Hit-and-run post #2: Guitar Hero III update #2

I knew I shouldn't have posted that first hit-and-run GH3 update.

I whined and complained about The Metal in my previous post, but then realized when company was over today that I hadn't actually tried it in a few weeks. I figured what the heck, I'll flail about on it for a bit and then see what happens. As for the retirement announcement, I've only retired from doing work on the songs, I have no issue with taking a random stab at them now and again to see if I've magically become good enough to complete them.

In Quick Play I figured what the heck, let's give it a whirl and put in on Expert.

...and promptly beat it.

I tried a couple of songs in the next set, specifically Knights of Cydonia and 3s and 7s, and beat them both. I couldn't believe it. I figured I'd push my luck at that point and see if I could manage Cult of Personality, but no go there. At any rate, I figured it was nice to beat them, but it didn't count unless they were on my profile. A little later in the day I tried them again on my profile and beat The Metal and 3 other songs in succession. I know that at the end of the day, even if I beat every song in the game I'm still inferior as a player to a 9-year-old kid, and regardless, these skills amount to pushing buttons on a toy. I harbour no illusions here. That being said, I'm still pretty proud of this. I even took a picture of the screen to show that I have 7 unfinished songs left on Expert, which includes the wussed-out guitar battle with Slash and the unattempted guitar battle with Lou, neither of which I'm interested in. This leaves me with five unfinished songs in Expert difficulty, and after trying a couple of them tonight, I may just finish here. I'll keep you posted either way. (:

Here's the screenshot. Yes, I know, my parents are very proud.

UPDATE: It's been pointed out to me that I have 41/42 songs complete in Hard difficulty, and the one remaining song is the ending guitar battle with Lou, which I haven't attempted in a while, but haven't ever managed to win. I am cool with this despite my OCD leanings when it comes to beating video games.

Enter: Rock Band

There's a weekly nerd meeting that Mrs. Addicted and I attend. At these meetings we indulge in all manner of nerdery, mostly video gaming, some movies, TV shows and the like. Ever since Rock Band was finally delivered to the place where our host had it pre-ordered, it's been the game of choice for our group. It had all the difficulty of Guitar Hero, but with an actual chance to interact with your fellow gamers. Okay, it really just lets more than two people play at once, and you're really playing near more than with, but let's not split hairs, here.

Before Rock Band launched, I may have (even in an earlier post) said that I was skeptical as to whether any game with a $200 price tag would sell.

I was wrong.

In fact, it was Rock Band that made me realize that I wasn't really having fun playing the last few sets in Expert mode on Guitar Hero.

It helps if you have a nerd coven that can split the cost of a video game eight ways, I might not've had a chance to play it otherwise, and I'm sure that the rest of the group is forever grateful for the opportunity to hear me attempt to sing not only Iron Maiden's love ballad Run To The Hills, but even to sing Rush's country/western classic Tom Sawyer.

I'd describe it in detail, but in an effort to retain my flagging readership, I'll just say I have a theatre voice. I performed on stage in musical theatre for several years a while ago, and if you think (like I did) that a theatre voice and actual training would translate well to Rock Band, you are sorely mistaken. In our meetings they give me a guitar and leave me on it for several very good reasons, two of which are mentioned above.

Rock Band is one of the first games that actually can help you learn a transferrable skill. Guitar Hero requires more than a little suspension of disbelief when it comes to helping what Mrs. Addict would call basement-dwelling CHUD to believe they're rock stars. Rock Band has a drum kit that is many times over more sadistic than it looks at first glance. Medium difficulty is the litmus test for weeding out the truly dedicated to the "instrument", and if you can manage some of the stuff that I've seen on Hard and Expert difficulties, then I'd recommend getting a kit for real, because you're not that far off, in my opinion.

On top of it all, it's fun. It's very cool to have four of your friends thrashing away on different instruments and to see the four different sections of the screen all going at once. It's fun to be able to trade instruments and see the same song completely differently.

My favourite mechanic has got to be the one thing that would make Expert difficulty on Guitar Hero do-able and a lot less of a chore. Star power builds up for each instrument the same as in GH, but if one of you fails out on your instrument, the entire song doesn't stop. Someone with enough star power can activate it and bring that player back into the song, and in that way it keeps one person with a brutal solo from being able to bring down the band. You can actually fail twice in a song and be saved by other band members, which is a very useful thing, keeping the entire band from having to do GHIII-esque work to get past certain areas.

