Harmonix

Rock Band Blitz was developed and published by Harmonix. It will be released on August 29, 2012 for 1200 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

With the emergence of online gaming, calling up friends to come over and play a video game seems like a distant memory. The most prominent party game a few years ago was Rock Band. Harmonix had struck gold with the be-all-end-all of party games. Hours passed as friends played the drums, keyboard, guitar, and of course the vocals. Everyone had “that friend” who tried to hit the falsetto on Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. While we all had fun with the “wannabe Freddie Mercury”, Harmonix has developed a new way to enjoy their rhythm-based game with the release of Rock Band Blitz on XBLA.

Rock Band Blitz is an entertaining music game utilizing controller-based play. Touting 25 songs, Harmonix channels their popular PS2 game Frequency; players control all of the tracks in a song and use power-ups to accumulate stars and points. An interesting twist is earning multipliers for each track, and players must get the maximum number of multipliers on all tracks to raise their level cap.  Another way to gain points is to enter Blitz Mode. While hitting every note is impossible, hitting many of them in a row will put players into this mode, where they’ll start earning additional points for every tenth note hit.
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Over the course of the last few weeks, Harmonix has been announcing tracks for the new PSN and XBLA game: Rock Band Blitz.  While you won’t be seeing Ballroom Blitz by Sweet (the song was already on the original title), you will be able to rock out to 25 different songs. Also, you won’t need to drag your old instruments out of storage, because Harmonix is introducing controller-based play system.

Rock Band Blitz offers a setlist to satisfy many music tastes. While classic and modern rock are quite prominent, the game also mixes in a bit of Top 40. In addition to the songs with Rock Band Blitz, all songs from previous Rock Band titles will be playable. The 25 tracks will also be able to be played on Rock Band 3 with full instruments.

Rock Band Blitz hits XBLA August 29 and will be available or 1200 MSP. Read the entire setlist after the break.

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Just as Rock Band Blitz passed certification, it seems a release date was on the horizon for this downloadable installment of Rock Band. The game feels like a throwback …
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Rock Band Blitz will let players experience their favorite Rock Band DLC in a new way, shifting the note-pressing craze to an arcade-style format. Players will compete on the leaderboards for the top spots, and the new power-ups will make the competition even tougher. The trailer above proves how power-ups can really rack up points, but have to be used properly for full scoring potential.

The focus may have been taken away from plastic instruments, but the game is still all about the music. A total of 11 songs have been announced from the set list, which can be seen after the jump. Get ready to make some noise, Rock Band Blitz releases this summer.

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After spending the last four years releasing a multitude of sequels and spin-offs for its popular Rock Band and Dance Central franchises, Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems is scaling things back a bit with its next release. The next Harmonix-developed title the world will get is still part of the Rock Band series, but it will arrive at some point this summer sans the band. On Tuesday the developer unveiled Rock Band Blitz — a single-player XBLA and PSN game that rocks out without rock instruments, instead requiring the use of a regular controller for solo-jamming along all five instrumental tracks at once.

The simplicity of the concept isn’t exactly in line with what fans have come to expect from the company that popularized plastic instruments, so it’s understandable if there is some hesitation from the community to accept this new direction. Project Director Matthew Nordhaus explanation during my trip to the developer’s studio that the team’s goal is to release a product that removes the series’ high barriers of entry through a more simplistic approach probably won’t have plastic rock stars pumped for the big show either. Read a few quick-and-dirty details on the internet and watch a quick clip of Blitz‘ gameplay and you might get the impression that this is just another case of a developer dumbing its game down for modern gamers who are, supposedly, unable to process complexity in their video games. Well, guess what? It’s not.

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Fans hoping to import disc-based tracks from Rock Band 3 to the newly-announced XBLA title Rock Band Blitz are out of luck. According to a Joystiq report, Harmonix confirms …
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A designer’s resume, exposed earlier today via Twitter, has made public the fact that developer Harmonix is working on a previously unannounced title. The game is referred to in the LinkedIn resume of one Brian Chan simply as “unannounced title,” but Chan did reveal the platforms it is coming to: XBLA, PSN and, rather peculiarly, Facebook.

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