Tag: rock band

>Goodbye 2008

>Some random ramblings as I fill in the idle hours at work on the last day of the year:

Was listening to the Giant Bomb “Game of the Year” podcast on the way into work this morning, and it suddenly hit me – I played (and liked) every game they talked about. In years past, there would always be a few titles that would be totally alien to me, and I felt like I missing out; missing Super Mario Galaxy in 2007 would be a good example of that. But not this year – this year I was on top of everything.

I think I may have completed my Best Games of 2008 entry a bit prematurely – I’ve been playing the hell out of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts over the last week or so, and I’m pretty sure I love it. It could be argued that 2008 was really the break-out year for user-generated content, what with Little Big Planet and Spore (oh, yeah, I downloaded Spore because Steam had that stupid holiday sale), but BK:N&B really does it right, in that it gives you some sort of focus and a specific task. Spore’s creature creator is certainly a fun toy to play with, but ultimately the design of your creature doesn’t necessarily have any practical, tangible result (at least not in my somewhat limited experience with it); and on the other hand, Little Big Planet lets you do so much that it’s a bit overwhelming – I’ve barely even touched the tutorials, because I have no idea what I’d want to create. Nuts & Bolts, on the other hand, does a fantastic job of giving you a specific goal, and giving you the tools to achieve it. Whether you build something totally from scratch or if you simply opt to tweak stuff you already have (which is my preferred method right now), it is immensely satisfying to complete a challenge entirely because of your own ingenuity.

Regarding Spore – yeah, I am a whore. Steam’s holiday sale was as good a reason as any to dip my toe into the Spore experience. I’ve only gotten a little bit into the 2nd evolutionary stage – the one where you emerge from the slime and start walking around – so there’s not a tremendous amount for me to discuss. My computer is getting a bit old, too, so I start to get some serious frame rate hitches every once in a while, which is a drag. It’s an interesting enough diversion, at any rate; I’ve yet to see if it really holds together as a game.

I played an awful lot of Fallout 3 over the break, as well; that game continues to astound and amaze. The stories in that game are top-notch, probably second only to GTA4 this year. My only real problem with that game is the engine; talking to NPCs is still just a little bit weird enough to pull me out of the experience, and it was the same thing in Oblivion. I’m about halfway to level 15 right now, though, and I think I might hold off for a bit until some of the DLC arrives and they lift the level cap.

Speaking of RPGs, I’ve also been playing Chrono Trigger before I go to bed lately. It’s a pretty solid game, and I can see why people love it. (I’m a little lost at the moment, though; I kinda rushed through the dialogue at the end of this one section and so now I’m not entirely sure where I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to be doing, and there’s no real way (short of a walkthrough) of solving that problem.) But I’m starting to have a problem with calling these sorts of games “role-playing games.” Fallout is a role-playing game; you inhabit your character and you can make choices and design your skillset and really play the way you want to play and have the experience you want to experience. However, in Chrono Trigger – and, indeed, in every JRPG I’ve ever played – all you do is level up and give your dude new and better gear. There’s no real choice involved; the story is linear and your little dude will play the same way at the end of the game as he will in the beginning. We need some new sort of nomenclature.

My wife and I hosted 2 parties this December – my birthday, and Christmas – and Rock Band 2 was featured prominently at both. Goddamn that game is fun. I love watching people figure out how to play the drums almost as much as I love actually playing them; at first they’re overwhelmed with all the information that’s hurtling towards them at breakneck speeds, but then they figure out how to translate all that arcane symbology into recongizable rhythm, and then the whole concept opens up for them like a flower. It’s really quite something to see.

Finally, I did the math, and barring some gaming tonight before the ball drops, I will have accumulated 12,060 Points in 2008. I will make no predictions about my point-whoring desires for 2009, other than I’d like to cross 50,000 in a cool way. I crossed 30K by playing Call of Duty 4 on a hard difficulty level, and I crossed 40K by playing the guitar on expert difficulty in Rock Band 2. Maybe I’ll cross 50K by doing something awesome in Brutal Legend?

