Harmonix and MTV Games announced today that “Rock Band” owners on PlayStation 2 and Wii will have a way to access downloadable content — it’s just coming bundled on a disc.

“Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1″ arrives on July 15 at an MSRP of $29.99, and features tracks from David Bowie (”Moonage Daydream”), Oasis (”Live Forever), Weezer (”Buddy Holly”), Boston (”More Than A Feeling)” and others. In total, 20 tracks.

Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gamers have been gobbling up downloadable tracks left and right — 10 million as of last week — but the introduction of “Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1″ introduces an altogether new value structure to the downloadable content.

Are PS2 and Wii consumers getting enough for their money?

Individual songs are $2 a pop on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, which means purchasing each song in the newly announced packs individually would cost $40.

The PS2 and Wii owners — who don’t have the option to download the songs on their consoles — are enjoying about $10 in savings, paying roughly $1.50 per song. Unlike everyone else, they don’t get to choose every song they’re paying for, but the cost of manufacturing and shipping a boxed product doesn’t appear to have been passed onto the retail consumer.

In terms of sheer value, the numbers speak for themselves: Wii and PS2 owners are still saving $10, unless it turns out they don’t want six or more of these songs Harmonix picked out.

This week’s Rhythm Game Track Finder update focuses on three of the biggest names in music video games “Rock Band,” “Guitar Hero” and “Alvin and The Chipmunks.”

Right about now, you may be wondering just how “Alvin” made it onto that list. While “Alvin and The Chipmunks” may not have been the most critically acclaimed game of last year, it does boast one of the most diverse and well-rounded soundtracks in quite some time. Granted, all songs were performed as covers by The Chipmunks, but, if you check out a few of the previews at the game’s official site, you’ll see just how amusing The Ramones and Run D.M.C. sound performed at such a high pitch.

In addition to “The Chipmunks” both “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero 3″ saw three song updates in the form of downloadable track packs. However, it was announced today that “Rock Band” owners who have a PS2 or Wii will be able to purchase twenty song track backs to supplement the Xbox and PS3’s downloadable content. The “Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1” disks will be available on July 15. Also added were the first 15 (of 25) confirmed tracks for “Guitar Hero: On Tour.”

Check out the full list of updates:
Alvin and The Chipmunks (Wii, PS2) 40 Songs Added
Guitar Hero 3 (Xbox 360, PS3) 3 Songs Added (Muse’s “‘Exo-Politics,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” and “Supermassive Black Hole”)
Guitar Hero: On Tour (DS) 15 Songs Added
Rock Band (Xbox 360, PS3) 3 Songs Added (Angels & Airwave’s “It Hurts,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Date With The Night,” and Fall Out Boy’s “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race”)
Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1 (Wii, PS2) 20 Songs Added

As always, go to trackfinder.mtv.com, for all this and more — it’s the definitive search engine for all your music gaming needs.

Since we launched the Rhythm Game Track Finder back in January, there haven’t been too many rhythm games actually released. Our updates have mainly been focused on downloadable content, or adding classic rhythm games from years past. However, this past week “Battle of the Bands” was released, and it was the ideal candidate for inclusion in the database.

THQ released this Wii-exclusive title with 30 songs from artists from drastically different genres. Whether you like Korn or The Commodores there’ll be something for you to play in “Battle of the Bands.” All the tracks are covers, but that actually plays into the game itself, since the challenge is to complete the songs as they are “remixed” into different styles by the “bands” in the game. Multiplayer’s own Patrick Klepek describes it as a “refreshingly different” rhythm game.

The Track Finder was also updated this past week with “Karaoke Revolution American Idol Encore” PS3 downloadable content, as well as “SingStar”’s official release date and track list for here in the States. Last, but not least, we added three more song’s to “Rock Band” (one of them being The Smashing Pumpkin’s greatest song of all time, “Zero”).

The full list is below:

Battle of the Bands (Wii) 30 Songs Added
Karaoke Revolution American Idol Encore (PS3) 43 Songs Added
Rock Band (PS3, Xbox 360) 3 Songs Added (The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Zero,” and The Mother Hips’ “Red Tandy” and “Time Sick Son of a Grizzly”)

As always, go to trackfinder.mtv.com, for all this and more — it’s the definitive search engine for all your music gaming needs.

I attended a wonderfully offbeat union of two hearts this past weekend. Held at the San Francisco Zoo, this ceremony had a live acoustic cover of “Still Alive” to greet guests, a musical playlist powered by an iPod and “Rock Band” as a main attraction.

Karen Chu, artist at 1UP, and Patrick Joynt, associate console editor at GameSpy, married on a particularly windy Saturday evening in the Bay Area, and yours truly was present for the celebratory festivities.

I’ve known both Karen and Patrick for several years, and this event was a long time coming. I also knew their wedding was to be anything but ordinary.

I never expected I’d be singing The Ramones‘ “Blitzkrieg Bop” in front of a bunch of my good friends’ family members that I’d never met before. But I did it anyway.

Read more…

It’s amazing what a couple of misunderstandings can lead you to.

I interviewed Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos last week about the “Rock Band” downloadable album program launching this week.

We chatted on Thursday, at which time I had two things wrong:

1. I thought, as we had reported earlier in the week, that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board prohibited downloadable content that would have a more severe rating than the game it was associated with. (Later in the week, we found out that the prohibition only applies to mandatory DLC).
2. I thought Nirvana’s Nevermind was announced as “Rock Band” DLC (it’s not). Given misunderstanding #1, I thought that would force Harmonix to confront the possibility that the album cover and some of its lyrics could be considered M-rated content that didn’t suit their T-rated game.

