii, with the PlayStation 3 version arriving on Thursday. I'm looking forward to giving the new songs a go, if I can ever wrest my copy of the game away from my older brother. You hear that, Richard? I want my game back! Now more pretending to be asleep when I knock on your door. I can hear you singing. Sometimes I have nightmares.

Next week fans of The Beatles will be able to complete what the Rock Band titles started with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "With A Little Help From My Friends," "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," "Getting Better," and "Good Morning Good Morning" with the final eight songs from the band's eighth studio album. The aptly-titled "Fixing A Hole" joins "She's Leaving Home," "Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!," "Within You Without You," "When I'm Sixty-Four," "Lovely Rita," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" and "A Day In The Life," completing the album so popular it was made into a musical starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Jees.

The new tracks will be available on November 17th for the Xbox 360 and Wii and November 19th on the PlayStation 3. The full pack will run $13.49 or 1080 Microsoft points, with individual songs running $2 a pop.

The fact he mentions a third Rock Band should surprise only those who wake up every morning shocked to see the sun has risen. But the specifics, and why he's involved in the project, those are a little more interesting.

"I'm working on 'Rock Band 3' and making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game," he told the newspaper. "Give me a couple years, it's going to happen."

I don't know. I enjoy playing Rock Band because I can't play the guitar. If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar I'd, well...learn how to play the guitar.

The ever-changing Thenewno2 [Chicago Tribune]

The official Rock Band web site is selling the Rock Band Special Edition Bundle, including the game, drums, microphone and guitar, plus a copy of Rock Band 2 for a combined $79 USD. That's shipped. Shipped! Obviously, you're getting first gen instrument controllers, but you're also getting 140 songs for under 80 bucks.

The deal is limited to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, better known as the ones you should be getting anyway.

Rock Band $79 [Official Site]

Maybe it has something to do with Ringo's moustache. Or maybe it's the option to play "Golden Slumbers"/ "Carry That Weight"/ "The End" but $17 doesn't seem that high a price any more.

According to a boastful official announcement from Apple Corps, MTV Games and Harmonix, the winner of the monthly music game battle was The Beatles: Rock Band, the "#2 selling title across all genres by revenue in the U.S. for the month of September." The Xbox 360 and Wii versions sold well enough to chart in the NPD's top ten video games for the month, with the downloadable single "All You Need Is Love" racking up over 100,000 downloads.

The Beatles: Rock Band folks further rub their victory in Activision's corporate face by pointing out that Guitar Hero 5 shipped on an additional platform (the PlayStation 2) and even included a copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen thrown in for free.

It may have also been claimed that Scott Guthrie, president of MTV Games, could beat up Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO. Or it may not have been. Or was it? We may never know...

That's the $249 version, with Ringo Starr's drums and Paul McCartney's bass (plus microphone and stand). GamesIndustry.biz reports that Phillipe Dauman, the Viacom boss, told a conference yesterday that sales have exceeded internal expectations, to the tune of 25 percent of its inventory being sold in the first week.

"The special limited edition hardware sets that we have are selling really fast," Dauman told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference in New York, "and it looks to us that we'll be selling out of that in November."

Dauman added that the game's sales have been, in particular, helped by the price cut on the PlayStation 3.

Should Dauman be right, it will be interesting to see if a bona fide holiday gray market can develop for the Beatles' top-shelf bundle, considering the expectations of a poor holiday spending season overall, and the fact it's not a console, just a very expensive version of a single game.

The Beatles Rock Band Sales "Exceeding Expectations" [GamesIndustry.biz]

Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" will be featured in LEGO Rock Band soundtrack as will the singer himself, looking far more pear-shaped than he's ever looked. Let's all pray for Iggy's continued health until the release of LEGO Rock Band, lest things get any weirder around here.

Iggy Pop monte sur scène dans LEGO Rock Band. [JeuxVideo.fr]

Nowhere is this more evident than in music-themed video games. Titles like Guitar Hero 5, The Beatles: Rock Band and soon-to-be released DJ Hero all use real musicians, living and dead, to help create a stronger sense of realism.

