X-Day

Update: There won’t be a dashboard system update to our 360’s after this XBL down time, but it is a preparation for it, but our Xbox’s will not be updated till later this fall.

Today Xbox Live is offline for entire day, while they update everything, and soon our Xbox 360’s will be updated with the new system dashboard update that might turn our beloved Xbox 360’s into Wii’s.  This is your last day to enjoy how your 360 runs and operates.

Another shitty thing is watching any videos or movies you may have that are encoded with mpeg4. The codec that was introduced almost a year ago requires you to be online Xbox live for the codec to acctually work. Lame.

Things we can look forward too but will probably never use:

1. Avatars.  This is still a gimic, and most games play already have thier own main character.  My Rock Band chick is hawt. If I wanted avatars I’d play Second Life.  Oh wait….
2. Netflix. Something else I’ll never use.  They talked about how you can “share” a movie with your friends over xbox live, but everyone has to be a netflix subscriber to even watch a “shared” movie. So what’s the point then? What do you think Bit Torrent is for?
3. New dashboard. Microsoft will also be “borrowing” from Apple giving you a page-flipping type interface replacing the “blades” we got so used to. Hopefully this will help in nagivating the HUGE massive library on Xbox Live, and marketplace. The biggest problem is acctually finding stuff you’re intrested in with the current interface.  So little room, big text that takes forever to scroll down so you can read the whole discription.
4. I hope I don’t brick!  No doubt some people’s Xbox’s will brick for no reason after the update. So don’t mod your Xbox! Thank gawd I bought a service contract for my 360 which has been a gawd-send since my units have RRoD’ed three times, plus an optical disc failure too.

Rock Band 2 still rocking!

I just discovered something cool with my new Rock Band 2 Guitar.  I was trying to plug in my headset into the guitar, but the jack at the bottom of the guitar (if you’re right handed) I found was too large for the headset jack. So it turns out that this larger jack is for expansion peripherals like the new RB2 drum set has. After finding the headset jack on my guitar, I was still wondering what is this connector jack for then?  I looked at the jack, and then looked over at my drum set (i still have the original drum set) and I looked at the bass drum pedal’s connector. The kick drum pedal FITS into the guitar’s expansion jack!  So I fired up a song, and wanted to see what it did.  It doesn’t whammy long notes, but once you get enough overdrive power it will activate overdrive!  woot!  Something I’ve been wanting since Guitar Hero 2.

Problem is, the cord on this is way too short, and it often will pull out when you’re standing.  You can probably over stretch the coiled cable to help overcome this, but it’s easier to just sit down with the guitar with the pedal under your foot.  It’s also a simple ½inch jack you can probably use an extension cable on.

Also the Fender head stalk is removable now on the new RB2 guitar. Has a little button to unlock it so you can pull it off. The original RB2 fenders weren’t easily removed.  Not like it really does anything, and I’m not even sure why it was detachable on the original RB guitars.  It only saves about 6 inches in length for the box to be shipped in.  But then again the GH3 Les Paul has a detachable neck, which comes detached when you get it new, but the retail box you buy it in is still a yard long.  So go fig.

I also just did the Bachman Turner Award Achievement in RB2, this is the one where you keep overdrive burning for 90 seconds. I thought this was going to be a hard achievement to do but it’s not. You do need two people in your band, so it can’t be done solo.  It can be done over XBL and it doesn’t matter what difficulty players use, but you do need to hit all the overdrive phrases, so you might want to do this on hard or medium.  With a guitarist and a bass player with the song “Dani California” play the song till you’re both filled with overdrive power and then have one activate it and each player alternates deploying their overdrive overlapping each others overdrive. You must overlap your overdrive or it breaks the clock to zero, so keep an eye on your partner’s overdrive meter so you’ll know when to activate yours.  The only problem is you won’t know if you did the 90 seconds untill the song is over; unless you had someone keep track with a stopwatch or something.  It’s not one of those instant achievements that pop up the monent you do it.

My new Stratocaster

I finally got the new Rockband2 guitar. Wireless, yay! It even came with batteries! It is a big improvement over the old strato, the neck seems thicker from front to back, but still seems paper thin compared to my GH3 Les Paul.  Yeah the faux wood, and fire burst looks cool. My biggest concern was the strum bar and whammy bar.  I’ve have used four other stratos and three of them had bad whammy bars where the spring breaks off and it no longer springs back.  The ones I got back from the RMA they still felt crappy, and some had noisy springs, and the whammy bar it self would slam against the body of the guitar. Others had what sounded like loose bits inside of it when you shook it, and I hated the mushy strum bar.