>Back To The Apocalypse

>I find it hard to believe that it’s really December 19. The year was already moving pretty fast, and now I look up and see that Christmas is next fucking week. What the hell happened?

In any event, the release calendar madness has finally slowed down, and now I find myself with a bunch of titles that I finally have some time to enjoy.

First and foremost, I’m getting back into Fallout 3. I had put it down a few weeks ago for some reason, and when I heard about the forthcoming packages of DLC – one of which would raise the level cap and make the endgame a bit more productive – I felt like my time with the game would be better spent with all that stuff intact, instead of playing it now, finishing it, and then coming back later. (I had originally meant to talk about this very thing in relation to this particular article from MTV Multiplayer.) And I guess there’s a part of me that still does feel that way; I’d like to be able to seamlessly incorporate this new DLC into my Fallout experience. That said, last night I found myself with an empty apartment and a lot of options, and I found myself missing the Fallout experience.

Goddamn, that game is awesome. I believe I said in my 2008 wrap-up that I thought I might be a little intimidated by it; it’s such a huge world and there’s so much to do and I still haven’t totally figured out how good or evil I want to be, even though I’m level 10 and have put in a considerable amount of hours into it already. I put it in last night and it only took me about 30 seconds to remember how it worked and I was immediately hooked, again. I’m trying to stay away from the main quest, and as a result I’ve found a ton of other things to see and explore. I used to do this thing in Oblivion – if I was walking towards my targeted location, and another random, undiscovered location started to appear in my map, I’d always feel compelled to stray away just far enough to see what it was that I’d found, and I find myself doing the same thing here in Fallout. And it’s really incredible to see what Bethesda has crammed in there. I’m currently on a side mission that’s taken me to some pretty awesome locations, and the level of detail in every room is just staggering, and it boggles my mind to think that if I had only made a left turn in Rivet City instead of a right, I would never have seen any of it. And the thing of it is, I’m already well aware that there’s a ton of stuff that I’ve already missed because I went one way and not the other. Absolutely incredible.

Rock Band 2 continues to be a nightly source of amusement at my house; my wife has finally graduated to “Medium” difficulty on guitar, and we’re getting back into Tour mode again. I made a brief mention of this in the 2008 Year In Music post on my other blog; there’s 2 songs in particular that I found in the store that I’ve totally fallen in love with, and I ended up purchasing those songs in iTunes – Maximo Park’s “Girls Who Play Guitars” and Silversun Pickups’ “Lazy Eye.” They’re both fun as hell to play on drums, but they also just kick a lot of ass in general.

I made a special category in my 2008 Year in Games post so as to congratulate myself for not being a total whore and buying the Strongbad Games, even though I’m a big fan of the cartoon and an even bigger fan of point-and-click adventure games. Then, of course, it was announced just the other day that they were releasing all 5 adventures on Steam, and so OF COURSE I went and downloaded them immediately. Steam was acting a little weird last night, though, and I couldn’t actually open Episode 1. But I did check out the tutorial in Episode 5, just to make sure I knew what I was getting into, and of course I’m totally fucking hooked.

I finally beat the single-player campaign in Little Big Planet, and then I started dabbling in user-created levels, most of which are kinda shitty. (It does sound strange to use the phrase “single-player campaign” for a game like LBP, but to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, you use the nomenclature you have.) I’m not sure I’m ready to begin designing my own levels just yet; I may end up going back into the single-player to try and find all the stickers and objects that I didn’t get the first time. I gotta say – even though the controls are awfully floaty and the back-middle-front aspect of it can get terribly screwed up, that game’s charm is absolutely impossible to deny. I am fully on board the Sackboy bandwagon.

Finally, my DS is finally starting to come to life again. I’ve been getting into Chrono Trigger a little more, and I’ve also been enjoying the newest Castlevania game. I find it incredible that Konami has basically been making the same Castlevania game for a million years and yet it still ends up being pretty awesome every single time.

