Happy Rock Band Day!

You saw that post further down about Rock Band right? It came out today. I don't have an XBox 360 and I still picked up the $170 boxed set that comes with the game, a guitar, drums and a mic.

Best $170 I've ever spent on my gaming hobby! I just got back from a co-worker's house where we sat and played for four hours straight with barely a pee break. At first we mixed it up, trading off instruments so we could each try our hand at singing, guitar or drums. Somebody ended up leaving early so we each picked a position in the band and stuck with it. I got vocals.

After a while you just sort of start to gel and get a feel for how each person in the band plays, when to hit bonuses and multipliers, and it's amazing the rush you get when you hit the crescendo of a song together perfectly. Unless you miss, then the three of you gang up on the fourth and tell him he's out of the band.

I see many an amazing night with friends in the future with this game. I'll post pics as soon as I get them, there's a great one of me singing "When You Were Young" by The Killers.

Tagged by my Hetero Life Mate

A). Link to the person who tagged you (Erik) and post the rules on your blog.

B). Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.

1. I used to make action figures and vehicles out of paper when I was a child. My daughters seem to have inherited this penchant for creative ways of getting what they want.
2. I prefer Pepsi products over Coke.
3. I still make toys out of paper, though they're more elaborate nowadays.
4. I went on maybe four dates, total, in high school and didn't have my first kiss until I was 17.
5. I went over ten years without getting a speeding ticket and then received two within a one month timespan.
6. I'm 30 and still play D&D on a regular basis.
7. I plan on taking fencing classes in the near future.
   

There is no C because, goddamnit, I refuse to perpetuate tags and/or chain letters. And I'm anti-establishment and a rule-breaker like that. Which also makes D unnecessary.

The Cake Is A Lie

I'm so giddy about this game I don't even know how to net my spastic thoughts, bottle them, and pin them down in a pleasing manner fit for public consumption.

I've followed indie gaming on the PC for a while now. (kind of like indie music only nerdier) Students at the Digipen institute created a game they later released for free on the internet called Narbacular Drop. It was a sort of 3D puzzle game where you could throw an entrance and exit portal on any non-metallic surface to navigate and solve the levels.


It was such a brilliant game concept the students were snatched up by Valve, the developers of Half Life, to create a pack-in for their Orange Box game collection. They would create a short game called Portal that expanded on the ideas presented in Narbacular Drop.

I had already played Narbacular so I knew the gameplay would be solid but I wasn't prepared at all for the story in which they wrapped it up. My first taste was a trailer for the game.



The voiceover you hear in the trailer is an enormous part of the setting. She's like a chipper version of HAL named GlaDOS. She starts out instructional but slowly gets more and more malevolent.

I won't get into the specifics of the setting lest I spoil it for anyone who is thinking about picking it up or who hasn't played it yet. For a spoiler-filled review that nails exactly how I felt after completing it read here. In my opinion Portal proves, without a doubt, that video games can be art.

This game will also spawn many inside-joke references across the web dealing mostly with cake and the adoration of the weighted companion cube. For me "The Cake is a Lie" also speaks of a deep-seated distrust of authority most of us hold in one way or another.

I need to go back and play it again so I can find the weighted companion cube shrine hidden in one of the levels.

"There was even going to be a party for you. A big party that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend the companion cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him."

Turning Saints Into The Sea

I sat down to my laptop earlier this evening to catch up on the many and varied sites I follow. My sister asked if I'd heard Sawdust yet. It's the recently released B-Sides and Rarities album by The Killers.

I said I'd only heard a couple songs off the album so she started streaming it and we listened to it in the background. She had to leave for a bit so I was alone listening to it for a while, tuning it in and out as my attention vacillated depending on the site I was at.

Slowly the familiar strains of Mr. Brightside played across my thoughts and I noticed they included a remix of it as the last song on the album. Mr. Brightside is a deep mixed bag of emotions for me. It represents awakening, fear, friendship, pain, and potential.

Awakening to a new way of looking at the world and the fear associated with that. The song came out at roughly the same time I was leaving the church and rebuilding my worldview. It represents the friendship of the people I met online at this time and whom I still call friends. We can't throw a party without this song coming up on the playlist resulting in a rush to the dancefloor and everyone singing along with it TO me. It represents the pain of losing "Mrs. Brightside." Nowadays it represents destiny, my potential, and what I'm capable of when I put my mind to things.

