It’s the weekend of Rock Band 2. The Xbox 360 version of the game hit shelves today, so you’ll forgive me if there isn’t anything else to talk about.
I just finished my review of the thing — no hints on how it scored, sorry — but my 330 word box didn’t leave me a lot of room to talk about the crowning feature of the game: Rock Band 2 can import (almost) all the tunes from your copy of Rock Band with only 15 minutes of idiot-proof technical wizardry.
Read on my wayward son.
If you’ve managed to hang on to your original Rock Band disc like a good lil’ packrat, you’ll need to pop it into your Xbox 360. Once the console is powered up and the game loads, the system will automatically prompt you to download an update.
Let it do its thing and once the game restarts you’ll find a new tab in the game’s Options menu dubbed “Export Songs” or something along those lines. Hit the button and find something else to occupy yourself with. The whole process takes about 15-20 minutes depending on factors you have absolutely no control over and you can’t do a thing with your Xbox until the progress bar hits the opposite end of the meter.
The good news is that once that’s complete, you’re done. When you power up Rock Band 2 (almost) all those songs will automatically be integrated into the game’s playlist, including any tracks you downloaded from the online music store.
The bad news? Nothing in life is free. Its going to set you back $5 just to import the tunes into RB2 and even with a cover charge four songs from the original couldn’t make the leap.
Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” and Tokio Hotel’s “Monsoon” are mysteriously stuck in the past, presumably because Harmonix and MTV didn’t want to spring for the licensing fees.
Then again, the Sabbath and Maiden tracks were covers, so you aren’t missing much.