Guitar Hero: World Tour

Guitar Hero: World Tour is without a doubt the best music game yet. It combines the full-band experience introduced in Harmonix’s “Rock Band” game with the higher difficulty presented by Activision’s fretting team. Just take a look at Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” It’s in both Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2, but in RB2, it’s much easier and is the first song in the career mode setlist, whereas in GH:WT it’s more difficult, and is in the third tier, not the first.

World Tour also integrates new features that make it closer to mirroring the actual guitar instrument: While already holding a sustained note, players are sometimes required to play other notes as well. In the Eagles’s “Hotel California,” there is a 4-note hammer-on sustain, where the player must press Green, then Red, then Yellow, then Blue, whilst still holding down the previous notes. The “slider bar” allows players to tap notes as an alternative to strumming, as well as “slide” notes in certain sections instead of pressing fret buttons.

The drums are amped up as well: In Rock Band, players cannot activate Star Power until the next drum fill. In GH:WT, the drummer can just hit both crash cymbals at any time in the song (Or the Yellow and Blue drums if they’re using the Rock Band drum set). They also get points for drum fills, unlike Rock Band, where the fill only serves to activate Star Power.

GH:WT solves the “I don’t want to play bass, it’s too easy!” problem with the addition of the sixth note: Open Strum. It takes the form of a line across the screen, much like the kick note for the drums, but it’s purple. To hit it, the player strums without holding any fret buttons. Keeping track of six notes instead of five makes the bass much more difficult.

In Guitar Hero: World Tour, famous artists make their way onstage. Blink 182’s drummer Travis Barker, Paramore’s singer Hayley Williams, famous singer Ozzy Osbourne, Singer/bassist Sting,  guitarist Zakk Wylde, and guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, among others, make their entrance to play their hit songs alongside the player’s avatars.

World Tour also features an amazing setlist, from classics like Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” to modern hits like Linkin Park’s  “What I’ve Done,” World Tour truly embodies the many varieties of Rock.

MySpace and Facebook and Twitter, oh my!

In the past few years, social networking sites have exploded to become a form of communication rivaling that of cell phone networks. MySpace was the first social networking site I became aware of back in 2005. Everyone was talking about it, and people were constantly asking me if I had an account. After a while I caved in and decided to see what “MySpace” was all about. I’ve been using it for four years now, and have hundreds of friends. Then, in 2007, some friends of mine were talking about Facebook. I decided to look into it as well, and soon found that some friends of mine who didn’t have a MySpace used Facebook. I quickly fell in love with the simplicity of Facebook. On MySpace, in order to see what someone’s up to you have to take the initiative to navigate to their page. While still rather simple, it gets tedious when you have many friends. On Facebook, everything your friends do (Except for private messages of course) gets posted in the “Stream” on the homepage. Recently, a new “micro-networking” site has made its debut: Twitter. Twitter is basically a place for people to post what they’re doing/thinking at any given time using 140 characters or less. For instance, since right now I am writing a blog post, I posted on Twitter that I’m “writing a blog post about Twitter on WordPress!!!” It’s a great way to keep up with what any given friend is doing at any given time.

MapleStory: A Fresh Start

Yeah, I’m getting back into MapleStory. I’ll be playing on a world I’ve never played on before (Bellocan) and I will be playing a few friends, one of which has gotten to level 200 multiple times on servers other than Global. My IGN is Vvhorizon, so feel free to add me if you play Bellocan.

The Lotus

I’m not into cars all that much, but this one I saw at the racetrack tonight is pretty sweet. I don’t know anything about how it runs, but I LOVE how it looks:

I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford one of these but if I can afford a cool car one day, this will be it!

