When I popped in my very own copy of Rock Band 2 for the first time last night, I was ecstatic. Finally, I could play all of the great new songs and check out the improvements that Harmonix has made to the second game in its music franchise. My boyfriend and I, who share a home, a 360, and a hard drive, started a new tour and made him the leader. The first thing we did was to transfer the songs from the first Rock Band (paying our $4.99 licensing fee) and to make sure all of the DLC worked properly with the new disc. Everything worked perfectly.

This morning, I got up early to start a solo tour, and made a character on my profile the band leader. Even on my profile, all of the downloadable content appeared on my song list, along with songs from the original Rock Band. Everything was going fine until I got to a random set list that threw in a DLC song, at which point I was told that the song was not available and got thrown back to the band menu screen. I didn’t know what had just happened, and it wasn’t until I got booted a few more times that I realized what was going on—even though the many downloaded songs that we had showed up on my list of songs, I couldn’t actually access them from my profile because they had all been downloaded on my boyfriend’s profile. What crap! This means that I have to stay away from all random setlists and can’t play any of the songs that were downloaded on MY system, on MY hard drive, because they were downloaded on a different profile. What kind of sense does that make?



As if that wasn’t bad enough, I discovered even more problems when I got to work today. I brought my hard drive to use with the office 360 so I could continue my tour. However, not only could I not play DLC, but on a different 360, I can’t play the first Rock Band songs—even though they work fine if I play at home. Because I was now at a complete dead end in my tour, I logged in using my boyfriend’s Gamertag, only to discover that I couldn’t play any of the non-Rock Band 2 songs—original game or DLC—unless I was signed into Xbox Live. Now, this may seem like a minor problem, but it’s good to know that if Live ever goes down for a time, we won’t be able to play more than half of the songs that we’ve paid for, even though they have all been downloaded to that one hard drive. What the eff is this all about?

Honestly, I don’t know if this is a Harmonix problem or something caused by Microsoft, because there have been similar problems with some XBLA games in the past. I did load up the first Rock Band to see if it had the same DLC issues, and it does—I just never noticed before because the solo mode in the first Rock Band doesn’t include set lists. All I know is that there are a whole lot of songs bought and paid for on my hard drive that I can’t use on my profile, and I’m not thrilled about it. Does anyone else think that this is complete bullshit? Is anyone else even having this problem? I was so excited for Rock Band 2, and I still am, but it doesn’t seem right that I can’t play all of my songs. True, I bought the game mostly for the new songs and new gameplay modes, but DLC is one of the things that makes the Rock Band franchise superior to every other.

When I download an Xbox Live Arcade game, it works on both profiles on my hard drive, so why shouldn’t I expect the songs to work the same way? Obviously, I don’t know if these problems will exist with the PS3 version of the game since it’s not out yet. Maybe one day down the line we’ll see a patch correcting this madness, or maybe I just need to get used to it. We have contacted Harmonix to see what they have to say about the issue, so stay tuned for future updates.

UPDATE:  I received a reply from Harmonix stating that this was actually a Microsoft issue, which I suspected earlier. However, I found an easy way around it: I could play through a tour by myself on my profile, as long as another controller was signed in under the other profile and the band "belonged" to the profile with the songs on it. Sounds complicated, but it's actually a pretty simple fix.

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