miffy495

Especially as, considering how good the Orange Box is, I'm probably not the only one with unclaimed extra copies of HL2 and Episode 1.

Yeah, that whole Progressive pack gives me shivers. Can't wait. In other news, my new drum pedal is here and seems much more solid than the first batch one I had before. This one moves less, and that takes a bit of getting used to, but it also doesn't give at all when I press down on it. I could feel the old one buckle with every beat and it always made me uneasy. Very happy with it. And now I know for sure that the reason I can't beat (Don't Fear) The Reaper on Hard is my own lack of skill, not my equipment malfunctioning. Up to 94% now though. Can get through those damned rolls, now it's just the really complex end segment that kills me. I'll get there one day...

Gin for me is associated with being on my hands and knees in a puddle of vomit in the parking lot of a hospital. I didn't always make smart choices when I was 16. Also, when I was four years old I decided that a jumbo bag of Twizzlers strawberry licorice would make an excellent breakfast. 'nuff said.

Please don't. I just wanted to mess with Oath a bit...

Well, I gotta say, though not the most original thing in the world, that premise does lend itself to a wide range of awesome possibilities. Don't know if I'm anything near pumped for this one, but I'll be keeping it in my peripherals...

WHO TOOK HER

Seems I'm at the sweet spot for a 24 inch screen as well. Nice chart, n0wak, very handy!

Am I the only one here who runs their HD gaming system through a computer monitor? I've got a 3-ish year old Dell 24 inch widescreen (native 1920x1200) monitor which I've been using for my 360 any time I'm playing something single player. The size would be a bit of an issue if it weren't a computer monitor and thus something you're usually really close to anyway. My bed is about 4 feet from the monitor, I swivel it so I can see the image, and I'm off to enjoy EDF, Crackdown, or whatever. Rock Band I just set the drums or guitar up a bit beside my bed and it's perfect. Aside from a little bit of letterboxing (16x9 things on a 16x10 screen. Whatever...) I have no worries whatsoever. When I'm playing multi, I'll cart the box out to the main room and hook it up to the larger SD screen. I love this setup. If I was suddenly struck with the urge to play Assassin's Creed in the middle of a post, I'd simply turn on the 360, cycle through 3 other inputs (monitor has 5) and play. Nothing like having your work desk also be your primary game center for all things geeky.

How many DSes can dance on the head of a stylus?

That's too good to not turn into a signature. Thanks for digging that one up.

Just wiped the cart recently myself as I was kinda bored and found it on my desk. Started over. I can confirm that syntheticgerbil's trick works with it.

Guitar should work fine as long as they're the same system. Compatibility is only ever a concern when trying to get a controller from Guitar Hero to work with Rock Band or vice versa. Guitar Hero to Guitar Hero is never any problem.

Baseball shirts are one of the few styles of shirt that don't make me look kinda dumb. I really love them, I just wish it were an image of concept art or something that doesn't so obviously scream GAME MERCHANDISE!!!! That kind of thing always turns me off a bit.

Well, given that I'm waiting on a kick pedal now, I've started really digging my teeth into the vocals while I wait. 11 songs left to do on Hard now, and getting somewhere between three and five stars every time. Of course, this doesn't surprise me on vocal as it's entirely dependent on the player's range and familiarity with the songs. I do better on songs that I know where I sound a bit like the singer. Fair enough. One thing that does irk me a bit about the vocals is that the mic does not seem to do much of a job of picking up growls. Any kind of gravelly voice, really. This means that when singing something like Enter Sandman or Main Offender if I try to sound like the singer, it will show that I'm getting the right note and hitting it dead on, but the arrow will flicker because it can't tell that I'm actually holding the note while I sing. In other words, now that I'm on the higher difficulty levels of vocals, I have to smooth out my voice and sound really weird singing that kind of song, or fail. The fact that the voice recognition for spoken word bits is a bit dodgy is already well known, so I won't harp on that. I'll just suggest to others that I have had far greater success with spoken word things when holding the mic about a foot from my face rather than my customary 4-6 inch distance while singing. Seems to do better when you're a decent distance away. Given the fact that I'm doing pretty damn well with any and all songs I know most of the lyrics to, I'm actually starting to get pretty confident about being able to successfully attack expert vocals quite soon. Something about the fact that the game would rate me an expert singer seems fundamentally broken, but hell I'm enjoying myself so whatever. If I can eventually get past the last 3 tiers of hard drums, I'll have made my way up to full expert level in about a month of play. Yay! ...and yeah, I'd be playing a bunch of guitar, but frankly I'm having a lot more fun with stuff I can't do blindfolded. Love the songs, and they nailed the note charts for fun (DLC especially. I played Number Of The Beast about 5 times in a row the night I downloaded it. Same goes for Hard To Handle. So good.) but until I've got my drumming and singing to the point where I can swap between instruments in a flash and not miss a cue, I'm having a hard time finding guitar as enthralling as I otherwise would.

