Extreme Progress [GH]

I’m amazed at how far I’ve made it when it comes to my skills as a Guitar Hero player. Just over a year ago I was struggling to beat ‘Beast and the Harlot’ on Expert, and now I’ve almost beat TTFATF. I have 5 stars on every song in Career Mode on Expert, save but two songs: Raining Blood (4 stars), and Number of the Beast (4 stars). I just can’ t seem to get the last few points necessary for 5 stars on those songs! I also have trouble with some of the bonus songs, TTFATF not included either! For instance, “The Way It Ends” is REALLY hard… I haven’t beaten that on either… All in all, though, I’m pretty impressed with my own skill, and am suprised that I got so good with so little effort. Most people I play with think that I practice for hours every day, but I really only play 4-5 songs just for the fun of it most of the time! On Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, I have 5 stars on every expert song, and I’m not sure about GH2, cos my little brothers broke the disc… again. I’m getting ANOTHER copy tomorrow after I get my paycheck lol…

GH: World Tour

I haven’t gotten to play World Tour much, but I like what I see. My friend got GH:WT for Christmas, but only has the Guitar, so I stopped by his house to play it for about an hour. They’ve got a [i]big[/i] selection of songs to play and all of them are great. The slide bar is hard to master and I haven’t gotten the hang of it. I like the new feature where sometimes there is a sustained note with other notes you have to play while keeping the first sustained, as well as the fact that GH followed Rock Band with the ability to gain Star Power while you already have Star Power activated. Expert has moved up a notch on many songs, thanks to the addition of the slidebar, and I think it will be quite a while before a large majority of players have very many 5 star performances on the harder songs! I can’t wait to play it more and would love to try out the drum set.

Combat Arms

Nexon enters the First Person Shooter scene with Combat Arms. It has several maps, each different from the rest, and a unique weapons system: You use GP you gain from matches to buy weapons in the shop, but the items expire after a set amount of time and you can purchase a weapon for 1 day, 1 week, or 3 months. Some items can’t be purchased until the player reaches a certain rank. Players rank up by gaining EXP points in combat. There are several play modes: In “One Man Army” anyone is free game to kill, it’s everyone versus everyone. In “Elimitation”, two teams fight against each other to reach a certain goal of kils (Anywhere from 30 to 140). In “Capture the Flag”, the point is obviously to capture the opponent’s flag and bring it back to your own. In “Spy Hunt” everyone starts out as allies and three intel cases are spread accross the map. As soon as someone touches an intel case, they become an enemy and everyone is out to kill them. The object of the game is to obtain all THREE cases at once, and when this happens, the player with the cases becomes a “super spy.” He gets a whopping 500 armor points, a Gatling Gun, a Flamethrower, and an extremely souped up rocket launcher. I’m not too sure about “Search and Destroy” but I believe the point is to plant a bomb in the opponent’s base. Since it’s a Nexon game, there are obviously many hackers, as there is a public Cham hack that’s easy to find if you looked hard enough. There are hackers in almost every match, and since the Cham hack is impossible to prove (Without a confession from the hacker, or a screenshot of the HACKER’s screen), few of the hackers get punished. There’s also an “OPK” hack, which puts all of the opponents on one spot so that the hacker can easily kill them all with a knife, but that’s considered “VIP” and typically has to be paid for. In short: Combat Arms is a great game to play if you want to hack!

Crankin it up on Hard: Guitar Hero II

I recently got GH2 for the X-Box 360. I breezed through Expert, finishing up the career with 5 stars on 31/48 songs. I went through on Hard, and I got 5 stars on all the career mode songs (Though it took me about 7 tries to get 5 stars on Psychobilly Freakout. I’m not working on Easy and Medium, getting 100% Gold Star rating on all of the songs, then I’ll return to Expert to attempt getting as many 5 star ratings as possible (I want to unlock that log guitar!). I heard from a friend that a Guitar Hero player is considered “Pro” when he can get a 5 star rating on over half of the songs on Expert, and since 31 is definately more than half (24), I guess I’m pro… Lol. However, I can’t confirm that as a fact, although it makes sense to me. Anyways, I’ll continue honing my skills and hopefully, I’ll one day master the only song on GH2 that I can’t beat on Expert…: Jordan!

Practicing TTFATF

I’ve been practicing Through the Fire and the Flames on Expert lately on GHIII on my X-Box 360. I’m still having alot of trouble getting the intro nailed down, my fingers just can’t seem to move fast enough. Once, I taped down the green button and made it through the intro only to fail 89% of the way through the song… <.< I know the tape is cheating but I’d like to be able to complete it at least once :P

Halo 3

Totally. Awesome. Game. My brother got an XBOX 360 for Christmas, along with Halo 3. Yeah, the campaign is short as heck, but the multiplayer offers almost infinite opportunity. Every time we have friends over they’re like “You have Halo 3!?” And then we get into a big rocket-match or a swordfight or fight for the Oddball for hours on end. I’m not that great of a player myself, I tend to come in last, although I am a pretty good team member and can hold my own in 2 v 2 matches. Even with my lack of Halo skills, I have a ton of fun, and enjoy yelling at the kid sitting next to me whenever I get killed by a head-shot right after I respawned from assassanation. Then there’s always those moments when I get an amazingly spectacular kill and my friends are like “How did you do that?!” I’d definately recommend this game to any fool person who hasn’t gotten it yet. Unless you’re not into the First Person Shooter genre. Even if you aren’t, it’s good to have to play with your buddies on occasion.

