What Video Games Are You Playing?

[RapscallionJones]

I got a little time with Rock Band on Saturday at my friend's place.  I have a burning need for this game and a couple of hours spent trying out all the instruments only intensified that need.  I'm almost convinced that I will have it for Christmas.

Guitar Hero players will be familiar with the formula.  The guitars and bass are almost identical.  They have changed the fret board up in the game a bit and the notes are now represented by colored bars.  You play them as you normally would.  Hammer ons and pull offs are represented by shorter bars which are a little difficult to distinguish in the heat of the moment.  The Strat also has five buttons way up on the neck that you press during solos.  You don't need to strum these and can just push them.  You can also use these to jam out during the big finish at the end of the song if the song lets you do so.  The strat, itself, also feels like a much more substantial instrument.  It's bigger and a little heavier.  The whammy bar has some resistance to it and there is also a switch to allow for effects like wah, chorus and ech (I think).  I tried them and never noticed the effect.

Vocally, I can't figure out how the game knows what you're doing.  It's obvious that part of the microphone is a tuner and you're judged based on how on-key you are.  The lyrics and pitch appear at the top of the screen and an arrow indicates whether you are sharp or flat.  Surprisingly, my big-ass self managed to turn out accurate performances of Wave Of Mutilation by The Pixies, Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Run To The Hills by Iron Maiden.  I've always managed to amaze people with my ability to mimic Bruce Dickinson since I'm tall and my voice is naturally deep.

The drums, however, are where this game shines.  I've played drums for nearly 18 years and have only minor gripes with the drum mechanic.  Played with the same idea as the guitar, you are prompted by the screen to hit the appropriately colored drum pad and kick the kick drum in time.  On easier difficulty settings, certain kicks are removed and fills are minimized but on hard and expert, you might as well be playing these songs on a real drum set.  My friends, each sitting in on a different instrument practically refused to play it due to the amount of coordination involved.  It's a very physical game when you're sitting at the drum set.

On the down-side, the pads are a little small and I found myself hitting the rim or missing altogether when watching the screen for the next beat.  I also can't tell you how many times I whacked the X button with the sticks when trying to hit a tom pad.  The other problem I had is that each pad is joined so you can't move them around to a comfortable position.  I understand this since the red pad doubles as a tom during fills and hats during the rhythm and the blue is sometimes a tom and sometimes a ride cymbal while the green pad is always a crash cymbal.  Also, I have to wonder what sort of a beating these things can take.  I play kick with my heel off the floor like you're supposed to so each kick came crashing down hard.  I imagine that that thing eventually will crap out from abuse.  I also naturally play hard, so the pads took a beating, too.  Even trying to rein it in and take it easy became difficult since I would get carried away in the heat of the moment or spaz out trying to catch a beat before it slipped by and wound up smacking the pad/pedal REALLY hard.  At $80 for the drum set, this damn thing could become a serious investment.

The set list is the usual give and take of other Guitar Hero games.  I like much of it but there is a lot of stuff that I just couldn't care less for (mostly falling into the 90's category) as I don't like the songs and the note charts didn't make up for it with intricate fingering or crazy drum work.  When you're Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and your entire purpose was to strip down rock to a simpler performance, it doesn't make much for fun playing, but the inclusion of these songs was more or less a crowd pleaser as Harmonix has always strived to make something for everyone.  So I guess I should stop b***hing about how boring playing Sabotage on EVERY instrument is.  You can't win 'em all, but like I said, there's something for everyone and with DLC coming down at their promised weekly interval, that window is about to widen even more.  With a punk pack and single song options, I'm hoping for something genuinely goofy like a death/black metal pack with crazy blast beats on the drums the necessity for guttural grunts in f**ked With A Knife by Cannibal Corpse songs and shrieky black metal vocals in I Am The Black Wizards by Emperor, though I know this will NEVER happen.

Though I only had a couple of hours with it and I was stuck on drums most of the time, itching to shred all of these songs on Expert with the guitar, I think Harmonix has done it again.  It may never usurp Guitar Hero as the new-wave bar game that it's becoming, but it is the ultimate party game for people unafraid to kick out the jams on mic and flail like an idiot on the drums.

[Mr. DS]

Thanx for the review on Rock Band.  My mother in law just picked it up today for my father in law's birthday and I was wondering how it was. 

[Torgo]

I just started playing through the .hack (pronounced dot hack) games on the PS2.

Gamestop had a buy 2 get 1 free sale going on this past weekend so I got the 1st 4 games and the the 3 G.U. games (along with Grandia 3 and Valkyrie Profile 2) this past weekend for not that much money compared to what they are still going for new.

[Mr. DS]

As covered by RapscallionJones, I figured I'd chime in on Rock Band seeing I just spent three hours straight playing it.  Overally I am quite impressed with the format.

The drums are just frickin' awesome. Sorry for lack of a better adjective buts thats all I can used to describe them.  There was a ton of people there tonight and everyone was fighting to play them.  Luckily I had a decent tiral run on "easy" mode and I think I'm pretty much read to advance to medium.  Hard mode will have to wait.