And so what are you playing this weekend?

>Scrabble, Rock Band, and some personal inventory

>Some quick hits:

1. I am somewhat of a Scrabble nerd. Which is not to say that I’m very good at it, but rather that I very much enjoy playing it. I was a huge Scrabulous fan on Facebook, and I’ve even succumbed and started playing the EA-sponsored OFFICIAL SCRABBLE Facebook app. Hell, me and Gred and our other friend Jongre started the BAD SCRABBLE HANDS page, which still gets quite a lot of traffic even if we haven’t updated it since 2001. I’ve had my eye on the upcoming US release of the DS Scrabble game, which has been out in the UK for a while – I very nearly bought a copy when I was in London earlier this year. (Or maybe it’s not the same thing?) Anyway, this story cracked my shit up.

2. Via the excellent Offworld comes this interview with Alex Rigopulos, the man behind Rock Band.

3. Just for shits and giggles, I scoured my old GS blog and found my year-end recaps for 2004, 2006 and 2007. I’m not entirely sure I know what happened to 2005.

>Good Times All Around

>Last night was epic.

Last night was the sort of night that makes me seriously reconsider my pick for GOTY. As said previously, I’m refraining from doing the big GOTY post until after Prince of Persia arrives – I’m a huge fan of the series, and with all the positive reviews it’s been getting, it could very well have an impact.* But as I’ve also said previously, I entered the 2008 stretch run still feeling confident in my GOTY choice.

I’m having some serious questions now.

Last night was a night spent with Rock Band 2 and Left 4 Dead.

Let me start with Rock Band 2. My wife and I have a band together: “Lilo and Two Poots”, named after our two dogs and their farts. In this band, I play drums (on hard) and she plays guitar (on easy). We’d been hitting a wall in our tour progression, though – Medium is too hard for her on guitar, and there were a bunch of competitions that had Medium difficulty as the lowest available option. And so, as she was out of the house, I took it upon myself to pick up the guitar and plow through the stuff she couldn’t do.

And, as a result, I ended up beating the game (I think). There was a 5-song set that we needed in order to open up some new venues, and then there was an 8-song set in Shanghai that would get us on the cover of Rolling Stone. After the RS show, I opened up every other venue in the world, and so obviously there’s still a tremendous amount left to do, but the credits rolled anyway. Having only really played RB2 on the drums, it took me a little while to get used to playing guitar again, but I quickly got the hang of it, and I had a friggin’ blast. There’s so many great songs in that game, and all of the guitar parts are sensible. My biggest problem with Guitar Hero 3 was that the difficulty level often had nothing to do with the actual music that was being played; playing a song on Medium was often times harder than actually playing the actual song on an actual guitar. RB2 does not make that mistake at all – I did my guitar parts on both Hard and Expert last night and the difficulty was absolutely fair; if I screwed up, I knew it was my fault, and if I was able to get 4 or 5 stars at the end, I felt like I’d earned it.

And in the middle of this RB2 insanity, I played some Left 4 Dead with some good friends. We managed to get through an entire story (I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head, but it’s the one that ends with the last stand at the boathouse). L4D might not be the most complete game package out there right now; it really just does one specific thing, though, and it does it exceedingly well. We were constantly keeping tabs on each other, racing in to fend off a Hunter on a downed teammate, calling out Boomers, making sure we all had our flashlights turned off if we heard a Witch, setting up gas can traps for oncoming horde assaults… and all the while, the excellent AI-controlled 4th member of our party was watching our 6, healing us when necessary, and never, ever getting in the way. The game is remarkable in its pacing, but also in terms of communication; the three of us were constantly talking to each other, but then (also) our in-game characters would chime in with situationally-appropriate comments which often cracked us up. Not to mention, we all scored a number of Achievements as we progressed, most of which were pretty cool and not really things we were consciously aiming for.

