Rock Band 3 patch fixes annoyances with overdrive, clarity

Rock Band 3 may be revered, but no game is without imperfections. That in mind, Harmonix has just released a new patch which fixes a few of the game's annoyances, and puts an end to a certain method of exploitation.

First of all, for PS3 users, if you've ever noticed weird distortion noises while playing with the keyboard controller, this patch will fix that. Everything else applies to both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game.

In Rock Band 3, the scrolling note tracks have become a bit more colorful and decorative, but that sometimes makes it harder to see the notes as they appear on screen. This patch increases the transparency of these tracks, at the request of numerous players who said it was giving them trouble.

Additionally, for those who like to belt it out (the vocal track, that is), you can finally use a controller to activate overdrive. No more sounding like an idiot when your initial shout of "hey!" didn't trigger the score multiplier.

And speaking of overdrive, thanks to the new patch keyboard players can now use a pedal to kick into the double-point mode.

And finally, some sad news for those meticulous cheaters out there. If you've ever paused a song multiple times to get in position or memorize an upcoming note string, sorry... there's a new mechanism that will disable scoring altogether if the song is paused too many times.

If you have the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band 3, the update will prompt the next time you play the game. It'll hit the PS3 version today as well, as soon as the PlayStation Store update is live.

Feb 1, 2011