...of course all this makes no difference now as my kick pedal snapped in half during a play through of Black Hole Sun about 5 minutes ago. Goddamn it. EDIT: Wow. I gotta say, given all the crap people are talking about Rock Band breakage, no one has said anything about the painlessness of EA's replacement system. Fill out one form and they say a new one will be shipped 2 day air, all paid up, tomorrow. Right on. Just gotta send 'em my broken one back in a box that they provide, postage and all.

Well, yeah, I always figure there'll be a little discrepancy between my own skills and what the game thinks is hard. For example, skip beats don't seem to give me much trouble but for whatever reason, drum rolls kill me. I just can't get the timing down. Given that I hear most people making the opposite complaint, I can't expect the game to be tailored to my skills. The thing for me was the huge difference in scores. From 80%-ish to 97%? Too much. I'd be cool with a jump from 85% to 90% or something like that, but that's almost a 20% difference in notes hit, and seems extreme for two songs that are right next to each other.

I'm going to level the same criticism at Rock Band that I've leveled at all Guitar Heroes as well. It's really obvious which difficultly level the structure of the tiers was designed for. That level, I'm going to venture, is Expert. Guitar, for example, the flow from song to song as the difficulty builds throughout the game is brilliant. I've heard complaints about hard, but haven't played a guitar game on hard since I five-starred everything on that difficultly level in GH1 so I can't say for myself. I can, however, relate firsthand the progression on drums, which I am currently 29 songs into the solo tour of Hard mode on, having beaten Easy and Medium. I'm sure this difficulty curve makes as much sense on Expert as the guitar does, but on Hard, everything seems disproportionate. Why is it that I can only barely sweat and curse my way to a 3 star rating on the New Pornographers' Electric Version but the very next song (the Killers' When You Were Young) I get 5 stars and 97% notes hit? It's not a matter of familiarity with the bands, for damn sure. I've been following the New Pornographers for a while now, as I live only a 7 hour drive from their hometown and they often tour the neighbouring cities (Yes, Europeans, in Canada a 7 hour drive is considered "neighbouring." The four cities band will usually put in a Western Canada tour are Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. I live in Calgary, the NPs are from Vancouver.) for quick summer shows. I have attended many. Before GHIII and RB put in When You Were Young I had only heard of the Killers from my younger sister. Given that I know the New Pornographers' song well and it's lower on the tier, I should have an easier time of it, yeah? Apparently not. I just really wish that the developers of either game would take a look at their note charts when making the difficultly levels up and maybe consider rearranging the song order by how hard each song is for the difficultly I'm playing at. It can't take much to slightly change the order that each song appears in the game. It's not like you're swapping in new songs or anything. ------ Oh, and I think I'm through that damn wall I'd hit on Vasoline. I couldn't do a damn thing, maybe getting one or two lines into the first verse, before failure. Then I remembered there was a practice mode. One run through that on 80% speed and back to the game. Four stars first try. Why do I never bother checking practice mode until I'm ready to put my head through a wall? Stupid me.

