Yesterday morning, the RockBand forums were down with nothing but a flash animation of the loading screens from the game. Something big was coming, and it did, now it is here, the new and improved RockBand.com *insert that ‘ding’ sound when someone smiles on TV and one of their teeth shines really bright.. you know that sound*

HMXWebJeff run down from their forums in short:
“The Music” section with info on every single track released.
“the ‘Zine” is basically the news/updates now in blog form.
“Battle of the Bands” section so you can check leaderboards and information on the current battles.
“The Merch Booth” is a.. well, keep on reading for detailed information about this section.

Harmonix are truly after my wallet more than ever before. Wasn’t weekly DLC enough guys!? Now with a new photo creator you can take the characters/bands you have customized in your game, and pose them to buy posters and t-shirts. Or get yourself in toy form! The pricing is where the only downfall to all this awesomeness comes, and not even with all items, only with the last two:

Button – $2
Key Chain – $3
Bumper Sticker – $4
Stickers (6) – $5
Posters – $14
T-Shirt – $29
Bandmate (the figure) – $69

$30 shirts seem a bit high. I understand it is custom merchandise, but I can easily take my photo creations over to cafepress or a similar site, and open my own store with the same (or better/photoshopped) pics.

The Bandmate measures 6″ and was marked as ‘Currently sold out’ already, so I guess a lot of people have faith that these will look as good as the flash preview makes them out to be. As for me, I guess I have time to make some scratch to help put all the Harmonix employee’s kids through college. For now though, enjoy using the free PhotoCreator (and enjoy the wait time it takes to process pictures with everyone seeming to be using the site at the moment).

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