Just got back from the track

I’ll be the first to tell you I know absolutely nothing about racing. What I can say about the 57th Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring is that there were a ton of cool cars, thousands of people, and the track. The smell of gasoline permeated the air and high-pitched whirring could be heard as the cars thundered around the course. Cameras flashed, lighting up small sections of the night, and people yelled in each others’ ears to be heard over the roaring engines. Sparks flew as the racers braked at the turns, and blue flames shot from the exhaust pipes. All in all, the race was an exciting event, even for someone like me who finds little entertainment in fast vehicles running around a track. I was lucky enough to be within 30 feet of the Winner’s Circle, and got to watch as the trophies were passed out. We came very close to catching one of the hats that was thrown by a driver, as it just barely grazed our fingertips. I got pictures of some very nice cars on my cell phone, but unfortunately have no way to move them to my computer, so on my phone they will stay.

Left 4 Dead

Four survivors battling through hordes of zombies, barely holding on by the skin of their teeth in an attempt to reach an evac point. That’s the basic summary of “Left 4 Dead,” but doesn’t even begin to describe the fun. There are several different gameplay modes, including single-player campaigns, two-player split-screen cooperative play, plaver-versus-player splitscreen play, and online play that pits special player-controlled zombies against the survivors. “Left 4 Dead” is fast action, adrenaline pumping, on-the-edge-of-your-seat gameplay through and through. At times players will be rushed by hundreds of zombies at once, and at other times they will be traveling through the dark hallways of abandoned buildings, hearing the soft crying of the “Witch” zombie and desperately trying not to startle it, for one attack from the Witch means instant incapacitation to anyone unfortunate enough to face its wrath. At other times, the mighty “Tank” zombie rushes the team, bashing away until the survivors have pumped enough lead into it to finish it off. Players must also keep an eye out for “Boomers” which explode upon being shot, and even worse, their puke attracts hordes of zombies to the survivors’ location, as well as “Hunters” who can leap insane distances in a single bound and once they pounce on a survivor, only a fellow survivor can save them from sure death. “Smokers” grab survivors with their tongues, pulling them away from the group and making them susceptible to a beat-down by the zombie horde.

Thankfully, there is a wide variety of weapons at the survivors’ disposal. From automatic shotguns to sniper rifles, there are plenty of guns to fit any player’s fighting style. Moltov-cocktails and Pipe-bombs make useful explosives, as the cocktail sends up a wall of flame and the Pipe-bomb beeps for a few seconds prior to exploding, attracting any zombies who hear it to pile on top of it.

Health packs are few and far between, and on harder difficulties players will find themselves having to decide whom amongst them to save. Pain-pills can be found every so often, but the temporary health boost they give wears off slowly.

At certain intervals along the way, players stop in “Safe-houses” which zombies cannot enter. Inside, players can restock on ammunition, switch weapons, and heal up with the med-packs that can be found there.

“Left 4 Dead” is a great game to play with a friend. Players will be watching each others’ backs and calling out for help all the way through each challenge.

Fable II: Bartending

My personal favorite job in Fable II is Bartending. It’s very easy to do because, unlike Woodcutting or Blacksmithing, the bar always fills in one direction (Left-to-right/clockwise) and it always turns green at the same point. Basically, bartending is just filling pints of beer all the way full, but not overflowing. If you don’t fill it enough, you earn less gold and you break the chain. Every three pints filled adds one point to your multiplier, and you can get a multiplier of up to 15. A5-star bartender earns a base of 75 gold per pint, so at a 15x multiplier, every pint is worth 1125 gold. A pint takes about 3 seconds to fill and send down the counter, so once you’ve gotten a chain of 45 pints of beer, you start raking in 22,500 gold per-minute. That’s alot. After about five minutes of bartending with a 15x multiplier, you’ll have earned enough gold to buy any building in the town of Bowerstone (The castle excluded, of course).