I would love something like HL2 to allow me to kill inconsequential good guys, maybe with horrid reactions from those around me, but still do the lowering-gun thing with characters like Alyx. I remember when Doom 3 first came out and I'd brought it over to a friend's so that he could give it a shot. About an hour and a half in, he's walking up to a doorway and he hears a voice. What those of us watching heard was "Hey! Over here. Look pal, I'm done for, but---" and nothing more. This abrupt end was because, though none of us were entirely sure what my friend heard, it was enough to make him scream and shotgun this guy in the face. In his defense, the atmosphere really had him on edge. In a game like Doom 3, which I really don't remember that fondly, this was a defining moment of awesome. "Shit dude, he was going to help you! Why the fuck did you blow his face off?" "I don't know! I don't know! I panicked!" Perfect. There are very few ways the Half Life series can get better, but allowing me to have moments like this would be one of them. Comparatively, when playing Episode 2 a month or so ago, I I'll admit it. I was spooked. His face popping up in front of me like that startled me. I shot that vortigaunt in the face about 4 times before I figured out he was friendly. Didn't even interrupt his speech file.

Hmmm... I'll have to add you and compare drum scores as I advance. I'm gradually getting better, although there's a definite wall that I've hit a little past the halfway point of Hard.

Nice review, man. I can't hack it in the 5th tier on hard drums yet (did pretty damn well right up to there, but I've hit a wall) so I don't know firsthand what you're talking about wrt the bass pedal craziness, but otherwise I'm totally with you. That band leader thing is ridiculous, but it seems that every time I play coop nobody wants to do the BWT anyway and we just do a lot of quickplay. That's too bad, because I really want to see the whole thing, but oh well. Rock Band was a huge thing on New Year's. We loaded the whole kit into my buddy's van and went off. Played from 6pm to 10am, rotating who was on what the whole time. I got some good singing, some solid drumming, and some spectacular guitar work in, and everyone had a blast. I see in your review you were into the 30 Seconds to Mars song. I'll admit that I don't know any of the songs that were released on Christmas, so I didn't download any of them. I'll give that one a look. Any other recommendations from that group of songs? After all, they're only a dollar.

Yup, cynicism about games that are getting raves. You'll fit in just fine. As for Crysis, got it for Christmas along with Assassin's Creed, but I started loving AC and want to finish it before Crysis comes out of the shrinkwrap.

Cheers all, happy new year.

The one you're looking for is Perfect Blue, Rodi. Yeah, Paprika was spectacular. I had to really push the bosses at the theater to pick it up, but seeing it on the big screen back in September made the whole thing worth it. So cool.

Agreed, the easiness is a major plus, especially for those of us (like myself and apparently Nappi) who are playing along with non-gamers. My girlfriend is just getting into it now. Her gaming experience up to now has been playing bass in Rock Band because she loves the soundtrack and a lot of Sonic 2 on virtual console because it reminds her of watching her brother play Sega when they were little. Before that she hadn't played since the aforementioned Genesis days. She's really loving Mario Galaxy, and the fact that it's easy is only helping this. As for me, with many more years of experience and far more likely to be bored by an easy game, I don't feel that. It's like Marek said, a dance. Besides, there's the occasional hard bit just to keep me challenged enough. There are very few games I would say feel like they're perfectly difficult. This is one. I have never once been frustrated, but neither have I ever been able to let my focus drift. It demands attention in the best way possible. A gentle "look out!" rather than punching you in the chest if you look away for a moment. ...and for the record, I have about 90 stars at the moment. I fully intend to get the last 30.

I see. I'm starting to get what you mean. Halfway through Hard now and in always sweating quite a bit by the time I go to put the sticks down. Too damned fun though. Oh, and that masking tape quick-fix for the strum bars on original guitars works like a bloody miracle. Did it earlier tonight on my guitar which was registering not a single damn downward strum. Now it actually works better than new. Love it to death, and I've become quite the afficionado of tiny plastic guitars. When this one broke and I had to go back to the GHIII Les Paul, it just felt like a joke.