JEFFREY VEGA DOT COM

*exhale* Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done a rant… but there really hasn’t anything to say until now. There seems to be a pattern of me complaining about Rock Band, but boy oh boy do I have some things to get off my mind! So grab a seat, as I call out Nintendo for some of the frustration I’ve faced with The Beatles: Rock Band, specifically regarding the Download Content (DLC). Read on to see why John Lennon looks so offended…! I have been a fan of The Beatles: Rock Band since it came out. Yeah okay, I never really actually talk about video games or Nintendo on here anymore, but heyy… does anyone really wanna hear my banter? HA. But yes, I do still play video games and stuff when I have the time, but that’s once in a blue moon! ANYWAY. The Beatles. They are literally one of my all-time favorite bands. They have the best music I’ve ever heard. So you could imagine how ecstatic I and the other millions of other Beatles fans around the world were when this hit 9/9/09. Grabbing it at Micro Center for a crazy low $39.99 (regularly $59.99), I immediately headed over to my friend Katie Marsh’s house (she’s in a new video that will appear on the site soon!) and we ripped open the game and we had SO much fun. If you have played the game, we can all agree that the dreamscapes (the trippy backgrounds) are the coolest part of the game. Harmonix & Pi Studios (they specifically developed the Wii version) did a FANTASTIC job on this title, and I was VERY happy with this game and everything about it! You can ask my sister ell oh elll… when slash if I came home for the weekend I was playing that game non-stop! OKAY. So you get the point. I LOVE this game. I LOVE The Beatles. All you need is LOVE! HA. Now… here comes the part of the rant where I frown upon something that has recently come to my attention.

The Abbey Road album just hit the music store for all systems (Wii, 360, PS3) for you to download with new dreamscapes, new songs, even the Abbey Road medley! OH WAIT. The Wii version does NOT get the Abbey Road medley. Why, you ask? Read on. First, if you are unfamiliar with the Abbey Road medley, it is simply the last 9 songs on the Abbey Road album; they are all rather short, but the songs are seamlessly connected to one beautiful 16 minute listening experience – like I said, they are all individual songs, but when they are played together it is widely known as the Abbey Road medley… if you don’t have this album, I definitely recommend getting it to listen to this fantastic medley! Okay, so I mentioned that this clocked in at almost 16 minutes. It looks like Nintendo has a problem with huge file sizes, so they made it impossible for Wii owners to play the medley straight-through as it was meant to be played, but instead rather they broke it up into 5 parts. That’s right, 5 freaking parts. Instead of being able to play the medley straight-through, Wii owners will have to sit through 5 loading breaks to bring up the other songs in the medley. Do I even need to mention that 360 & PS3 owners will have no trouble playing this medley and be able to fully experience the abbey road album? The surprising factor is that this is not the fault of Harmonix, but of Nintendo. They have weird file restrictions and such, which is understandable considering the Wii has literally no internal memory storage, while the 360 & PS3 are always advertised as having like 120 GB systems. GAH NINTENDO. Why did you have to be different? “Nah, let’s not use GB. Let’s just say you have 100 blocks of memory!” What does that even mean?!

Okay. NOW, here’s the kicker of this whole sha-bang. You are gonna LOVE this. Because of this wacky file size thing, we are not allowed to purchase the album in full. We have to go into the store and buy each track individually if we want the whole thing. If you are an iTunes-music-purchaser, you know that buying the whole album is cheaper than getting each track one-by-one. Yep. That’s the case here. 360 & PS3 can hit the “buy full album” button and get the entire album for $17.99, medley and all. It’s pretty bad for Wii owners. Ready for this? All we can do is hit each song one-by-one and end up spending $19.50. What. the. heck. So basically we are forced to pay MORE (because of not being able to buy the album but just songs) for a LESS quality product (instead of the full medley we just get the puzzle pieces of it). And what’s funny is that The Beatles: Rock Band has sold the best on the Wii platform (I guess the party nature of the Wii matches the party atmosphere of rock band). In the end, we are left with angered Wii fans who just want what the 360 & PS3 owners get – we paid the same freaking price for the game, so why do we get the shaft? A call to action plan would be to lower the price because we can’t get it at the buy the album price. There’s literally nothing we can do about it… it’s a file size problem with Nintendo, but geez, we shouldn’t have to pay more because of their personal problems. As much as I want to add Abbey Road and its famous medley to my game, I refuse to do it under conditions like this. Let me re-inforce what I said earlier: We are forced to pay MORE for a LESS quality product… just because we chose Nintendo. I’d rather pay $17.99 for the full thing with the medley then $19.50 for the chopped-up lesser version. No full album ability, no medley, but hey, let’s pay more money for that, just for kicks and giggles!!! *sarcasm* Thanks Nintendo. This is THE definition of unfair. :/