May 19, 2008

• Are you ready to rock?

  About a month ago, I was visiting a friend, and her boyfriend happened to have a copy of “Rock Band” for the XBox 360.  Now, I’ve never seen a reason to have another system, because I’ve always had more fun with the nintendo systems.  In fact, the only real gaem that I played on those systems was in the Halo series, because they were group games, a dynamic that Nintendo subscribes to heavily.  At teh same time, I never got into Guitar Hero, either.  I mean, I knew about it, but Nintendo never had it for the longest time, and I never had teh desire to buy it.

  Until now.

  Unfortunately, I seem to have caught a bug which will quickly lead to me purchasing a new gaming system.  And, even though the game is also coming out for the Wii, since it’s most mainstream on the other systems, it seems like the best idea is to get their stuff, since I can use that stuff on other people’s systems.  My only issue is that I need to choose between a PS3 and the Xbox 360, and I really just don’t want to spend money, but will sooner or later.  Fortunately, I’m thrifty (read: cheap), and try not to spend a dime unless I know that I am making the best decicion.  So, there’s research.

  The PS3 is an expensive system.  Good graphics, the newest of the three, and posesses the Blu-Ray reader, slayer of HD-DVD.  At the price it goes for, it’s one of the cheapest Blu-RAy player that you’re going to get, and it plays video games.

  On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the XBox 360.  It’s has a deeply rooted fan base, good online play, and it’s already familiar to me.  Plus, it was selling like hot cakes [use hotcakes link].  Much better than the Ps3.  However, Microsoft has stated that it ill not be making an external Blu-Ray player (they previously had an external HD-DVD player).  However, I have heard that they contracted an OEM vendor to develop one for them, so only time will tell.  If rumor becomes reality, they win.

  Now to just budget this out.  Either Way, the Rock Band set costs $150, but it has a lot of stuff, so that’s understandable.  For those of you that do’t know, the game has a guitar type controller, a drum set controller, and a microphone.  You can play by yourself with any of these, or you can get friends together and rock out.  Get a second guitar, and someone plays the bass in the game.  Here’s a video of a guy on he drums for Rock Band.  REalize that this guy is playing it on expert, and that you can start on easy, which doesn’t make you play ALL of the notes, and work your way up as you get better.

  Now, there’s just the issue of becoming addicted to it.  Here are two videos of a song from Guitar Hero 3 called Through the Fire and Flames.  This video is the song, in which someone had to program a computer to hit EVERY NOTE on expert.  (I can’t embed it because they disabled that option.)  There are 3722 notes, which means it requires a human to make than many movements with EACH HAND over the course of 8 minutes.  The video below is of a guy playing the same song.  He misses some notes, but as you can see, it’s pretty intense.

  Black 6, out.

  • 8:10 am
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