The new Strato is much better.  The whammy feels a bit more solid, and you don’t feel the spring squeaking and rubbing as you whack the whammy bar, and it doesn’t touch the body of the guitar as you go all the way down with it.  What they did with the strum bar was they shorted the “throw” of the strum bar. It still doesn’t CLICK like the Guitar Hero guitars do, but it no longer has that mushy feel that you haven’t moved it all the way.  Now it stops cold when you strum it up or down and it feels like you hit the note proper.

The auto-calibration isn’t really that great for me.  Audio calibration works fine, and I was amazed I had a 2ms lag time, which is barely noticeable anyway.  The video calibration was a problem, while it was able to calibrate, watching the green progress bar grow every time the screen flashed, it continued to say it couldn’t get a reliable reading from the guitar when it was done.  Seemed fine to me, and the calibration was ZER0ms. The real thing is to test this on my friends system who I KNOW has a lag delay on his surround sound (all surround sound system do!!), but he keeps insisting it doesn’t, and I know this since I keep missing notes on really simple songs that have a long rhythmic set of the same notes or chords (not rapid ones) and I’m always off, fucking up the song.  This should prove I’m right!

So WHERE the fuck is the juke-box mode on Rock Band 2?  If you leave the game on the main title screen where it asks you to press start, all it does is play that intro video (which I’m sick of now), and then it usually it’s plays a partal song of AC/DC’s “Let there be rock” and repeats.  Doesn’t change the song unless you restart the game.  Where the hell is the juke box mode so I listen to all this music I have (about 250 grand total) with out having to actually play it each time?

Spore a bit of a bore

I’ve only got into the first couple stages, but by the time I got into the 2nd part of it, it felt like I was playing a simple verison of WoW (or any other MMO). All you do is go around and either make friends with other species or kill then and eat them, while also exploring and finding “bones” to collect more “parts” for the next time you mate.  When dealing with other species, you click on a target, choose either to be friendly or aggressive, and then tap number keys 1-4 to do whatever attack/gesture you need to do.  It’s just like doing attacks on a typical MMO, with out the online part of it.  How is this original? its boring for someone who’s been doing this for the past 5 years already.

All of this get’s rather monotmus, but the exploring is a bit intresting. Hopefully when I start cvilizations it will get more intresting, and then turn into somrthing like SimCity; for which I never cared to get into.

Will Wright did a lot of research about animals, evolution, and all kinds of shit that I think was pointless, becuase none of it really appears in game. This game boils down to some very simple basic gaming gimics that really have nothing to do with evolutuon, or about nature.  If you’re a creationist wack-job you shouldn’t be offended by this game because of it’s loose notion of evolutiuon, when the game play is about the player making choices as to how the creature improves and changes from generation to generation.

All you’re really doing is like in any MMO, is gaining experience to be spent on better stuff.  Typical RPG MMO type stuff.  Nothing new here, in fact most of the time there’s little exciting going on while you’re playing.  This is probably why the game lets you skip a head to other parts with out having to grind for more experience points (DNA points they call it.. same fucking thing.) just to get to the next stage and start all over again.

I’ll keep playing it from time to time but I dunno if I’ll grind though the whole game starting from the beginning.  I’ll likely skip to the diffrent stages.  There are some “cool” moments but it’s not anything you care to see more than a few times.

RB2 Rocks my shit

Okay never mind about what I thought I didn’t like about RB2.  It’s FUCKING AWESOME! Tour mode, and challenge modes are fun.  Yes you do tend to replay the same songs still but holey shit it’s fun.