But is that a good thing?

For the surviving members of The Beatles and their fans it seems to be.

The self-titled Rock Band game released to phenomenal reviews and delivered an experience that was solely devoted the band. The game, it seems, was an effort to not only give people a chance to play through their favorite Beatles hits, but to get a better sense of how The Beatles grew both as musicians and a band.

The same week that fans of the fab four were rejoicing in the singular experience of The Beatles: Rock Band, the widow, fans and band mates of late grunge icon Kurt Cobain were up in arms over his inclusion in Guitar Hero 5.

Prior to the game's release, publisher Activision told Rolling Stone magazine that Courtney Love wasn't just integral in bringing Cobain to life in the game, she was great to work with.

But in a frenzy of late-night Twitter updates a week after the game's release, Love denied that she was happily involved in the project, posting 214 Tweets over a six-hour period decrying the game, Cobain's inclusion in it and most hotly the ability to have the grunge singer perform other songs.

It's this single feature, which allows gamers to unlock Cobain and have him sing everything from Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire to Bon Jovi's You Give Love a Bad Name, that seems to be the most upsetting to friends, fans and family.

Some critics too, were unhappy with it. Kotaku's own review described the ability to reanimate the virtual corpses of Cobain and Johnny Cash and control them as marionettes in other people's songs, as tacky and crude.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, the two surviving members of Nirvana, released a joint statement asking Activision to alter the game to prevent the virtual Cobain from performing songs that are not his own.

"Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better."

Activision, which had initially agreed to participate in this story, declined to respond to questions about the decision to include real-world musicians in games and to say whether they would change Cobain's inclusion in Guitar Hero 5.

They did send along a prepared statement saying that the game had the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a "written agreement signed by Courtney Love to use Kurt Cobain's likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero 5,"

While Love didn't respond to our requests for an interview, her attorney did, saying that while there was an agreement in place, it didn't allow the sort of treatment Cobain is getting in the game.

"Ms. Cobain is extremely upset about Activision's use of Mr. Cobain's likeness to sing the songs of others in its Guitar Hero game," Keith A. Fink, Love's attorney, told Kotaku. "Activision was granted permission by Kurt's trust solely to use his name and likeness. Activision was not given an unbridled right to use Mr. Cobain's name and likeness. "

"The agreement Activision has with the trust doesn't allow them to use his likeness in ways that denigrate his image."

Love's response to Guitar Hero 5 is a far cry from the response The Beatles: Rock Band is getting from the family and surviving members of The Beatles.

Perhaps that's because in the Rock Band game players can only perform as The Beatles in songs by The Beatles. The game comes with 45 tracks, and more are on the way, but they're only going to be Beatles songs. And none of those Beatles songs work on Rock Band 2.

It's a clear distinction that could explain Love's emotional and slightly delayed reaction to Cobain's use in Guitar Hero 5.

Had she seen The Beatles: Rock Band I'm sure she couldn't help but ponder over what could have been: A video game that celebrates Kurt Cobain rather than using him. A title that expands Cobain's audience, reminds people of his importance in the world of music and gives fans and neophytes an equal opportunity to try and understand the godfather of grunge.

In the future, game developers attracted to the allure of reality should perhaps keep in mind that what makes reality so intriguing is that it's real, not that it's a jumping off point for a distasteful fiction.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Dhani Harrison, son of The Beatles' George Harrison and The Beatles: Rock Band consultant, was a guest on last night's show, a rare Tonight Show video game promotional appearance. Rare, but one that may offer some insight into how well Harmonix's new game will fare with the public. It seemed to fare alright with Conan and the boys, as shown in the clip below.

Yep, that's a Hulu clip and may not be available to view in your country or continent. Maybe give NBC.com a shot at the link below.

The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien Dhani Harrison (09/08/09) [NBC.com]

The Beatles: Rock Band features band authentic replica instruments, 45 songs pulled from the history of the band and the backing of the surviving members of The Beatles themselves. But is it just another Rock Band with The Beatles' music, or is it, as Harmonix promised, something entirely new?

