Based on some good word-of-mouth, I checked out the first full album download for Rock Band that came out this week, Judas Priest’s “Screaming For Vengeance”, and it is indeed pretty good if you like playing guitar. There’s a good amount of variation, lots of power chords mixed in, and decent guitar solos.

After doing them all at once, they kind of blur together so I can’t really comment on all of them, but the title track was definitely the toughest of the bunch, with Hellion/Electric Eye probably coming in a close second.

I finally got around to trying out the latest Rock Band DLC tracks, and overall it’s a fairly average group. “Call Me” (Blondie) is a bit tougher thanks to a lot of chords, “Message In A Bottle” (The Police) is pretty much the same as the Guitar Hero version as far as I can tell, and “Simple Man” (Lynyrd Skynyrd) is, well, pretty simple.

The one novelty this week was the Motley Crue track “Saints Of Los Angeles”, which debuted in Rock Band before even on the radio. I wouldn’t call myself a Crue fan, and the song itself wasn’t all that special, but the guitar note chart for it is actually fairly fun.

Today was the traditional Rock Band DLC day, and consisted of a six-pack of Boston songs. I wasn’t really that familiar with them, but a few of them triggered those “oh yeah, *that* song” memories.

All of them are fairly fun and challenging to play on the guitar, but “More Than A Feeling” is my favourite of the bunch so far. “Smokin'” is probably the toughest of the bunch, largely thanks to having to play the extended, complex organ solos as guitar bits instead. The bass versions of them are pretty good too, never getting too repetitive even without any chords.

A big patch for Rock Band was just released, adding an in-game store where you can finally preview the song before buying it and see cover art and difficulty ratings for the different instruments. It doesn’t add the rumoured online mode for the World Tour though, which I’m still hoping for.

I figured I’d give some more songs a fling on Hard and started working my way down the downloaded songs list, but no, I still need more practice. Up to El Scorcho, I could only complete about half of them, often failing out within the first minute, and only five-starred one of them (El Scorcho, since it’s a fairly slow song).

Practice makes perfect, of course, but I don’t know if I really want to give it the hours of dedication needed to break through that Hard barrier.

I finally got around to trying this week’s Rock Band tracks tonight. The word-of-mouth on them was rather mixed, but they were half the regular price, so what the hell.

“Beethoven’s Cunt” (by Serj Tankian of System Of A Down) was moderately interesting on guitar, but “Crushcrushcrush” (by Paramore) was a bit repetitive and too pop-like for my tastes. “Shockwave” (by Black Tide) was a real challenge though, and the only one of the set that I couldn’t five-star. Overall, I don’t think I’ll feel any real urge to go back specifically to play these ones, but I wouldn’t skip them if they came up in a setlist either.

I probably won’t bother with next week’s tracks, though. It’s all thrash metal, which I don’t really listen to and my fingers are hurting just thinking of trying to play it…

Completely opposite from last week’s disappointment, this week’s Rock Band tracks are actually pretty good on guitar. My understanding of The Grateful Dead was about on par with Téodor’s, so I didn’t really know what to expect, but the guitar tracks are actually pretty challenging and fun. In fact, it makes me wonder how you could play them at all if you were stoned out of your gourd…