If you’ve not done the drum trainer, DO IT!  For the love of life try it, you’ll be AMAZED how you’ll get into groves and attempt to speed it up and learning all sorts of paters and rhythms that will help you play an actual song.  So far the best song for me is “Livin’ on a Prayer” starting on medium, rocking the hell out of it. Advancing to Hard, loving it, and then Expert and rocking the shit! woot! \m/

I understand why they did a drum trainer first before a guitar trainer.  Drums are still new, and we’ve been playing guitar since Guitar Hero back almost 3 years ago.  I still hope they create a guitar trainer similar to the drum trainer.  I could use something like that since I still have problems doing up and down strumming on a long string of repeated notes (like eye of the Tiger, Orange Crush). Super fast solos still kill me.  Also I seem to spaz on simple fast three-strum phrases that start out with two normal notes and end on a chord (like “More than a Feeling” in the chorus). I’m at the point where I can attempt any new song on expert with confidence, but some things still whack me out.  Like “One Step Closer” has some WEIRD funky patterns I can barely get my head around, and yet it’s in the first difficulty tier… go fig.

OMFG HoPo Chords!

If you aren’t into music games, then you won’t understand the title of this post.  So move along… however if you do understand what a “hopo” is, yeah it’s WEIRD but it works as you think it does. But I’ve yet to see a string of chord hopos in succession making you stroke your guitar with two fingers up and down the fret buttons… I’m waiting for that!   BTW I’ve had Guitar Hero Areosmith, and in one of the last songs it has a four note chord!  No shit!

Anyway I digress..
RockBand 2 is here (except my new RB2 guitar damnit) and it’s great.  The only thing I miss is the actual normal solo career mode that’s been around since the original Guitar Hero.  All that really let you do is go down the list of new songs.  In RB2 you do Tour mode, and are forced to replay the same old songs in hopes you’ll come across a gig that lists a new song you haven’t played… if you can even TELL since you’ll have a shit ton of songs already from RB1 and DLC.

Here’s the problem I’m having with this.  I feel like I’m playing old Rock Band, and guess what?  I am.  First thing we did was get that exporter function to export (most) of the songs from RB1 so that they can be played in RB2, plus all of the 50+ DLC songs I have and played to death will load up in RB2.  Thank GAWD RB2 has a decent way of dealing with huge song lists!

So we basically have to replay the same fucking songs over and over and over and over just to get an occasional new song from a long lists of venues and gigs you have to sift through that tour mode has in RB. I really DO miss the simple career mode that the past games have, since you can SEE what new songs there are with out having to dig tough a fuckton of menus.

Also where’s the fucking “jukebox” function I kept hearing about?  I read once that you can set RB2 to just play the songs you have in your library, and the game will play out a full band on stage playing your songs with out the fret boards cluttering your view.

Also there’s 20 songs that we are getting via download.. but apparently they aren’t available, after all if the were they would be on the game disc.  Apparently when this is released for the PS3 these 20 songs will already be on that version.  But then again PS3 uses Bluray discs so they can hold a lot more songs, where as the Xbox/360 (and GameCube/Wii) is still using DVD formats.  And we have no idea what songs are on this list anyway.  So they are probably still editing those songs for the game, as well as getting licencing rights. You know the RIAAs gotta get thier cut from us dirty song downloaders.

One of the annoyances with RB1 was that you had to have an active gamertag signed into the controller you are using.  The only good thing about that was it was able to force your gamertag to log out of one controller so you can login to the one you’re using.

But today we kept swapping from Drum set, microphone, and diffrent guitars for various achievements we wanted to score on. Constantly we traded places to use whatever insturment controller we wanted to use. At one point a friend of mine was playing both Bass, vocal, and drums AT THE SAME TIME (all set on easy) and he acctually passed the song! Some achevemetns required the use of the RB stratocaster guitar, even though I play better on my wireless Les Paul for GH3.

RB2 lets anyone instantly drop into a band that’s being set up; no need for a gamertag at all for a local game. This caused problems since when we finnally got an achevement after all the hours and sweat (especially banging away at the drums) we realize our gamertag isn’t logged into the controller we are using.  Ah FUCK!! This is apparent when RB2 finnishs the song and no achevements appear, and even more so when you hit the dashboard button there is no gamertag name on the blade that appears.  D’oh!

It would be nice if maybe.. possibly.. RB2 could have some amount of sympathy and let us GIVE the achievement to a gamertag if the controller being used doesn’t have anyone logged into it? As long as it’s a gamer tag on the local machine.. not just anyone.

By the way.. the new Drum tutorials and rhythm practice sessions are fucking AMAZING.  They have a huge selection of different rhythm patterns and you can set your own tempo, and you can learn how to play the fucking drums.. you’ll be amazed!