Loved
The Music: The Beatles: Rock Band is an aural journey through the sizzling, but short history of one of the world's most successful and popular bands in history. The selection of music that walks participants through the 45-track trip was deftly plucked from the group's discography, providing a deep look at the group's evolution from skiffle to pop and offering subtle insight into how they absorbed and transformed the music of the day into their own sound. Along the journey the more popular, more pop music of The Beatles gives way to a sophisticated sound, touching on The Beatles' experimental songwriting, their use of unusual recording methods and, of course, those dazzling lyrics.

Dreamscapes: Where the power of the game's music selection sneaks up on gamers as they work their way from "Twist and Shout" to "The End," the game's 20 fantastical "dreamscapes" are a far less subtle, though no less powerful device. Each of these dream-like sequences start off in the Abbey Road recording studios, then launch gamers into surreal, psychedelic, fantasy worlds tied to specific songs. Each has the production value of a televised music video and each seems to draw out the meaning and power of the song it supplements.

Sounds: Easily missed, the background sounds included in the loading screens and at the beginning and end of many of the game's songs, help pull gamers into the experience. Listening to the foursome talking among themselves about trivial matters, or hearing Ringo Starr complain about the blisters on his fingers after playing through "Helter Skelter" on drums, and perhaps earning some yourself, adds a final touch of authenticity to the experience.

Extras: As much as I enjoyed playing through The Beatles evolution, it is only 45 songs. It helps, then, that the game offers up such compelling rewards for replaying and perfecting venues and songs. These unlockables, all drawn from the Apple Corps' archives include photographs and hard to find audio clips, such as the full version of The Beatles unreleased Christmas Record from 1963.

Instruments: Another level of realism includes the creation of four new controllers based on the instruments used by The Beatles. The Special Edition bundle of the game comes with a Ludwig drum set, a microphone and microphone stand and Paul McCartney's Hofner bass. While the drum isn't different looking, the Hofner bass is a surprisingly accurate replica. Other controllers available include a Rickenbacker 325 guitar and a Gretsch Duo Jet guitar.

Harmony: Not much has changed in the basic mechanic of Rock Band, but one of the biggest changes is the ability for three singers to use three microphones while playing The Beatles: Rock Band. The game actually tracks and scores each of the microphones separately. When multiple singers are playing there are also multiple pitch indicators that track the melody and two harmonies.

Hated
Deja Vu: The Beatles: Rock Band will be familiar to anyone who has played a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game. Very familiar. Perhaps too familiar in light of Harmonix co-founder's promise to deliver an all new game built from the ground up. With the same mechanics, essentially the same controllers and the same way to experience the music, the only thing new about The Beatles: Rock Band is its subject matter. If this was built from the ground up, it was done without leaving the successful frame work of the original Rock Band.

Dopplegangers: The game features six settings carefully recreated from their real world counterparts and 20 mind-blowing dreamscapes, but what it doesn't feature is a lot of variety in those fans watching you perform. For a game focusing on such a shot period of time and a single band, one would have hoped that more diversity would have been included in the screaming fans that compile a bulk of the shots at the venues you play. Instead gamers are treated to a few too many recycled audience animations in each location.

Beatle Beats: Beatles Beats is The Beatles: Rock Band version of the drum trainer already found in Rock Band 2. Instead of training with generic beats, it teaches gamers how to drum using some of Ringo Starr's famous rhythms. But that's all you get from The Beatles. No voice work from Starr, no new animations. A bit of a disappointment.

The Beatles: It should probably go without saying that a game called The Beatles: Rock Band is meant for fans of The Beatles. It's worth pointing out, though, that unlike band-themed released of Guitar Hero which include other group's music in the mix, this one doesn't. What you're paying for is 45 songs by The Beatles and the promise of more Beatles music to purchase down the road.

The promise of Harmonix and Apple Corps working together to deliver a new way to experience The Beatles can't help but raise expectations. It doesn't help that early on Harmonix was adamant that what fans would receive would not be Rock Band featuring music from The Beatles. And that eventually, ultimately, is very close to what Harmonix delivered.