In all, wanting to learn the drum part alone has tempted Mrs. Addicted and I to pick up a 360 should room present itself for one in our budget in the coming months. I'll keep you posted on that, but don't count on a post for it until closer to the end of the year.

Hit-and-run post #1: Guitar Hero III update

To all and sundry: I have retired from Guitar Hero III.

This doesn't mean that I've quit playing by any stretch, but I have stopped trying to finish songs I've never finished before.There are 9 songs I haven't finished successfully in Expert difficulty, not counting three guitar battles, which seemed gimmicky anyway.

I spent an hour playing and in practice mode trying to play the ludicrously hard bridge in The Metal, also known as the ending credit music from the movie Tenacious D. Two attempts at the song after this garnered one failure at the expected 50% and another failure at 94%. I noticed after that failure that I had at some point stopped having fun.

I'm confident that I can do it, provided I'm willing to spend as much time as I need to develop the muscle-memory required for this one song. On quick-play mode I tried a few other songs and ran into the same difficulty, that being that there is a stupidly difficult chord sequence or hammer-on sequence each time that you can learn if you're willing to spend the required time to teach your fingers to perform that one sequence, which won't help you with the next song. Ultimately, I'm far enough behind in my unplayed games library that spending hours on hours not having fun with this one simply isn't worth it.

That's not to say that I've stopped playing it, I happen to enjoy the music, particularly the Blue Oyster Cult song Cities on Flame With Rock And Roll, and when company comes over I'm more than happy to play with them. I've just stopped trying to finish every song on my own, and for someone who's willing to farm in caves, that's saying something. It also hasn't stopped me from looking on the Internets for a remotely cheap copy of GH I and II for the PS2 so that we can play all the songs that were in the first two games. But I digress.

I partly blame Rock Band, but that's another entry, coming soon.

Love-Hate Relationships

I need to tell you about a game I traded for recently that I kinda regret. In exchange for a copy of Trauma Center for the DS shipped to the east coast, I got a copy of Puzzle Quest.

Short Review: This is a stupid game.

Every time I try to come up with a positive description of this game what I come up with makes it sound even worse. It's technically an RPG where the combat mechanic is that ubiquitous web-based flash game that involves matching coloured gems. You know the one, Bejewelled or Bepuzzled or BeWTFAmIDoingStillPlayingThisGame, I can't remember the exact title off the top of my head. When you're not doing this, Puzzle Quest is every hack-n-slash RPG ever. There's a kingdom, multiple kingdoms, in fact, each with a perfectly good army that requires you to be their collective savior single-handed. All of the dialogue is full of alarmist language, but evidently the situation is not so dire that the merchants don't charge you an arm and a leg for the tools/armour/weapons that you need to spend time saving up your cash to buy in order to progress through the game. The story has been done before and the combat is exactly the same every time, save for an ability to change gem colour or to use "spells" that allow you to take extra turns.

It's like this game was genetically engineered to kill me through sleep deprivation. I've played this game past midnight on three work nights this week, and on public transit to and from work and on breaks. Two pints of tasty cider were the only things preventing me from doing it again yesterday.

It's really weird, because it's not like any other game addiction I've had before. Most addictions make me think about the game a lot and the game addiction du jour tends to dominate my conversations, as people unfortunate enough to talk to me in mid-fix discover. With Guitar Hero I couldn't shut up about it for weeks, same for a lot of other titles. With this one, I don't even think about it. I don't long to play it when I'm busy and I certainly don't have dreams anything like the fretboard from hell visions one gets when going to bed right after spending an hour losing guitar battles with Slash on Expert.

I just find myself instinctively reaching for the DS whenever I get a minute of free time, and it's honestly kind of creepy. I skimmed a GameFAQs....FAQ for this game and one of the first things it says is that this game hates you. After playing for a week, I agree completely. You can be dominating a Bejeweled combat against a monster when suddenly the random replacement gems that fall for your "opponent" create an auto-complete sequence that not only levels the playing field again but in fact causes you to suddenly lose through no action of your own. This will happen often enough that you will discover a real-life ability called Spike Rage that makes you want to snap your DS in half, throw it against a wall and go do something productive. It's not even that it's prohibitively hard, it's that it feels like the game decides that you shouldn't win a particular fight and there is nothing you can do at that point.

Maybe that's it. The ultra-sadistic gameplay mechanics result in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome where you start to love something that treats you so badly. Or at least find yourself subconsciously deciding to play it the second there's a hint of free time available, because every time you think about it with your conscious brain you're almost embarrassed to play it.

Regardless, that's the latest crisis. Back to your daily lives.

