Friday, February 10, 2006

Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero won five awards at the Interactive Achievement Awards last night.
--Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
--Outstanding Achievement: Soundtrack
--Outstanding Achievement: Gameplay Engineering
--Outstanding Achievement: Game Design
--Family Game of the Year

That sounds about right. The only thing missing is The Best Damn Game Ever Made Award.

If you still haven't played Guitar Hero, I know what you're thinking: He's been talking about this game FOREVER. It can't possibly be that good.

Yes, it can be, I promise you, and I've got several hundred e-mails attesting to that.

I've passed 28 or 30 songs on Expert at this point. "Passing" just means that you finished the song without getting booed off the stage (three stars out of five, at a minimum). All I have left to pass Expert level is Bark at the Moon and Cowboys From Hell. Cowboys From Hell is just pure evil, with a terrific sequence to the song (much better than the Hard version), but it's fiendishly hard to even finish the opening riff, let alone get through the song. That was no surprise to me, though, since CFH on Hard difficulty also killed me, and Expert is considerably more complicated.

Bark at the Moon, though, is just pissing me off. What drives me crazy is that the riffs, in the first 60-70% of the song, at least, are not impossible to play--they're just blindingly fast. I see the sequences, my brain understands them, and I can play them with no problem, but I just can't sustain that kind of speed for the lenth of time the song requires. I've liked every version of this song, for some reason, and I like this version, but I just can't play it yet.

I've gone back to the Hard level to fill in, and I've gotten up to 22 out of 30 songs with at least 4 stars or better. The way that your brain rewires itself as you get better is just an amazing feeling.

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