kabael

Trying to be quieter for my neighbors downstairs (despite the loud assholes upstairs), Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead have clearly taken a toll on my drumming.

After only an hour and a half of playing fast songs my arms are already a bit tired.

You weak fool!

• search frequency for songs & bands announced for Rock Band DLC from the announcement through a few weeks after release
• sales figures for multiple stores (online and CD) for the same bands during the same period
• sales of the individual tracks for the first few weeks
• play frequency within the game itself for the same period

I would be very interested in seeing those plotted out against each other. Very interested indeed.

Apparently as part of a promotion they're giving away thousands of free DLC packs.

My sooper-awesome drum set arrived the other day. After a brief adventure, I got it hope today and then spent the next few hours setting it up.

Shit ain't no simply task. And it's for those big-boy audio plugs that make you feel like you're not playing with a toy anymore. Which I guess I'm not, since it's a "real electronic drum kit" and everything.

A million nobs, screws and bolts later, it was assembled and solid as a rock, but lacking a convenient place to store my sticks, sadly.

It's pretty much amazing. The pads are both bouncing and rock solid and the cymbals are fun, but I suspect it's going to take quite a while to get used to. Currently I basically just suck as I keep losing my sticks and hitting the frame.

I'm also very concerned about the kick pedal. It's a pretty darn sensitive mechanic switch (with a pretty weak spring-back) but there is no padding at all on it, so it slams into the floor. I have to figure out some novel way to deal with that before I start playing with any regularity.

Putting a towel underneath it is ghetto. So of course that's what I'm doing now. Harumph.

So the Rock Holiday has come to an end. Two days of Rock Band 2 came to an end with a predictable preempting of our normally scheduled D&D game, but I won't complain too much, we did eventually get to "Aqualung" and I got to sing it and it totally rocked.

We ended up ranked pretty high on a few songs - in the top 50 or 100 for a large number of songs. We got number 2 on one song, though I can't remember which. Those positions of glory shall be enjoyed while they last, before more people who are better than us get around to actually playing those songs and bumping us off the charts.

My shepherd's pie was also a bit hit, which pleases me.

Right now, though, I am completely wiped and exhausted. My arms, hands, feet, face... everything is drained and a wee bit sore. I have a headache and the aftertaste of Twizzlers won't leave my mouth.

It was a good weekend.

So I basically played Rock Band 2 all goddamn day.

We got were in "line" around 8:30 am but there wasn't really any wait, not too many other people were at the store to pick it up. We then grabbed breakfast and heading back to gamescribe's place to find out that our band name (Crusty Jugglers) was already taken. We solved this by adding "The" to it. Still crazy-ass. Most everyone else recovered their gamertags and made characters - which later came to back to bite us in the ass when it turned out that we'll have to ditch and re-create all those characters since you can't transfer them out of a gamertag or something.

Anyway, we played for the whole day and I'm tired as hell with a banging headache. I'm more drained than when we did the same shit with Rock Band 1, prolly 'cause we're playing on such higher difficulty now.

Some highlights include "Everlong" being just about the best song ever on both drums and guitar (seriously, all fucking kinds of holy shit), having to sing and play bass on "Spoonman" to get through the song, and "Let There Be Rock" sucking complete balls on drums (boring as fuck and long as hell).

The new drum set is awesome and I've love to comment on the guitars but they hadn't arrived yet. I think my Ion kit has already shipped. With any luck it'll arrive at work within the next few days and I'll have that to play around with. The new interface is also great, though I'm not sure how convenient it'll be in single-player and there are still some snags. Big step forward, though.

We all took tomorrow off from work to cointinue the game (at this rate, we might "beat" it), and I made a ton of shepherd's pie yesterday for the feedings. It will be great.

Now for the important question, however: what the hell do I name my band? I had Surprise! Butt Saxons and T-Rex on Bass as my serious bands before. I think I might need to go some Nathan Barley, but I know I want to keep my band members: Leonidas, WretchedHarmony and Purr Cussin (who I need to actually put some effort into customizing this time around).

All in all, lovin' it.

I'm officially over the edge now.

I finally went and pre-ordered the insane Drum Rocker deluxe Rock Band drum kit.

I really, really hope someone puts out some happy little drivers for the beast so I can hook it up to my computer and don't need to shell out another $300+ to get a drum brain so I can pretend I actually know how to use a drum set.

Awesome. I've been wanting Pandora or last.fm to do something like this for a while now.

Rock Band 2 Radio

Today we are pleased to announce a cool partner integration with Gamespot for their Rockband 2 launch center. Gamespot has setup Last.fm radio with the ability to play songs from the game (so you can start getting warmed up :). They will be updating their station with new songs that show up in weekly download section of Rockband 2.

So another set of drums arrived yesterday and I finally got a chance to try it out today. It's amazing - by far the best drum kit I've used for Rock Band yet. And not just 'cause it actually works.

It's much bouncer than my old set, much more give and spring-back. It feels like foam or soft rubber, not a thin later of rubber over plastic. It makes for a much, much easier play, though i suspect you might not notice it much unless you're a complete drum-obsessed nut like me.