Fable II

The other day, my older brother brought home a game he’d borrowed from a friend. I didn’t place much interest in it at first, but after my brother played for a while we discovered a co-op mode. I was given a crash course in the controls of the game and soon found myself blasting enemies with powerful spells (that look quite awesome I might add). My brother turned in early that night, but I stayed up literally through the night, creating my own file and playing through the storyline. Though the battle system is amazing in its own right, there is much more to Fable II that makes it one of the coolest Role-Playing games I have played. Not only can you customize your character’s skill set to be a sword-bearing warrior, a sharp-eyed marksman, a powerful spell-caster, or any combination of the three, you can do a number of jobs, from chopping wood to assassinating given targets, you can own a house, tavern, shop, and virtually every building in the game. You can execute a number of expressions that will affect people’s opinion of you, choose to eat pies and cheeses and become fat or fruits and veggies to stay thin, walk the holy path of Good or take the lower road of Evil. You can buy a wide array of weaponry, clothing, furniture, potions, jewels, and gifts. You can start a family (or a few families, if you wish) who love and adore you and give you gifts, or you can just use them for personal gain.

Rock Band 2

I know I’m way behind the curve here, but I finally got myself a copy of Rock Band 2. I played it all night long to unlock “One Step Closer,”

then played for the rest of the week working on unlocking all the songs and finishing my solo career. I have finally *finished* the career in the since that I have beaten the “Rolling Stones Rock Immortal” setlist, but I do not yet have the 900 stars required for the Endless Setlist 2 (I have 707 so far, and I just need to keep completing setlists). All in all, I give RB:2 a 9.5/10 because it has great gameplay and great replay value. I was a little dissapointed that I cannot transfer the songs from my original Rock Band disc to Rock Band 2 without a way to connect my X-box to the internet and $5 worth of Microsoft Points or whatever it’s called… Also, the “Impossible Challenges” are not-so-impossible. The songs that make up the marathons are about as difficult as GH3’s “Raining Blood,” “Cliffs of Dover,” and the last half of “One.” I never failed any of them on Expert Guitar. Yeah, the setlist was most certainly difficult, especially as one has to play six songs in a row, and the fingers do turn to jelly about halfway through the sixth song. However, taken one or two at a time with a short break in between, the songs on the Impossible Challenges are relatively easy to beat. When I saw the words “Impossible Challenges” I was thinking along the lines of “Through the Fire and the Flames” and I must say I was a little dissapointed. Rock Band has never been as difficult on the Guitar as the Guitar Hero games, understandably, but I was still hoping for a little more of a challenge. I do have a challenge, however, in getting 5 stars on some of these songs, and it will most definately take me a while. I will continue to work on that, and once that gets boring, I’ll see about getting an internet connection for my X-Box so I can download more selections to play. I am looking forward to getting the Who’s album, as “Who Are You” is one of my top 10 favorite rock songs of all time–OH! and kudos to Harmonix for re-doing “Carry On Wayward Son.” I LOVE this song and I love the re-vamped chart for the guitar. The awesomeness factor of this one song almos makes up for the non-challenging Impossible Challenges. Some of my other favorites from the RB:2 selection are “In the Middle” by Jimmy Eat World, “Alive” by Pearl Jam, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol (I’d never really been into this song very much, I’d just heard it a few times on the radio and liked it), and, of course, “One Step Closer.” Harmonix definately beat Activision in their choice of a Linkin Park song, because “What I’ve Done” (On GH: World Tour) is waaaay too easy, even though it is a great song. “One Step Closer” is a bit more challenging, so one can enjoy the music and the note chart as well.

Rock Band Revisited

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten a chance to play RB2, but I did finally get a replacement disc for my Rock Band game. I played around on it today and got gold stars on 4 songs without really even trying. It’s so much easier on RB than on GH, because with GH if you miss just ONE note, you have to start all over. With Rock Band, it’s simply a matter of getting enough points (I think I heard somewhere that the requirement for Gold Stars is 1.5x the requirement for 5 stars) so if you can keep a 4x multiplier through most of the song, time your overdrive right, and whammy like a mad man, you can get Gold Stars easily! Anyways, I had a great time playing “Dead or Alive” with my little brother (He’s almost 10) and jammin out solo as well.