Paying for stuff on the disk? Not that bad.

This is in response to this rant by Jim Sterling right here. I'm giving my rant it's
own blog entry because, basically, it may have enough content to merit one.

I must admit I used to poo-poo this sort of DLC, considering it an act of fleecing the unskilled rubes, who
cannot be bothered to spend the time to grind to unlock this content themselves.

Then I got Rock Band. I beat the game on guitar Easy, which didn't unlock all the songs. Being that I wanted to
play, say, Enter Sandman, I decided to go through on Normal. I did fine, until I hit Vaseline. I failed
out of the song over, and over, and over again, after trying for a month. I looked for a cheat code and found
one - one that disabled saving and leaderboards, meaning that my scores for all the other songs
wouldn't be sent online, and that I'd have to enter the cheat every time I put in the game.

Fuck. That. Noise.

I'll be honest. I'm now willing to pay $5 to unlock everything on the disk in Rock Band, and still be able to save,
and upload my scores later to the online leaderboards, just so I can get to the songs after Vaseline,
because I suspect that they're actually easier than Vaseline, as my main problem with Vaseline is that god-
fucking-damned alternating two-note riff.

As much as I love all the rest of Rock Band, and I love the DLC options available for the game, and even
though I love Harmonix's games - the note chart for Vaseline, and the fact that I couldn't just enter a
cheat and unlock everything forever, nor did I have the option to spend 5 bucks to unlock the entire track list
made me want run through the halls of Harmonix, on a bloody rampage, with
Stormbringer in hand, or spitting the employees responsible
for the abomination that is Vaseline's note chart on pikes, and setting them ablaze as a warning for
all those future people who make note charts, not only for Rock Band, but for Guitar Hero as well, to avoid
such expensive-controller-smashingly frustrating riffs.

So, I can now forgive pay DLC for content that would ordinarily be unlockable. I do admit that using a cheat
code to unlock that content, one that doesn't disable saving, so that I don't have to enter the code
every time I want to play the game would better. However, considering the lack of such codes in games these
days, and in general the way games are going, that's probably a bit too much to ask.

That, though, is a rant for another time.