I can't say however that I really dig the guitar.  I'm used to shredding away at the Guitar Hero controller which I'm happy to say worked with my father in law's Xbot 360.  Perhaps I need more time with it.  It seems to be subtible for bass performance but I'm a little leary on using it on hard mode for advance performances.  I have heard that people are having major problems with the unit breaking as well.

The vocals are pretty much like Karaoke Revolution, for those who have played it.  I burnt my voice out tonight singing.

Perhaps my utlitmate favorite thing is the "free style" modes in which you can just simply bang away at the drums or shred on the guitar.  It was the cause of much laughter in the house. 

Overall, I'd say I'll be back for more. 

 

[Jack]

I was playing Defender on the PS2, it was a pretty fun game once you upgraded to the "ratchet cannon" that had automatic tracking capability.  Got to one level where I got killed about 30 times, can't imagine how I'll make it past.  One thing that ticks me off is that I purchased an extra life for my ship, but when I turned the game off and restarted it the next day, my extra life was gone and so was the money I used to pay for it. 

Now I'm working on Rogue Ops.  Not terribly fun.  One of those games where I wander around for 20 minutes, have no idea what to do, then I check the walkthrough, go "Good grief, I would have never thought of doing that!" then repeat over and over.  I'm hoping that once I get farther into it I'll get better at it, but I dunno.  I've played vastly superior games, I'll tell ya that.  These stealth missions are nothing but sneaking around, having someone spot you, then having to start over. 

[KYGOTC]

Im playing Super Smash Brothers Melee. Does anyone know how to wave-dash?

[Mofo Rising]

I'm currently playing Mass Effect.  If you liked Knights of the Old Republic, you'll like Mass Effect.  It's pretty much the same game with a retooled combat system and no Star Wars.  I'm really enjoying the game, but it doesn't seem very innovative.  It is amazing how much more enjoyable conversation trees are with their new play mechanic, though.  It's no Leisure Suit Larry, but it'll do.

[Torgo]

I just got around to finally finishing the 1st Shin Megami Tensi: Digital Devil Saga game for the PS2 last night and I'm going to start playing through the 2nd one tonight.

I've given up on Odin Sphere for the time being. Too hard, too repetitive and too frustrating.

[indianasmith]

I played ROME: TOTAL WAR for a couple of weeks and got kinda bored with it, so I went back to Oblivion and created a new character, a Breton Nightblade, with some pretty awesome destructive magic skills.  I am only about level 5 right now, and just got killed for the first time . . . by a stupid wild boar.  Dumb pigs do a lot of damage, and fireballs don't take them down very fast!

[Ash]

Well, I went through BioShock three times and there are only two endings.

If you harvest even one little sister, you get the "bad ending".
If you don't harvest any of them, you get the "good ending".

Turns out that the supposed third ending was just a rumor.

And Skaboi, you were right about the end boss fight.
The first time I faced Fontaine, I went in with super long health and Eve bars both maxed out.
9 health packs and 9 Eve hypos.
I used two health packs and no Eve hypos to beat him.
Talk about easy!

[AnubisVonMojo]

Been hopping back and forth between Super Mario Galaxy, Godzilla: Unleashed, and The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Just beat Hit & Run and have been going back to the early levels to get 100% completion. My biggest complaint about Godzilla: Unleashed? Not only do you have to purchase the other monsters, but a number of them need to be unlocked by achieving certain conditions in the game that you have to figure out for yourself unless you cheat by looking up a FAQ online... that, and some of the levels have no real objective and will just end in seemingly random fashion!

Check out my review if anybody's interested: ToA Review: Godzilla Unleashed

[Jack]

I'm almost done with Rogue Ops.  Very, very mediocre game.  There's just nothing original about it, all the environments look like stuff you've seen in ten other games, you won't do anything in this game that you haven't done in other games, etc.  The combat isn't especially fun either, the guns don't have any auto-aim feature which just makes it more time consuming and guarantees you'll get killed and have to restart more times.  And it's just so confusing.  You get a "fly cam", which is a camera on a bug that you fly around.  It's a pain in the butt to control, and you won't use it for 10 hours or so, then all of a sudden you're supposed to spot some small hole way up on the top of a wall and know that you should fly the fly cam through it.   

Looking forward to stating Resident Evil 4, I've been saving it for those long, cold winter nights and they're certainly here now 

[Mofo Rising]

Well, I went through BioShock three times and there are only two endings.

If you harvest even one little sister, you get the "bad ending".
If you don't harvest any of them, you get the "good ending".

Turns out that the supposed third ending was just a rumor.

***SPOILER***

I checked out the bad ending online, because I didn't want to play through the game again just to see it. Apparently there is a bad ending, where the doctor is very angry, and a bad-but-not-so-bad ending where the it's the same cinema, the same lines, but the doctor reads them not quite so angrily. So the good ending and then two almost the same bad endings.

[CheezeFlixz]

We've got about a ba-zillion games on Nintendo NES, SNES, 64 and WII, Playstation 2 and others but I keep finding myself going back to the good old PC game Civilization III or IV with the 1000's of mod you can get for them. Been playing it since Civ I ... I'm addicted to it.

[KYGOTC]

Im almost done with Super Paper Mario. Im in the last dungon.