When "Rock Band Unplugged" was first announced, I had visions of tiny plastic instruments or four people sitting next to each other rocking out on their PSPs. Not so.

Unlike the console iterations of "Rock Band," "Unplugged" is a one-person band. Read more...

The band's sixth and most recent album will be available for download next week. Read more...

Check out the first trailer for upcoming PSP title "Rock Band Unplugged," where your hands are the peripherals.

The game will be out on June 9 with the PSP. There will also be a "Rock Band Entertainment Pack" that comes with the game, a black PSP, a 4GB memory stick and a voucher to download the movie "School of Rock."

Related Post:
'Rock Band Unplugged' Comes To PSP In June, With DLC

Time to look under the couch for change, as MTV Games and Harmonix have announced the latest downloadable content for "Rock Band," featuring live Thin Lizzy tracks, more from Pat Benetar, the debut of The Pretenders and even some Nickelodeon (?!) tracks. Read more...

Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos says that "Rock Band" has encouraged more people to learn how to play real instruments. He also speaks briefly on The Beatles licensing. Read more...

It's no surprise that many people at MTV love the MTV Games-published "Rock Band." But just how much do they love the Harmonix-developed game?

At MTV's Times Square headquarters where two-thirds of the Multiplayer team operates, yesterday was declared "Rock Band Day." Employees were invited to play and compete to win "Rock Band 2" "game kits" which consisted of the game, a microphone, one guitar and the standard drum set.

All day in our cafeteria, "The Lodge," MTV workers tried to earn a spot in the end-of-day finals. The competition came down to two bands: Fujiyaki from the 30th floor and Necromantik from the 17th floor (MTV.com, represent).

Read on to see photos from the event: Read more...

Today at E3, Harmonix announced the full track listing for "Rock Band 2."

The list, which comprises of 83 songs (all original master tracks), includes a new single from Guns N' Roses as well as classic songs from much-sought-after legends AC/DC and Bob Dylan.

The new game will also be backwards compatible, allowing all the tracks players downloaded for the first "Rock Band" game to work with "Rock Band 2." At the moment, the "Rock Band 1" disc tracks aren't confirmed (Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos said "almost" all of them can be exported to "Rock Band 2"). Thus far, that's still 257 songs.

See all 257 songs you can play in "Rock Band 2" so far: Read more...

Yesterday afternoon, I played "Rock Band" for the Wii in a demo room used by MTV Games (it's not as easy for us as you'd think -- I had to walk five blocks to another building).

Harmonix Community Manager Sean Baptiste was on hand to sing lead vocals for shy journalists. After we rocked out to some tunes (I played guitar on OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" and Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time"), I gave Baptiste the third degree (no, we don't get any details in advance) with a few burning questions I had about the Wii version...

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Today, Harmonix announced the details about a major patch for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of "Rock Band" that includes a new in-game music store. The update will be available this week for both platforms, according to the developer.

The Cambridge-based studio, which is owned by MTV Networks, also revealed today that six million songs have been downloaded since the game's November 20 launch.

MTV Multiplayer was able to see a demo of the store's features earlier this month in New York. The new music store is accessible through the main menu listed after the "Community" tab, and the purchasable songs are categorized by new releases, song titles, song packs and albums. Albums are not available yet, but are indicated to be "coming soon." You can also sort the downloadable tracks by artist name, genre, difficulty and year.

New tunes will be marked with "New!" and the store will recognize if you've already downloaded a song by marking it as "Sold" to prevent you from accidentally acquiring the same song twice. Within the store, aside from pricing, you'll also be able to preview the songs and see the album artwork.

Another addition to the music shopping experience is the denotation of difficulty for each track; on a nine-point scale, players can see a song's difficulty for each instrument as well as the band as a whole. I wondered why they chose a nine-point scale. "When I asked 'Why not out of ten?' [The developers] were like, 'Because it's out of nine," Harmonix rep John Drake told me at the demo, laughing. When I asked if the handy new difficulty ratings would be retroactively applied to the on-disc tunes, he said, "That's something we're looking into, but it's not planned at the moment."

The music store patch also includes several fixes to the game. Read on to see the revisions as well as screenshots of the new music store. Read more...

Earlier this week, Harmonix Senior Designer Dan Teasdale answered our burning questions about "Rock Band."

But we also wanted to know how the team came up with the Achievements for the game. Continuing our series of finding out where Achievements come from, Teasdale answers our questions about "Rock Band"'s range of Achievements, including how they differ from "Guitar Hero II"'s Achievements and the possibility of Achievement-laden downloadable content.

But for Teasdale, personally, he said he'd like to see a new kind of Achievement:

"I'd love it if there was some form of additional Achievement-like system in the future that was more like a badge of honor or a way for people to see your play style... Imagine if you could view someone's Gamercard and see that they'd beaten me in a "Meet the Developer" tournament, or chosen to team up with the Scryers in "World of Warcraft," or even was an "Early Adopter" and played a certain game in the first week of release. You can't do these with Achievements, since you could never get 100%, but with a badge of honor system as well as Achievements, things could be much more flexible."

More material like that follows in what may well be our last "Rock Band" post of 2007!

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