Tag Archives: rock band 2

3 Weeks Remain

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The long four day weekend was mostly spent on one of two things: Rock Band 2 and setting up for projects. And the Rock Band 2 stopped as soon as I completed the game in solo guitar mode. And no, I didn’t count the Endless Setlist… unless I can get 3 other kids to go all out for hours and hours on end.

This weekend was a blur. I don’t remember much of it. A lot of late night talks with Dean didn’t help the project progress, but was beneficial. As a sidenote, he’s my third impromptu roommate after I started living solo (I guess I should count that Jong-Sun kid, because he was over constantly, so four).

Moving on, I’m hoping to get the whole development environments set up tonight. It seems like my forearms aren’t even happy about my typing this entry. We’ll see if I’ll sleep happy or not.

Summary Of Said Weekend

I have these artifacts as evidence to the caffeinated stupor I was in.

The Six Cans of the Apocalypse

Remember, the green one’s the most tasty.

But yeah, working ’til the week hours of the night/morning, I popped on the sysadmin hat and rocked out. Finally after having installed MediaWiki (it’s a little slow, I need something faster… any suggestions?), I started to document the insanity.

I bought a new”er” slice at slicehost. I love how close to the metal all of the insanity is. I finally got to see how Derek worked his magic during the days of StatusFix… er… more like I copied and pasted commands, all the while man paging everything that went past my eyes. Lots to learn and screw up on so that I’ll learn even more.

Still need to work on Capistrano deployment from the git repository. Hoping to get this done tonight. Still not sure where I should be developing… should I be using my computer for both dev and test? Hmm.

Lots to chew this week. But indeed, only three weeks remain.

Rock Band 2 Is Going To Eat Me Alive

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Harmonix, you brilliant purveyor of delicious time “occupying” goodness.

You guessed it, it came. Even though I read all these horror stories about Amazon being bad on game pre-orders, I knew my Store In The Clouds would provide.

I’ve been able to tear myself from this amazing gaming development feat to bring you this quick review of the whole shebang.

  • While I had owned and played through the Wii version of the game, I don’t really have a good reference point to compare it with its first revision, since the Wii dropped a lot of features. The lack of DLC as well as character creation/editing might have really angered some Wii owners, but it didn’t mind me.
    • DLC: I was fine with getting them in disc form. Heck, I could just rent them using Gamefly anyway. And besides, I love sightreading songs: It gives me quite the rush. (I guess I could have somehow threw in some pun with Rush, but I refrained.)
    • Character Creation: Funner than I imagined. I just like to play the songs, but being able to play dress up… but most importantly the guitars. I might find this more fun because I’m currently in the market for my first electric guitar, though.
  • The UI is slick. I love the revamped song selection screen. I might estimate that you can now see twice as many songs or more, with even more information on difficulty of the song across all instruments. Having the album art also helps to identify the song. If I feel nerdy enough, I’ll tear through this UI.
  • HOPOs (Hammer On’s and Pull Off’s) seem much more responsive than Rock Band “1″. But I feel this way about Guitar Hero 3′s ease of HOPOing vs GH1 and GH2′s near impossibility of it. I kinda prefer more ridiculous fretboarding than strumming: Makes me feel more like a rock star.
  • Song Selection: I like. I feel like there were more contemporary songs that I knew in RB2 than RB1. And with DLC, I’ll be able to pick and choose. As always, a couple songs will piss me off, but that’s expected.
  • Nintpicking, do you actually gain a tiny tiny bit of Overdrive as you whammy through a sustained white note while already being in Overdrive?? I don’t think this was the case in Rock Band 1, where your Overdrive bar would not increase or decrease.

Okay, that’s that. I hope to not touch this game until my drums arrive. I haven’t said a word about playing Rock Band 1, though… time to go unlock some Achievements.

What An Achievement Whore.

I know. And I just found out today Stack Overflow has badges, rewarding users for active usage of the system. So very interesting. Feels a little gimmicky, but hey, still a cool idea. Does anyone know if Atwood and Spolsky explained the reasoning behind this feature on their podcast? Can someone point me to it?

Okay, Back To The Verk Verk.