Oh. My. God.

It looks like Harmonix has managed to snag the Beatles for Rock Band 2.  There’s already confirmation from the Wallstreet Journal no less.  Part of me is happy because it’s the Beatles, and part of me is happy because it’s not Neversoft or Activision who have been killing my former beloved franchise since they got it.  At least with this, there’s the guarantee that the songs won’t be needlessly overcharted with phantom notes for the sake of difficulty, since Harmonix cares more about the music than they do about leaderboard competition and bragging rights.  This is great news to go along with the fact that Guitar Hero:  World Tour seems to fare badly in reviews even in comparison to the original Rock Band, with bizarre design choices such as the fact that songs you unlock with a single instrument are confined to that instrument.  In other words, if you’ve unlocked every song on guitar, you STILL can’t go into band mode and play all those songs, you have to go into band mode and play all the songs AGAIN to unlock them, UNLESS you’ve got an exclusive cheat from a game retail pre-order offer that unlocks all the songs for you.  Otherwise, legit players will have to play through once to unlock all the songs on guitar/bass, play through again to unlock them for drums, play through a third time to unlock vocals and play through a final time to unlock them on Band Mode.  This, apparently, is how hardcore gamers do it, and since Neversoft is all about the gamer achievements and doesn’t actually give a crap about music or enjoyment, this is the way they’ve done it, versus the Harmonix way of one instrument unlocking the songs immediately for access in band mode.  On top of that, the music creator mode in Guitar Hero:  World Tour is getting a lot of knocks for a) being too complicated, and b) offering bad quality MIDI sound. It doesn’t help that the Neversoft director Brian Bright has been doing horrible PR for the game, coming off as rude, arrogant, and constantly bashing Harmonix and Rock Band while Harmonix itself has tried to be as diplomatic as possible when it comes to discussing their competitors.  It’s nice to see that the jock/bully in this equation is actually getting some karmic justice while the nerdy kid gets rewarded for being passionate about his interests rather than worrying about popularity, greed or ambition.  I hope this is a black eye for Activision, Neversoft and Red Octane that they don’t soon recover from, bullies like that deserve a beat down once in a while to remind them they’re not God.