The ultimate Rock Band 2 accessory

One of the things that makes Rock Band better than Guitar Hero, IMHO, is the amount of avatar customization it offers. Never underestimate the value of letting a player spend lots of time playing dress-up and tweaking the appearance of a video game character. I LOVE my Rock Band persona, I wish I could look like her, and certainly there are days I could use her attitude.

So naturally, when I saw this little announcement that Rock Band 2 will let you create action figures based on your RB2 avatar, I idly thought to myself, "ZOMFG I'm GETTING ONE!!!!" (really, the same reaction I had when I heard about this.)



Now, I don't know if I'm actually getting one, because $75 is a little steep (purely from a budgetary standpoint, I don't think it's unreasonable to charge), but the idea is freaking cool enough that the price is not a deal-breaker.

Players will be able to use the game's normal avatar creation engine to "create variety of body styles, faces, makeup options, hair styles and tattoos," said Scott Harmon, Z Corporation's vice president of business development. "Users can also design a band logo and have that applied to a (virtual) T-shirt, and then you control clothing, footwear, hats and instruments."

How COOL is that?? Very cool, that's how cool. And when they say it has the potential to be used on an MMO like World of Warcraft, I say...yeah, it does have that potential, a potential akin to finding a blank check signed by Bill Gates lying on the street. If one breed of player is willing to shell out hundreds of dollars to buy pre-leveled game characters, you can bet the yin to that yang, players who identify with the character they created strongly enough to want an action figure of it, will flock to this (if they aren't already, I seem to dimly remember something like this in conjunction with WoW a while back).