God I love music.

	a2 - the killers-mr brightside (thin white duke remix)
	Found at skreemr.com

Halloween; A Decompression

I chalk up the most recent silence on the blog to a combination of two factors: Halloween and Red. The third is laziness but that one's ever-present and you're tired of hearing me talk about that anyway.

I introduce you to both causes of recent silence through a series of pictures.





Yeah, I'd fuck me.

I'm not even going to pretend like I'll be able to keep up with the rigors of NaBloPoMo, especially since I'm looking at a two week trip to Trinidad at the end of the month. My personal goal is to beat my top number of posts for a one month time period. That currently stands at eight for last years NaBloPoMo. That should be easy right?

These Go To Eleven

Me and rhythm games have a colored history.

I remember hearing about a game called Dance Dance Revolution about ten years ago. It sounded like the Nintendo Powerpad recycled as an arcade game to me, I didn't understand what the big deal was. You get up and stomp on the buttons in time to the music, what's the big deal. It sounds like something Japanese school girls would like.

Around the same time a game called PaRappa the Rapper was released for the Playstation and became a huge hit. This one was even more headscratching as you're just pushing buttons on a game pad in time to the music. You don't even pretend to dance! Talk about a dumbed down game concept.

Skip ahead a few years to the release of the Sega Dreamcast and a game called Space Channel 5. Same concept as PaRappa only this time the protagonist is a curvy pink-haired woman in a spacesuit a'la Barbarella. Ok so maybe sex does sell. I ended up picking it up and enjoying the hell out of it.

Shortly thereafter I found myself at a party one weekend where a group of co-workers had brought in an X-Box and four Dance Dance Revolution pads. We connected it to an overhead projector and a decent stereo and for the next 30 minutes I sat watched people who had obviously played the game way too much. They stepped, jumped, and turned in perfect synchronization to the music and to one-another. I was so mesmerized I lost prejudice for the game enough to ask for a turn. They set it to the easiest level and I still failed miserably but it was fun, god it was fun.

I finally understood what those Japanese school girls had seen all along.

I eventually picked up the game and my own pad and though I never got as good as my friends I still had a blast playing. Which brings us to this last year.

Different set of co-workers and a drinking game with lots of beer this time. I'd been hearing a lot about this game called Guitar Hero. Same premise as DDR only instead of a dance pad you have a guitar you press colored buttons on in time to the music. It feels less a guilty pleasure and more socially acceptable to wail on a guitar than bounce around on a plastic mat with giant arrows.

I hesitated to get into these types of games because they were the realm of the slavering masses. Those that had eschewed video games as too complex and for nerds. They had never cared if that new sword raised an elves attack value enough to be worth the cost, or learned to circle strafe or rocket jump. I felt like I was betraying my roots. But you get to pretend to play guitar!!! Now with less air and more interaction!

Well, somebody was reading my mind and has found the perfect marriage of experience/level/never-ending-treadmill style gameplay and the rhythm game. They also threw in what promises to be the ultimate drunken party game to boot.


You've got a guitar, a microphone, and drums this time for you and two drunken friends. (three if you pick up another guitar for someone to play bass) They've created a World Tour mode where you create a rock star analog of yourself in game, as do your friends, and you come up with a band name and logo. You start off playing smaller clubs and build a fanbase and slowly unlock things like a manager, tour bus, roadies, etc... until you have enough infrastructure with you to allow you to play stadiums. You earn money in game for better equipment, stage props, costumes. I'm sure you can hear giddiness in my serifs as I type this. It's so absolutely perfect.

Here's where you, my readers, get to join in the fun. We've all thought at one time or another "that outrageous combination of words would make the perfect band name"! I need a name for my band so I can get working on a logo and have it ready for the game when it comes out on the 20th.

If any of you have felt the spirit of rock and own an Xbox 360 you can play with your band on Live so you don't even have to be in the same room to rock out together. In the words of AC/DC: We roll tonight... to the guitar bite... and for those about to rock... I salute you.