Sex, Drugs, Rockband

g4tv.com - The online capabilities of the Nintendo Wii have taken a step forward today with the announcement that a fully functioning music store for Rock Band is available on the system.

Starting today there are 50 Rock Band tracks available for download in the Rock Band Music Store. There are 20 free Rock Band 2 DLC tracks and 30 additional songs for purchase already released as downloadable content for other console versions. Each purchasable track will be available for 200 Wii Points ($2).

Harmonix also plans to release all 500 currently available Rock Band tracks for the Wii, and will release new tracks on Nintendo’s system, as well as on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
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Rather than adding a hard drive to the Wii, Nintendo announced this Fall that they’d solve the console’s storage problem by allowing players to load and play software from SD cards. Here’s the first set of these cards: Rock Band-branded memory cards from SanDisk, set to be released this Spring to coincide with the opening of the Wii Rock Band music store.

The cards have a capacity of 2 GB, which should be enough space for “at least 75 downloadable songs”. Though they’re being advertised primarily as a means for you to save Rock Band downloadable content, they’re all-purpose Wii storage. You can also download Virtual Console games to the cards or use them to transfer photos from your digital camera to the Wii’s photography channel.

The Rock Band memory cards will retail for $13. That’s about twice what you’d pay for a normal SanDisk 2GB card but compared to the mark-up on Xbox 360 hard drives, an extra $7 isn’t that bad. Plus, c’mon, it’s got a Rock Band sticker on it.