2007 FWC Blog Awards

Welcome to the 2007 FWC Blog Awards, where the categories are arbitrary and the decisions even moreso.

Without any further ado, let's begin, shall we?

Category: TV Series Most Stuck Up Its Own Arse

The Winner: 24

I started watching this show a couple of weeks ago when my wife's maid of honour brought season one over on DVD. We managed an entire episode and a half before we switched it off, shortly after Jack Bauer cut off the finger of a dead guy.

In its favour, the idea of a real-time show is good. The idea of multiple things going on at once is also good. Unfortunately, the way they did it was not. I'll buy a Sutherland in the main role, but way too much stuff happened that kept me from getting into the story. The multiple boxes on the screen? Nice idea if you only do it maybe once an episode, but every 5 minutes? Come on, this show has way too big a budget not to be more creative with this.

In all, the show came off to me like a version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but with terrorism and US politics as the setting. The only really competent person in the entire show is the main character, and everyone else seems to be in constant danger because of their own stupid decisions and only Jack Bauer can save them all, but he can only do so much at once, even if you put him in all four boxes on the screen at the same time.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying the show is without merit. If 24 didn't try so hard to be The Greatest Show Evar I think I'd have been able to get in on the ground floor. However, the flaws I mentioned plus a helping of self-importance and the constant adding of danger music when nothing ends up happening in a scene were just too off-putting for me.

Runner-up: Lost

Category: TV Series That I Didn't Expect To Like But Did

The Winner: Weeds

My wife and I started watching season one at around 7 or so in the evening a couple of months ago. 11 hours of episodes later that same night we went to bed.

It's hard to explain why in one sentence. It's not that Weeds is the most amazing show evar (see the efforts of 24 above). It's pretty straightforward about what it is, and that's nice. Weeds takes its time, but the story moves pretty quickly, if that makes sense. The characters are caricatures, but not to the point of distracting from the story. In all, it's entertaining because it's not too much of one thing. The actors, the story and even the theme song all grow on you, if that's not too close to a plant joke.

The show itself starts out about a widow (Mary-Louise Parker) in white Californian suburbia that starts selling marijuana to the rest of the nearby suburbanites. The idea is compelling enough to get you to start watching and then the good writing takes over. Watch 3 episodes (they're only a half hour each) and see if you don't find yourself watching through the rest of the season.

Category: Worst Fantasy Football League Owner, 2007

The "Winner": Me!

WARNING: This section is full of self-pitying rants. Feel free to skip to the next category if you don't want to see them, and you can't say you weren't warned otherwise.

To be honest, this wasn't even really close. I should have known better, but I decided that maybe the last 8 or so times I played fantasy football to all be coincidences.

My fantasy teams have two common themes, and those are underachievers and injuries. Well, I suppose finishing last is common as well, but I figured that kinda goes without sayign.

I have an impressive collection of careers I've ended during my fantasy football history, with highlights including (but not limited to):

Randall Cunningham: Drafted 1st overall, injured Q1 of game 1 (thanks, Bryce Paup)
Steve Young: Drafted Round 1 the year he started collecting concussions.

The list of underperformers is much longer if not more impressive, including Jerry Rice, Steve Smith, Ahman Green and so on.

2007 was special for me, as I managed injuries and near-suspensions and underperforming all at the same time, including the loss of the top 4 running backs I drafted to injury.

Here's the short list:Larry Johnson: Underperformed until he could manage an injury.Travis Henry: Did well for a few weeks, then injured a knee and failed a marijuana test. He won the appeal and is allowed to play, but can't because he's still injured.
Ronnie Brown: Did nothing until mid-season, then went on IR after two good games.
Marshawn Lynch: Injury after injury after injury.
LaMont Jordan: Played 2 good weeks, then a back injury ended his season.
Lee Evans: Played 2 good weeks, but only after I cut him and he was picked up by another team.
Drew Brees: Managed 3 good weeks this season, and wasn't starting on any of them.
Matt Schaub: Completing 75% of your passes and still being useless in a fantasy league takes genuine effort, I think. Then he separated his shoulder.
Matt Leinart: Underperformed AND went on IR.
Vince Young: Underperformed, traded, still underperformed.
Santonio Holmes: All the promise in the world, 2 good weeks on the field. The season is 14 weeks long.
Brandon Marshall: To see the guy break tackles in-game you'd think he's the next Jerry Rice. He still hasn't shown up on the stats sheet.

This also doesn't count the kickers and defenses that are enough reason on their own to make an alcoholic out of me.