But while the game's core remained mostly untouched, the developers managed to massage enough new, enough subtlety into the title to deliver something that leaves gamers somehow feeling much more in tune with not just the music of The Beatles, but their personalities. Ultimately, The Beatles: Rock Band is an interesting experiment, one that, while flawed, eventually delivers a new and rewarding experience for music and game fans alike.

The Beatles: Rock Band was developed by Harmonix and published by MTV Games for the Playstation 3, Wii and Xbox 360 on Sept. 9. The stand-alone game sells for $59.99, the Limited Edition Premium Bundle sell for $249.99, the Rickenbacker 325 Standalone Guitar and the Gretsch Duo Jet Standalone Guitar sells for $99.99. Played through the entire story mode on drums. Played multiple quickplay sessions on drums, guitar and microphone. Sampled the Beatle Beats trainer and vocal harmony trainer.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The Beatles Rock Band will be released next week, which puts us in that pre-release timeframe during which secrets lurking in a game lurk no more. Now's about when we would find out that Raiden is actually the main character of The Beatles game. Or that the game is only six hours long and full of driving missions.

So we know what 44 of the 45 songs will be. A mystery remains.

Wondering what the scoop was on song #45, I asked an MTV Games PR rep what the deal was. He informed me that it's just a surprise for the people who get the game. No big scoop? No suddenly-discovered new Beatles song?

Probably not. Check out the list at the link above. Then... any guesses?

The folks behind Rock Band appear to be taking the opportunity seriously, with a series of promotional tools to highlight Rock Band Bar Nights registered businesses. These include a Bar Night exclusive e-commerce store, online friendliness via the Rock Band Facebook and Twitter accounts and "exclusive Rock Band product offerings."

The first of those offerings is a five song disc preview of The Beatles: Rock Band, available only to Rock Band Bar Nights participants. It's just a week away and a five song rotation will quickly wear thin amongst drunkards, but it's something!

Coming later are some online tools that will help fans of drinking alcohol close to a copy of Rock Band find locations that offer this combination. MTV Games will release "an online application searchable by zip code and a mobile version available for download as a free iPhone application" so you're never too far away from knowing where the nearest Rock Band bar night is.

As a fan of imbibing and making an ass of myself on stage, this is great news.

While that close-up shot of John may border on slightly creepy, the blend of footage of the band and the people who could conceivably play The Beatles: Rock Band is well done. Charming maybe. Classy definitely. And the transition from Abbey Road to Rock Band note highway? Someone's clever!

Wonder how the competition will respond, TV commercial-wise...

Here comes Rock Band's public option.

Launching on the Xbox 360 in November and coming later to the PlayStation 3, the Rock Band Network is one of those grand creations that just maybe could change how everything works in its corner of the video game kingdom.

The Network will empower anyone with about $160 to spend and decent music and computer skills with the ability to turn a recorded piece of music into a Rock Band song available to anyone who has an Xbox 360 version of Rock Band. This is what the game's developers at Harmonix have been doing for years and they're now ending their monopoly.

The ambitious program will require a community of amateur and professional song coders to take several steps — some probably too technical to interest the average gamer — to bring a song through the process.

"This is a project that's geared towards musicians," Harmonix composer and sound designer Caleb Epps told Kotaku during a demo of the tools and service at MTV's offices in New York earlier this week. "The boon for gamers is they're going to get access to a ton more content. It's far more content than we can do [ourselves.]"

If this all works, gamers will gain the ability to purchase countless new songs from a broader selection of music styles than any video game has offered before. And they'll be able to do something with them they've not yet been able to do with Rock Band music: Try it before they buy it.

At the MTV offices in Times Square earlier this week, a quartet of Harmonix employees demonstrated how Rock Band Network works.

The process begins, hopefully, with honesty. Harmonix and MTV Games are opening their platform to anyone who has rights to pieces of music. Those with such rights can get underway by purchasing, for a $60 non-commercial license, the PC and Mac audio program Reaper, a version of which has been modified for Rock Band. The program allows the user to edit multiple MIDI tracks, associating hits of a drum, licks of a guitar or words in a song with colored-button Rock Band cues. That coding makes it possible for a piece of music to become the stuff of Rock Band: Audio that plays if players tap, strum and sing using the game's drums, guitars and mic, in time with colored icons that scroll down a note highway.