New Record!

This past Christmas, I got a DIY cube set, including pieces to build a cube, stickers, and cube lube, a liquid that comes in a dispenser that resembles a hyperdermic needle. This lube greatly decreases the friction between the individual “Cubies” that make up the Rubik’s Cube, therefore increasing turning speed. I applied some of this cube lube to my cube. At first, my solving time increased because I overshot my turns and messed up alot. After a while, I got used to the lubrication and started getting better again. The other day, my friends at my lunch table challenged me to solve it as fast as possible, and I ended up with 47 seconds, which obviously wrecks the previous time of 1:02.

MapleStory: My Anti-drug

Or rather, my drug. It’s just one of those games that, once you allow yourself to get hooked, you can’t stop playing. The call is too strong to resist. I have recently gotten an iPod, and I subscribed to a MapleStory podcast, Aqua Road Radio. After listening for a while, I decided to give MapleStory another go, despite the difficulties I’ve talked about in earlier posts. I’ve started on the Khaini server (I used to play Bera, but I’ve gotten fed up with it) as a Rogue. I’ve only gotten to level 10 in the past few days, because I’m a very busy guy with work and school and all. I was fighting mushrooms in Kerning, trying to save up for a garnier so I could throw stars and do more damage. I had 1.5k mesos and the garnier costs 3k. On top of that, a set of 500 throwing stars costs 500 mesos. I would have to make a total of 2k more just to get a weapon set. And I could forget about armor. Anyways, as I was training, this level 20+ magician chick uses this NX cash item that makes a card frame pop up around the user. Apparently, this was some kind of test, because her Priest bf said something to the effect of “He passed the noob test.” The chick said that she figured I have a main. I replied that I had a main and went on to describe my Maple troubles. I got the usual reply of “That sux,” but the priest gave me 30k. Awesome. So now, I have a completely decked out level 10 rogue, and I’m all set and ready to go. Hopefully, before the 2008-2009 school year begins (sometime during the summer) I can get to the third job as a Hermit. If anyone wants to chat with me in game, my character is RockmanStar of the Khaini server. I’ll probably be posting more about this as I go along.

My GHIII Experience

I got Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the Nintendo Wii five days after it came out. I launched straight into Hard mode (I’d had plenty of experience on GHII though I never owned the game… I can play expert on GHII) to unlock all of the songs. In a couple of hours, I’d beaten all of the songs except “Raining Blood” by Slayer, and the battle against Lou of course. So, frustrated, I played at it over and over. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get past the part I was stuck at (Mosh I). So, to vent some steam, I played through Career Mode on Medium to unlock the ultimate goal: “Through the Fire and the Flames” by DragonForce. Finally unlocking this song, I foolishly thought I could beat it on Hard. I failed miserably at 2%. I toned it down to Medium and made it through with only three stars. Sad. Next, I played on Easy, and let me say, if anyone capable of playing hard doesn’t get five stars on TTFATF, they need to go beat their heads into a wall and stay there… Anyways, I practiced some more, but still couldn’t beat “Raining Blood” on Hard. I decided to give TTFATF another shot and went into practice mode to nail the intro. Let’s just say I still haven’t quite “nailed” it, but I can play through it without failing. At the end of the song, I was sweating like no tomorrow. Playing difficult songs takes alot out of you!

 Overall Review of GHIII:

 I enjoyed the gameplay. Guitar Hero III has a great blend of classics and newer music, ranging from “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ‘N Roses to “Miss Murder” by AFI. They’ve even got Slipknot (“Before I Forget”) and Metallica (“One”)! I have to say, they didn’t have very many of what we would call Rock Anthems like GHII did. There’s nothing as classic as “Carry On Wayward Son” on the set list, and all of the Extra songs are foreign to me (as in I’ve never heard of band nor song before). The online battle function is pretty much awesome, though on the Wii it’s rather hard to find a match. Overall, I’d give Guitar Hero III four stars. I know I’ve still got plenty of enjoyment to squeeze out of the game.

Guitar Hero

I first heard of Guitar Hero when I went to a gaming party at my local library. One look at it and my mind was made up: It was stupid. When they asked me to try it out, I refused to go near it. I went instead to surf the internet on roleplaying sites the whole night.

 At the next gaming party, I went straight for it. For half the night, I stayed on, undefeated by any challenger. Of course, they weren’t very good and I wasn’t really that great. I thought I was awesome, because I could beat any song from the first five sets on medium.

 The reason for this being that my neighbor, who is always over at my house, acquired the Guitar Hero II game and had gotten hooked on it. He showed me and got me to play a couple of times, and I couldn’t put the controller down. Ever since then, every time I get the chance, I play it.  I’m now at the Expert difficulty level, but I’m stuck on the song “Rock This Town.” Guitar Hero II is another very addicting game, and I’m hooked on it as much as I am the Rubik’s Cube.