It doesn’t matter that I was wrong, on both fronts, because, Rigopulos told me, the ESRB doesn’t factor into Harmonix’s decisions about “Rock Band” music.

“By and large we’ve tended toward using radio edits,” Rigopulos told me. “The ESRB is not, to my knowledge, as sensitive to language in M ratings. The use of radio edits on our part has been our decision, rather than an ESRB one.”

“Rock Band” fans, what do you think? Do radio edits affect your purchases? Would you buy uncensored versions of songs if they were available? Would they get you in trouble?

You may have heard about our biggest addition to the Track Finder this week already - “Rock Band”’s first full albums.

Three albums totaling 34 songs were added last week to our ever-growing database of rhythm game songs. Once these songs are released Xbox 360 and PS3 owners will have 176 songs available to them, mostly via download, but that’s more than any other game that is currently a part of the Track Finder. So, take your pick from The Cars, Pixies, and Judas Priest and play that endless setlist like it was meant to be played.

Rock Band: (PS3, Xbox 360) 34 Songs Added (The Cars’ Self Titled, The Pixies’ Doolittle, Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance and Motley Crue’s “Saints of Love”)

Rock Band: (Wii) 63 Songs Added

As always, go to trackfinder.mtv.com, for all this and more — it’s the definitive search engine for all your music gaming needs.

Over at MTVNews.com I just filed a story about the new plan for downloadable “Rock Band” albums. The first three albums have been announced:

• Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance (April 22 for Xbox 360, April 24 for PS3)
• The Cars‘ The Cars (May)
• The Pixies‘ Doolittle (June)

Each will sell as separate singles or as an album for $14.99.

The albums will not be downloadable for the PS2 and Wii versions of “Rock Band,” but Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos had this to say when I asked him if they’d be left out from enjoying albums via his game:

“Suffice it to say that all of this content we’re amassing for next-gen consoles, we want to make it available to as broad an audience as possible as we can.”

For more on the download plan, an update on the status of potential “Rock Band” album releases involving Fall Out Boy, Nirvana and The Who, check out the full story at MTVNews.com.

You might have noticed a drop in my posting habits at MTV Multiplayer last week. I spent almost every day immersed in games at different events and conferences, including Nintendo’s Media Summit, where the media went hands-on with their spring lineup.

The Nintendo Media Summit was also an interesting showcase for third-parties and independent studios teaming with Nintendo on Wii and the upcoming WiiWare. There wasn’t much new at the event, but that didn’t make it any less interesting.

From my two days spent with Nintendo, here were my five key takeaways:

1. “Rock Band” on Wii proved extremely popular. Even though almost everyone there had played it before. It was always packed — even singers.

2. No first-party WiiWare titles on display. Nintendo chose to highlight games outside their inner circle, made no mention of their upcoming works.

3. “Lost Winds” was the media’s WiiWare favorite. There was no way to avoid a 20 minute plus wait for the “Kirby: Cursed Canvas”-like platformer.

4. The guys behind ‘World of Goo” aren’t fans of Electronic Arts. They managed to sneak in a clever dig at their former employers in a presentation, cleverly capitalizing “E” and “A” in a slide, when speaking about their worst memories of working in the industry so far. I don’t think Nintendo knew.

5. “Boom Blox” is way better than you think. It doesn’t come across well in screens, impressions or even in-person demos. You need to play it yourself.

Bonus: Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime was nowhere to be seen.

If you’ve ever wished you could be Tommy Lee, well now’s your chance, at least virtually.

Not to be outdone by “Guitar Hero“’s announcement of Def Leppard premiering their latest single in an upcoming track pack, the crew behind “Rock Band” have announced that Mötley Crüe will be the first band to release a new single in their game.

“Saints of Los Angeles” will be premiere on April 15th on Xbox Live for 80 Points, and will make an encore performance on April 17 on the PlayStation Store for $0.99. The single is the title track from the group’s next album which is due to hit stores on July 8.

This week’s Rhythm Game Track Finder update is not only plentiful, but also home to at least one interesting video game fact that I did not know.

The past few weeks of Track Finder updates have been a bit slow, only adding some DLC one week, and half of an upcoming game the other. However, the same can’t be said about this week. We are back on track, with updates for the biggest rhythm games around: “Rock Band,” “Guitar Hero,” and “DDR.”

“Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero III” both saw updates of newly announced track packs, but the “DDR” addition was more archival, since it added “DDR Ultramix 2” to our database. In doing so, it also added one of the first games to really take advantage of Xbox Live’s downloading capabilities.

There were six downloadable track packs for the original “Ultramix,” and once “Ultramix 2″ was released, there were another set of six for that game as well. However here is where it gets interesting, if you bought any of the track packs for the original, you could play those songs in the sequel as well. So your purchase wasn’t just tied to one game, instead it was tied to a franchise. Sadly, this is an opportunity that “Guitar Hero III” has already missed out on, but there is still hope for “Rock Band.” I mean, if this kind of technology worked four years ago, on a last generation console, why can’t it work now?

Here’s this week complete update list:
Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix (Xbox) 5 Songs Added
Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2 (Xbox) 130 Songs Added
Guitar Hero III (Xbox 360, PS3) 3 Songs Added (Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages,” “Photograph,” and their still yet to be released new single “Nine Lives”)
Rock Band (Xbox 360, PS3) 3 Songs Added (Blondie’s “Call Me,” The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”)

As always, go to trackfinder.mtv.com, for all this and more — it’s the definitive search engine for all your music gaming needs.