In the true spirit of a Leafs fan, however, I'm sure I'll do better next year. (:

(head shake) Enough of the whining, however, and on to the next award.


Category: Cinematic surprise of 2007

The Winner: The Wife getting into horror flicks!

My wife is amazing at a great many things. Keeping her cool when watching a horror flick not among them. Not that she'd scream at the top of her lungs when something happened, but she seemed to shy away from them on principle, until this year, after she remembered that that she enjoyed really tense movies like Session 9 and decided that apart from the special-effects "gore because we can" kind of movies (your Saws and Hostels), she wanted to see if she had the stomach for some good classic horror movies. These included the original Friday the 13th, the original Exorcist, 1408 and a few others, and it turns out that she loved them. I'm very proud of her for this, because people tend to decide at an early age that they do or don't like horror movies and tend not to re-evaluate that stance afterward.

She jumps at the right moments and reacts the way people making these kind of movies hope you will. She also loves it, and I look forward to seeing some more classics with her soon.


Category: Crack of 2007

The Winner: Guitar Hero III

I've played a lot of games over the past year. I've played OCD tests like Rune Factory (which I finished without ever getting close to getting married in the game), Final Fantasy III (All the grinding you could ever want without learning how to weld) and Picross (still the best instant multiplayer game I've seen for the DS).

I'd played GHII at a friend's house enough to be able to beat YYZ on medium difficulty, and was pretty proud of that. Then GHIII showed up and I've made it to Hard difficulty.

To explain the jump from Medium to Hard difficulty, do you remember the scene in the movie Airplane where the sick kid starts convulsing and the nurse slaps him and then other people start joining in slapping him and the camera pans to the lineup up the aisle with people waiting their turn holding blunt objects and various weapons? If you start in on Hard difficulty immediately after the first time you beat the final boss fight in Medium you'll think that queue of people is lining up for you. It's that steep of a curve. Luckily I'm also a video game masochist in addition to susceptible to OCD-tests, so I've been in the Practice mode nearly as much as I've been playing the actual songs in order to get the the galloping triplets section in Knights of Cydonia or the brutal fingering in 3s and 7s.

It's also a game that just about everyone in our nerd circle of friends enjoys playing a lot. If it wasn't for the fact that staring at dots moving down the fret board makes your eyes tired after a while, there would probably be genuine fights over who gets to play next.

Releasing extra controllers for the Wii version so all the addicts can play multiplayer would also be nice, but I digress.

So, yeah, crack. If you pick it up, at least you can't say you haven't been warned.

Unmentioned Runners-Up: Lunar Knights, Brain Age 2


Category: Band I Like That Would Ruin My Credibility If I Recommended Them

The Winner: DragonForce

I have an inner 6-year-old.

This 6-year-old will laugh at every 3 Stooges Sketch. He has seriously considered buying a box set of Rocky movies (and has seen Rocky IV at least a half dozen times and had the final training montage music on cassette). He loved a very bad show that only ran for 2 seasons in the very early eighties called Automan. He cheered the Hoff in Knight Rider and wished he owned Kitt. He watched and cheered for Airwolf, he loved Beowulf and every Die Hard movie. He watched horrible shows like this one and this one and this one and loved every one of them. You get the picture.

By cheered, by the way, I mean literally stood up and cheered out loud.

In short, my inner 6-year-old is responsible for just about every embarrassing enjoyment in my life.

Dragonforce is a English rock band that wrote the song Through The Fire And Flames which is used as credit music after each difficulty level in Guitar Hero III.

The first time I heard this song my adult brain cringed and my inner 6-year-old exalted. This could not end well.

It is not good music. My adult brain gave some ground and hoped to stop where this was going by finding the discography and listening to it end-to-end.

First, the good. Dragonforce is a very high-energy band, and by that I don't mean they play faster than most, I mean they play ferret-on-a-double-espresso fast. The guitarist plays almost at the speed of Yngwie Malmsteen. Oh, just look him up.

They're an honest band. They're not going to make a dance remix of anything, they're not going anywhere near jazz that I can tell, and even both of their "slow" songs (they have 2 on 3 albums) are 150bpm. They play aggressive guitar rock and they're amazing musicians, talent-wise. How they'd play at the pace they do in a live concert for 3+ hours is beyond me. The thought of a Dragonforce mosh pit is enough of a deterrant that I am going to pass on going to their live shows to find out, even if they weren't all in Europe.

Finally, their sound is intentionally loud and for what it is, it sounds well balanced to my ear.