This is a long way of saying that RB2 and L4D are now firmly entrenched in my top 5 of 2008, which is getting more and more crowded with every passing day.

*According to Amazon, I won’t be getting my grubby little mitts on PoP until Friday, the 5th.

>The Greatest Thing (take 2)

>I have been guilty of using excessive hyperbole for pretty much my entire life, which can (obviously) lessen the weight of any endorsement or criticism I might have. That said, eventually, we will all look back on the sum of one’s experiences and be able to say, “That was the greatest thing I ever did,” “that was the most fun I ever had,” “that was the shittiest thing I ever saw.”

So I won’t say that playing drums yesterday afternoon in Rock Band 2 for 5 hours while my wife played guitar is the most fun I’ve ever had. “Fun” is an incredibly subjective term and is therefore almost impossible to define with any degree of specificity.

If I were to say, however, that my experience yesterday afternoon playing the drums in Rock Band 2 while my wife played guitar was about 1000 times better than I thought it would be, and actually made me feel like I was really playing the drums which is something I’ve always wanted to be able to do, and basically let me live out my secret drum-playing fantasies in all their sweaty glory, and that it will probably be my favorite gaming moment of the year and maybe make the leap into my top 5 gaming moments of all time, I think that would be fair.

I would estimate that in 95% of all the band rehearsals I’ve ever had over the last 15 years – and this is no exaggeration – I’ve managed to squeeze in at least 10-20 minutes of drum-kit time, which is usually whenever the drummer leaves the room. I would never pass myself off as a gig-worthy drummer, but I can keep a steady beat and can generally get a pretty good groove going. I take a certain amount of pride in my drum machine prowess, and almost all the drumming on my recent recordings has been “live”, not pre-programmed.

The point is, I’ve always loved playing drums. And I got to feel like I was actually playing drums yesterday, and it was awesome.

I should back up here and clarify the record. Just a few days ago, I wrote about my disinterest in music games, and specifically my reluctance to buy Rock Band, even though all of my gaming friends love the hell out of it. The biggest obstacle, though, was my wife; I didn’t want to spend that much money if she wasn’t going to play it with me, and she’s always been somewhat reluctant to play those kinds of games.

But then, this past Saturday, I was at an anniversary party for some friends of mine; they had rented out a private karaoke room at this sushi place in the East Village and hooked up Guitar Hero to the projector. And as we all got into the spirit of the thing, I could see she was starting to melt a little bit.

With some minor cajoling, she gave in. And so I traded in a ton of old games and was able to procure the full Rock Band 2 package, and it only cost me about $30.

[Games I Traded In:

  • Dead Rising
  • Call of Duty 4
  • Dirt
  • Eternal Sonata
  • Kameo
  • Lego Indiana Jones
  • Pure
  • Saints Row 1
  • Lego Star Wars: Complete Saga
  • Rockstar Table Tennis
  • Tiger Woods 09

Alternately, I probably could’ve just traded in my Wii, for all I use it these days. I am not a fan or supporter of the used games market, but, hey: I have no problem using it to my advantage.]

My brief time with Guitar Hero World Tour at the karaoke bar was enough to seal the deal, in terms of brand loyalty. Both GH and RB are functionally identical in terms of gameplay, but there’s just something about GH that just turns me off. Maybe it’s the gratuitous product placement, or maybe it’s the way everything is laid out, but everything in GH just screamed out “CASH-IN”. Whereas Rock Band 2 feels a lot more… I don’t know… awesome. My wife and I named our band “Lilo and Two Poots” after our dogs (and their farts), and seeing the bandname on logos and posters randomly appear in the game totally cracked us up. Every once in a while we’d try a “Mystery Setlist” and we’d start playing these awesome songs that weren’t yet appearing on the set list creation screen, and after every song we’d instinctively reach over and give each other a high-five.

I can’t tell you how awesome that is, to be high-fiving my wife after getting 5 stars on a Jane’s Addiction song.