Finish out Rock Band

Okay with RB2 coming out mañana, a friend of mine and I are going to attempt to finish out all career modes in RB1. Drums are a bitch but we found a way we can possibly play through them on expert and finish off drums career by having one person play the four drum pads, and the other use the kick pedal.

The bass drum kick pedal is by far the hardest thing to get your head around while paying drums. You literally have to grow a separate brain for your foot to play this, as you deal with the four drum pads to play. At least for us is seems that way. According to the game it’s one of the more important parts of the drum kit that the audience pays attention to in the game.  So the more often you miss the kick drum and the red drum pad, the more the crowd will dislike you.  Apparently missing notes on the other three pads isn’t as important.

Being able to ignore the kick pedal while playing the drums is like going back to medium difficulty.  Doing just the bass drum isn’t really simple, since some songs have some very rapid beats that can be hard to keep up with, and you can easily get tired.  I actually find it easier to just use my hands with the pedal on my lap and pressing down on it.  I joked to my friend as to how it felt like I was doing CPR.

We will probably do the same trick to get our drum characers as platium aritsts by playing the endless set list, and do the same with Rock Band 2 when it comes out tommarow. Rock on! \m/

New theme

Yes new theme.. don’t freak.  Got bored with the old one, so nothing serious.

Chrome

Yeah I know everyone been talking bout Google’s new web browser; I like it too.  The one thing I’m not really keen on is how it handles bookmarks.  I’m so used to having a left pane window listing all my bookmarks (in collapsible tree form), so I can just click on what I wanna go to.  Chrome doesn’t have this, it has a “home page” that shows little thumbnails of the most recent sites you’ve been on (like Opera has), plus a bookmark tool bar at the top, and your full list of bookmarks from a drop-down menu at the top right.

That’s all fine and dandy, but once you go to a page all of that disappears. This forces you to click on the home button (if you have it enabled) just to see your bookmarks again.  Sure you can enable the bookmark toolbar to always be on, but I like the extra realistate at the top. Most pages never fill my screen side-by-side on my widescreen monitor, so I don’t mind having my bookmark list on the left side taking up screen space that’s not going to be used anyway.  I’m sure that can be implemented with some kina plug-in. I also don’t like the fact that if you close your last tab, it closes the entire application.

That’s really my only gripe with the UI that the creators at google have done.  My other issues are with web site compatibility glitches. Sometimes the text formatting on entry fields (like in forums) will format weird, and it will appear to be over-writing text when it’s not.  It doesn’t really seem to have a spell checker yet it puts red squiggly underlines on misspelled words, but right clicking them doesn’t bring up the spell check. Hotmail doesn’t know what to do with Chrome, so it throws up a page telling me to update my browser, but it runs just fine once you’re in your inbox.

One site I like to look at from time to time is a site that has some webcams watching Mount St. Helens. The java just dosen’t seem to work, and behaves as if java plug-in isn’t installed. Yet if you read the 30+ page “comic” about thier phiosophy of Chrome, they go into anal-details about how thier Java VM works, but it dosen’t seem to work here.

Yes it does render pages very fast, unless the page your on has a lot of 3rd party banner ads that load off-site so those tend to appear a bit slower, depending on how the page is laid out. The concept they have for Chrome is brilliant when it comes to memory management, virtualization, sandboxing and all that technical stuff. I’m sure it will set a new standard that firefox blazed the path for years ago. Rather than the vunrabilities glitches that IE set about a decade ago.

Rock Band 2 all set

I packed my old guitars and traded them in at my local GameStop. I had two Stratocasters, and my old Xplorer that I handed over. The deal GameStop has now is if you trade something in towards a reserve for a new game you get a 20% bonus of it, so all three guitars paid for Rock Band 2 game disc.

I still have my GH3 Les Paul, and I’ve also reserved my self the new Rock Band 2 Stratocaster with the faux wood texture, built-in sync function, and all the updates bits that should play better, and it’s wireless.  My hope is the new stumbar acctually clicks, or has some sort of feedback as GH guitars do.  My room sure is a lot less cluttered by not having so many wired guitars all over the place.  I still have my drumset, and microphone.  So I’m all ready, now I just have to wait two weeks till the game is out.

Rock on people! \m/