With all of that going for them, why are they in the Embarrassing category instead of Highly Recommended? Let's look at that now.

That song I told you about earlier? That's their sound, and it's their only one. If you listen to enough of their music, it all blurs into one song with arbitrary pauses to let the musicians go outside and set fire to things, I imagine. It's fine if you're using it as background music while you do work. On its own, however, if your band has as much variety as that of highland dancing arm movement, something is wrong.

Nearly every lyric is sung by all the vocalists at once, and they never vary the arrangement. It sounds stolen from Carry On My Wayward Son, now that I think about it. There may have been some solo singing in one song, but I might've been imagining it. Also, the drumming begins to sound more like galloping than drumming after a while.

Next, the song titles physically hurt me to read. It honestly sounds like a mix tape put together by the Crown Prince of EmoTown. Here's the track list for their latest album, just so you don't think I'm cherry-picking titles:

1 - Through The Fire and Flames
2 - Revolution Deathsquad
3 - Storming The Burning Fields
4 - Operation Ground and Pound
5 - Body Breakdown
6 - Cry For Eternity
7 - The Flame Of Youth
8 - Trail of Broken Hearts

See?

Given their obvious skill at wordsmithery when it comes to song titles, I'm sure you can only imagine the quality of their lyric-writing. Even my inner 6-year-old doesn't get behind the lyrics, they're that bad. I won't risk my single-digit readership any further by actually typing out any of them, but please do take my word for it, they're....appropriate for the music and song titles.

And that's Dragonforce. If you like a balanced fast-paced guitar rock sound and can avoid reading the titles or paying attention to the lyrics or thinking about the lack of variety throughout, then my inner 6-year-old highly recommends them.


Well, there you have it, I'm officially out of rants for the time being. Shouldn't be out for long, though.

Adventures in Moviedom

NOTE: At the time of this writing, the author may be intoxicated. Maybe. A lot.

I just watched Live Free or Die Hard, the latest adventure in the otherwise boring life of character John McLane. It's a movie about how a group of eeeeeeevil computer hackers manage to take down the entirety of the eastern seaboard's power and utilities and almost steal all the financial data (and, evidently, the funds) of all businesses within the US, until John McLane, the King of the Luddites and a good-guy hacker that looks disturbingly like Keanu Reeves but with something better approaching acting talent stop them at every turn.

I love computers in movies. Not at first, mind you. Every computer in a movie can be hacked, reprogrammed, fixed, encrypted and made to do standing backflips by typing "asdf;lkjasdf;lkj" on the keyboard for an appropriate length of time. This makes my brain hurt, which makes me drink, which makes me not hate the movie so much.

The lead villain, played by Timothy Olyphant, is essentially a complete waste of space. I knew he had minimal acting depth when I saw Deadwood and saw approximately two different expressions on his face over the course of multiple seasons. In light of that, I think he should marry Sarah Brightman, and their collective acting depth might rival that of a dime. If nothing else, you wouldn't need more than one wedding photo, because they'd have the same expressions the entire time anyway.

You're welcome, Natalie.

But back to the movie.

This movie is action stem to stern, which is awesome, unless you are even remotely interested in anything approaching realistic physics. Example A: The truck vs. the F-35 that can hover, shoot M-60 rounds, navigate in ways that would impress Starbuck, and do anything until, oh, wait, something gets stuck in its blowhole and it has to esplode. Example B: A power grid hub that evidently controls major gas pipelines as well, until the bad guys decide to "re-route" all the gas to point at the station where the good guys are and make the whole thing blow up. So long as you don't imagine the prospects or time required to make gas pipeline pumps slow down, stop and then start going backward to re-route gas flow, it's a cool idea.

To recap: No knowledge of physics or computers? Great movie! Unfortunately for sober me, I have bachelors degrees in both mechanical engineering and computer science. To compensate for this, I've consumed enough vodka to make this entirely forgiveable. I may not live to morning, so I'm writing this blog entry now.

A highlight of the movie is the use of Kevin Smith as the holy grail of nerds living as a grown man in his mother's basement. He gets recruited against his will to help the good guys. A fantastic touch, and given the chance, I'd have taken a part in this series as well, even if it's the equivalent of Police Academy 16: Mahoney Needs Money.

All told, I did enjoy the movie, but I did have to relegate it to the same place that allows me to enjoy Rocky movies after Rocky II. I know it's going to be cheesy and unrealistic, but sometimes stuff's just gotsta blow up.

Okay, back to your normal lives.

Life is good.