And to think, I was planning on writing a thing about Gears of War 2 today.

>Rock Band: Beatles

>The big news this morning is of the new Beatles music game, currently slated for a Holiday 2009 release.

During a teleconference being held by Apple Corps, Ltd and MTV this morning, the two companies, along with Harmonix, announced an exclusive partnership to create a brand new video game featuring the music of the Beatles. This seems to be a new game that will allow friends and families to experience the music of the band in an all new way.

Other than a brief mention of Rock Band during the teleconference, so far no mention has been made of the band’s songs coming to Rock Band or Rock Band 2. In fact, Harmonix’s Alex Rigopolis stated during the call that this is not a Rock Band expansion pack, but an all-new game title built from the ground up.

The game will be a journey that will take you through the entire Beatles catalog, from the first album to the last. There will be an interactive music performance involved using music controller peripherals, but they stress that the game is not a Rock Band title. Visual exploration of the Beatles will be a big part of the game, though they were not prepared to discuss more on that at this time.

I’ve got a lot to say about music games, most of which I’ve probably already said a million times before. I’ve been playing music since I was about 3; my parents were both musicians and I can’t really remember not playing music. (My parents were classical musicians, though, and so they had a pretty big influence over the music I listened to when I grew up; they weren’t very keen on rock music. One thing we could all agree on, however, was The Beatles, and how awesome they were.)

Anyway. My point is that, as an actual musician, the Guitar Hero / Rock Band games don’t necessarily appeal to me; I already have real guitars, and my personal aesthetic when it comes to music is not on shredding ability but songcraft and arrangement. What I liked about Guitar Hero 2 (my first dabbling in this genre) was the song selection, and specifically how they deconstructed the guitar parts so you could really get inside the part and see how it interacted with the song as a whole. And on the flipside, my biggest frustration with Guitar Hero 3 (well, one of many) was that I would fail songs (on Medium difficulty) that I could actually play, on a real guitar; the emphasis was on shredding, not on feeling like you were part of a band. (The other big frustration were the boss battles, which were totally fucking ridiculous. If I were actually on a stage and engaged in a real guitar duel, and my opponent came over and detuned my guitar while I was playing, or futzed around with my amp, I would punch my opponent in the face and then take their guitar and break it over their head.)

I’ve never played Rock Band 1 or 2, mostly because (a) I don’t really feel like I need to, and (b) they’re expensive and I don’t necessarily have the real estate in my apartment to house them. But I’ve certainly wanted to play them; the RB games have a far better selection of songs than the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games do, in my opinion, and from my perspective, song selection is pretty much the most important issue in this genre.

Which is why a Harmonix-produced Beatles game is so fascinating to me. I know the Beatles catalog pretty much inside and out – well, certainly for everything from Rubber Soul onwards – and none of those songs are terribly difficult to play; George was not a shredder, and Ringo was, well, Ringo. So the appeal of playing a Beatles-themed music game can’t be about racking up zillions of points; instead, the appeal is that almost everybody has an intrinsic knowledge of at least a few Beatles songs, and that being able to play them – being able to get inside of them, subconsciously absorbing how the songs are constructed and arranged – is an experience that, until now, not many people have ever really thought about besides music nerds.

My biggest question, then, is what they’re going to do about the keyboards and crazy sounds. Once the Beatles started smoking pot, going to India, and hanging out with Bob Dylan, everything changed, and I mean everything; they stopped writing catchy pop songs and instead starting breaking down boundaries that nobody had even conceived before. How are you going to play “Hey Jude” or “Let it Be” without a piano? Better yet, how are you going to play “A Day in the Life” without an orchestra? Or “I Am the Walrus” without inhaling a sheet of LSD? Will there be a George Martin mini-game, where you have to build all sorts of crazy shit in order to capture the sounds that John Lennon wants to be able to hear when you’re trying to play “Tomorrow Never Knows”?