Pretty much chalking this up to the month of angst.  It is hard to say if this is just due to over-sensitivity to all the poor service we have encountered over this period or if the current state of the economy and the incompetency in our government is starting to weigh too heavy.  We will know soon enough with November just around the corner, but for now, I’ll just chalk it up to the former and just assume we’ve stumbled into a nest of stupidity.  If you recall, from my previous post on Steam, we are very sensitive to bandwidth since our satellite service has limited throughput and a 24 hour 300M cap.  Yes, I know this is my own choosing, but you keep your large pipe and I’ll continue to use my firearms, burn when I need to and most of all enjoy the peace and tranquility the country offers.  With that said, we do have fun when everyone can make it out for  some Rock Band.  Up to this point, we have worked around the network requirements.  A few hours before everyone shows up, I fire the game up to make sure any required updates are completed and pull down any new songs for the night.  Well, that was up until last weekend.   Linda bought me LEGO Rock Band game as a gift sometime back.  One of the features of this release is it allowed you to export the songs into the Rock Band 2 DLC cache.  Not for free, of course, but like the AC/DC pack it just takes a key code, some Microsoft points and the physical disk to copy the songs from.  That is what I thought before 4:00pm the day of the gig.

First off, hop over to the LEGO Rock Band website and use the key code bundled with the game disk to generate a redemption code for the export – Check.  Next, get on the Xbox marketplace and redeem some Microsoft points – Check.  Following that, load up the LEGO Rock Band game and head on over to the Export option – Check.  Now purchase the export package and sit and listen to the disk whirl away as it extracts the songs off of the disk – Ch…. hmmm.. wait a second, it sounds a little too quiet.  Now that I recall, it did mention something regarding 1.2G download, but figured that it was just how much space the songs would take up once copied from the disk.  Could it be that it is really trying to download all those songs from the Marketplace?  This was not how the AC/DC pack worked.  A quick Google check seemed to confirm the download conclusion.  So let’s do some quick math… 1.2G / (300M) per 24 hrs gives about 4 days worth of standard download allotments.  Comparing that to the 3 hours I had left before the rest of the band showed up and you get SOL.  As with the Steam issue, the disk was legally purchased, I have the physical media in my hand, paid the required fee which added $10 to the overall cost of the disk, followed all the procedures and yet some genius decided everyone had high speed Internet and would be more than happy to wait for a 1.2G download before being able to play the songs.  Up to this point, RB has done everything right – plenty of DLC and imports of expansion packs, but this latest requirement is not appreciated.  Later that evening, I started the download in my uncapped window (1-5AM) and got it down that way so, at least  next time I’m ready.

Note to the RB coders, I’ll let this slide if you  will finally add some decent stats to the game so we can assess our efforts better.