If the Rock Band 2 drum set is like this - and if this proves more durable than old designs - there will be a lot of happy pretend drummers out there.

Goddamn I wanna drum some Tool in Rock Band right now.

Every time I hear it I just can't stop moving.

Yellow pad.

Broken.

Again.

That'll make 5 times now (+1 busted kick pedal I had to fix myself).

Grr. Rock Band 2 better have the better, more durable drums.

Looks like I had another breakthrough on drumming - I'm now down to only 3 songs I can't do on hard difficulty: "Run to the Hills," "Blinded by Fear" and "Hammerhead." I managed to at least get through everything else.

I beat "Perfect Drug" on hard (5 stars!)! And "Thrasher" and "D.O.A." and "Blackened" and "Ride the Lightening" as well! I managed to get through the rest of the final tier on hard the other day when honyakunoteki was over. A lot of it was much easier than I had expected.

I cleared out a few more songs on expert mode as well, getting through "Reptilia" with less trouble than I had expected (though "Epic" is still too much) and then doing several unlockable songs ("Nightmare," "I'm So Sick" and "Time We Had").

Aside from the rush of beating "Perfect Drug," beating "A Clean Shot" on expert was definitely the best part of the day (took me several times to keep from hitting my sticks together and sending one flying). Check out the note stream

Today was definitely a good day to break and head home early. Did I mention I'm giddy and exhausted with drum excitement?

My replacement kick-pedal has arrived and I can't wait to go home and install it.

Though... I must admit I was expect something a bit more... involved for $30. It's just two metal plates and a plastic strip that serves as the new hinge. Not what I was expecting.

We'll see how this works out.

So yeah, the response I got from EA customer support was basically "I am the supervisor. I'll forward your comments along to management with everything else in my usual report, but don't expect any kind of actual response. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Here's hoping my metal repair kit arrives from Amazon realsoonnow so I can get back on the drums. I'm reaching the end of my guitar skills, i think - I failed out for the first time on hard on "Flirtin' with Disaster"

Everyone knows that Rock Band had more than its fair share of hardware issues out of the game. Everyone I know had to send in at least one instrument. I'm on my third guitar and my fourth drum kit myself.

Lots of people cried foul about it, but I didn't mind that much because EA was backing the game up with a very solid return policy. If it ain't workin', we'll send you a replacement and you ship the busted one back to us (with very few questions asked). It was a very generous and forward-thinking policy. It certainly gave me a great feeling of good will towards the company and managed to further reinforce my loyalty.

The honeymoon period of the "unstated lifetime warranty" is over, however. The policy has now changed to "only within 60 days of purchase."

I can understand why the corporation would want to do this - all those replacement units and all that free shipping couldn't have been cheap - but it still isn't really right.

Arguments of "the instruments are as sturdy as they can be at that price point" aside, it's widely acknowledged that both the drums and guitars had several significant issues. Harmonix and EA did a great job of refining and improving the instrument designs as time went on, shipping new instruments with games and sending replacements to early adopters. From what I understand, issues and replacements have dropped off significantly as updated models were sent out.

That's exactly how things should be. No one can reasonable expect Harmonix to design perfect, invulnerable instruments or to get all the kinks worked out right out of the gate. A continual refine & replace policy was great.

And switching to a "60-days only" policy is fine - once you've worked out all those kinks and sent replacements to everyone. But I'm not sure that Harmonix has fixed all the issues with the drums yet and I was still using my original kick pedal when it snapped in half, so now I'm SOL with EA's enforcement of the stated warranty policy.

I'm not calling for anyone's head on a pike here, but I am criticizing EA's enforcement of the policy. If this was a soft policy - it's what's stated on the web site but customer service reps have the power to make exceptions for angry customers with reasonable stories. You can cut out a lot of the people getting a free ride but still take care of the people with real problems.

Not very happy about this. I've gone and bought a third-party metal replacement from a seller on Amazon and I'm trying to escalate the issue through EA's customer support until I can speak with a supervisor and see what kind of leniency they are willing to provide. That will determine how much of their good will EA retains.

I still love this game, but it potentially just got a hell of a lot more expensive. And I hope that EA unclenches if they release any new peripherals down the road.

Kinda.

I did a burst of updates on The Hyper Culture

• What's been keeping me busy: cons, work  Rock Band
• The Skull Man: a surprisingly good BONES show, though not without some failings
• I officially gave up on Hatenkou Yuugi
• and I rant about parents blaming video games for everything. Stop taking the games away from the kids and start playing them with the kids and they'll turn out fine.

I'm now even more of a Rock Band nerd.

It started with a real guitar strap. Then practice drumsticks. Then a mic stand.

Now I have a real drum throne.


I figure piece by piece, eventually I'll have a real drum set or something.


(posted over at The Hyper Culture as well - which reminds me - does anyone know of a god Mac tool to post to mulitple blogs at once? I've seen a few of my friends do it when they duplicated/migrated blogs, but I had little luck in finding anything that seemed simple.)