Manipulating a song in Reaper looks, at a glance, like working on a song in ProTools or other popular sound-editing software. "We're fully expecting people to come to the program with a little bit of musical knowledge," Harmonix sound designer Caleb Epps told me. If you don't have that expertise, then coding songs for Rock Band Network is probably not for you. But if it is, the Harmonix reps say that Reaper will feel comfortable for people who use digital audio studio programs. Features specific to the Rock Band version of Reaper include a preview pane that shows how the part of a song will look as it scrolls through the game's note highway.

Some shortcuts are built into the system, automatically syncing mouth animations of characters to vocals. Drum parts can be automatically rendered for those who don't want to code one. For those who want depth, they can manually craft each part, even including a track for animations in the venue. Manipulating the same system that Harmonix coders use, Rock Band Network programmers can specify how a a drummer will animate and hit each drum throughout a song.

The next step involves the computer program Magma, a transferring tool that brings the music file from Reaper to a user's Xbox 360. This program allows a little more tweaking of a song's levels, but is primarily intended to allow the song coder to test a playthrough of their song, using regular Rock Band instrument controllers and setting as many or as few parts to auto-play as need be. Testing can only be done locally, not with other people networked online.

During these stages, a song coder can apply any cover art, upload the text of lyrics, incorporate overdive cues, assign a difficulty level and any other basics that would be involved in setting the song up for purchase and playability.

Harmonix estimates that these coding stages will take about two days for a user comfortable with the program to complete. What follows is a process of mandatory play-testing and peer review on the Rock Band Network's creators website.

Uploading a song for playtesting and participating in such tests and peer reviews requires membership in Microsoft's XNA Creators Club, which costs $99 to join.

A submitted song will have to be reviewed by at least eight other people and will be checked manually and by software for quality and copyright infringement. Play-testing last a week and peer review runs at least two days or as long as two weeks. A two-day quarantine follows. After that, a song will be published to the Rock Band Network Store, a separate store from the familiar Rock Band marketplace, also accessible through the game. Publishing will happen within an hour of the song clearing those hurdles, not at an assigned weekly or monthly release time.

The whole process from song creation to publishing on the store would therefore take a couple of weeks, minimum.

Once a song is on the Rock Band Network store, gamers will be able to download and play a demo version of the song, which will last a minute or 35% of the way into a song, whichever comes first. Song quality can be rated with one to five "lighters," though Harmonix attests that there will be measures taken to ensure people can't unfairly vote down a song for spite.

Songs can be sold for 80, 160 or 240 Microsoft points, the equivalent of $1, $2 or $3. Songs can range from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Albums are not supported and, while there will be a Harmoinx Picks section in the store, no special treatment is planned for bigger labels. Users will be able to search by song author, label, genre or even just find a random track. The person who put the song through this whole system, the song "submitter," will earn 30% of the revenue generated by the sale of the music.

The Rock Band Network is in beta test on the Xbox 360. When the service launches to the public in November, Harmonix expects there to be songs already pushed through and available for purchase.

Epps said the song-coding tools that this service makes available are "98.75%" the same as what Harmonix used to code songs for Rock Band. Amatuers and the pros will be on a nearly level playing field. But he doesn't fear for his job, he said. "I think there's always going to be a market for premium content." He's coded many, many songs himself. "I think we're the best in the world at this," he said.

Dear public, can you do better?

(A release of the Rock Band Network Store is also planned for the PlayStation 3, though Harmonix has no date specified. As the PS3 lacks the Creators Club amateur development infrastructure, song creation and submission would still occur through the XNA Creators Club. Harmonix senior producer Matthew Nordhaus told Kotaku that a subset of the songs available to 360 owners would be available to PS3 users. As for the Wii, Harmonix would like to make the store available but is uncertain how to do it but is trying to find a way. Support for the Rock Band Network requires a software patch, and Wii games currently don't support patches.)