The Week According to Foo

The start of the week was quite bad in a way. Not 'bad' bad, but sort of 'disappointing' bad, if you know what I mean (chances are that you do not). My Rock Band kick-drum pedal broke, you see and everything in the world seemed to fade into irrelevance at this tragic event. Not for long, though, as EA sent me a new one! Yay! Suddenly the world seemed a better place and a little nicer smelling at that. Thank you, EA, very muchly.

You see, I feel that the drums are the core of that game, and it's certainly its main selling point. It's because we've all played the bygone Guitar Heroes and some of us have played SingStar, so it was obvious the main attraction Rock Band has to fans of the Rock-Bemani sub-genre is the drum-kit. I'm pretty sure that most of the people who bought Rock Band spent the first few hours getting to grips with that rather marvellous piece of gaming kit rather than repeating something they'd done on Guitar Hero and SingStar before it. I'd also wager a fair amount who bought Rock Band bought the game and the standalone drum-kit and chose to either ignore the 'Band in a Box' or wait until a later date before picking up the remaining peripherals.

But that's old news now. What's new news is that I've bought Alone in the Dark for my Xbox 360. I've played a good 2 hours of it and frankly, despite being disappointed at just how bad it is to actually play, it seems to get better the more I play it. This might be down to me becoming honed to the nuances of the game; for instance the control system and the way your character moves. It might be that I'm getting dragged in by the story and that no amount of clunky gameplay can make me deviate from it. But it might just be that the game is simply getting better - no more, no less - as if the developers started the game from the first level (or, as they're called in Alone in the Dark, episode) and worked it's way to the end of the game, slowly becoming more accomplished at making the game they wanted to make.

I very much doubt it'll end up being The Best Game I've Ever Played in The World Ever™, but it could very well become one of those games that isn't praised by absolutely everyone in the world, but finds its own loyal devoted fans that love the game despite its shortcomings and such, and that I might find that, come completion, I can call myself a member of this small club. At the moment, it's hard to say whether I will or won't, but I will definitely tell you if I do and if I don't. 

There is a game that I have happened across in the past and I truly believe it is one of the most criminally underrated games in the history of man… that's for another time, but the same place.

Crack Band [Update]

The reasons for my title are two-fold: Rock Band is as addictive as crack (not an analogy I've made from personal experience), and my drum pedal has a big-ass crack in it - it will snap into two pieces very soon.

I've stopped playing it. Anticipating the pedal to inevitably give way under my foot and becoming completely unusable is just as bad as it being completely unusable anyway. It saps all the fun out of playing the damn thing and makes me want to stop just in case I'm desperate for one more final go tomorrow (I'm quite good to my future-self like that).

On the freakishly large Rock Band box, it says that I should visit rockbandservice.ea.com if I was to "encounter a problem with any Rock Band™ peripheral", so I did just that. A quick questionnaire later and I was well on my way to having my pedal replaced. After having to sign up for an 'EA Account' (whatever that is), I had to give them my name, address and telephone number and then I was told I'd get a confirmation email which I still haven't received. So I don't really know what's going on with it. I'll keep you updated, but I've got every faith in EA that I'll soon be receiving my brand spanking new and completely unbroken pedal (I've got a score to settle with Run to the Hills - God, I hate Iron Maiden).

[Update] Yeah, it's broken. I wasn't even playing it, I was testing it and it came apart. The worst thing about it is the new one would have been delivered today, but I missed the post-man, so now I'm sans pedal until Thursday.

*cries*

So, Rock Band, Then!

I haven't posted for a while, I know. I've been playing Rock Band. It is definitely worth that £140, it's probably even worth the RRP £179.99 (I think). Analysis list time, because I can't be bothered with punctuation.

• The Drums
• Awesome
• Work incredibly well
• Well made
  
• Quite loud (clack, clack, clack, clack)
  
• Steep learning curve
• Ultimately satisfying

• The Guitar
• Feels quite cheap
• Works well
• Not as good as GH III guitar
• Added extras are cool

• The Microphone
• Is basically a real microphone
• Feels incredibly cool to hold
• Works very well

• The Songs
• Practically all tastes accounted for (provided you like Rawk!)
• It's got Little Sister by Queens of the Stone Age = enough said
• The DLC stuff is amazing
• Also, My Sharona by The Knack
• More Than a Feeling by Boston
• Detroit Rock City by Kiss
• I mean, I could go on
• Paranoid by Black Sabbath
• Crushcrushcrush by Paramore
• That enough for you?
• This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race by Fall Out Boy
• Needs some System of a Down, but so did GH, GH II and GH III (at least there's some Serj Tankian)
• Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters :D

• The Actual Game
• Yes, it is better than GH III
• Rock Band World Tour is a revelation
• Achievements are nice and fair, unlike GH III
• Can see myself playing this for a long, long, time

Also, I've been playing Rez HD. I missed it the first time around when it came out for the Dreamcast, and I have to say it is now one of my very favourite games ever. And I haven't even used the Trance Vibration yet!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

… once I caught 12,345 Gamerpoints on Xbox Live :D

Twelve thousand, three hundred and forty five gamerpoints. It looks so cool. 12,345 G. Thanks go out to Devil May Cry 4 (which is so much better on the second play-through) and, ultimately, GTA IV. I know, I keep mentioning GTA IV, but the fact is that I created this blog to pass the time and to bang-on about my anticipation in one place rather than have to spew it out to my friends, who, unlike me, don't like to talk about gaming all the time. GTA IV got me the 20G I needed to take my Gamerscore from a rubbish looking 12,325Gs to an awesome 12,345Gs. So props to it. Also, to being awesome as well.

By the way, I still haven't completed it, despite clocking up a massive 60 hours on it.

Also, after getting paid, I've given up under the strain of the huge weight of my wallet and have splurged £140 on Rock Band (from Play.com). I know it's going to be worth it and I knew it wasn't going to be cheap over here anyway. What with some people (not me, obviously) getting all het up by the injustice of the game's price, I decided that, yeah, maybe we are getting stiffed for the bill, as it were, when really we're just being charged more because of VAT. It's the country we live in and there's not much we can do about it. Also, our minimum wage is higher than most of the states of the USA, so we should expect to pay a little more for things than them. Anyway, I'm going to pretend I never went all political about Rock Band's pricing. If I don't get it, I feel I'll miss out on something truly special.

So, 12,345Gs. Expect that to rise to a rather less sequential number once I get the chance to kick the shit out of Rock Band's drum-kit in a couple of days.

Play.com To The Rescue (for Rock Band fans)!

Still smarting at the fact that Rock Band is going to cost you an absolute bomb? Well, Play.com, the ever-cheap internet store, might well soften the blow for you. The Rock Band: Band In A Box (Instruments Edition) has a recommended retailer's price of £129.99, however, Play.com have chopped a big old 23% off that price and are offering it to you for £99.99 with free delivery. That's a penny under £100! Awesome! It still comes without the actual game, though, which is going for the rather run-of-the-mill price of £39.99.

Compare this to the fact that Amazon.co.uk have taken a paltry tenner off (8%? Pah!), without free delivery, and you've got yourself a stone-cold bargain if you get it from Play.com (the better option being that you smuggle one in from America).

This might even spark a price-war if Rock Band becomes popular enough. It's pretty much guaranteed that the supermarket chains like ASDA Walmart and Tesco are going to go for another round of price oneupmanship, if that's the case.

But, for now, I know where I'm getting my Band In A Box from. It's cheap(er) and I don't have to cart the fecker home on the bus.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Play.com, nor do I have any sort of affiliation with them, I just think Play.com is awesome. If you don't like it, go buy Guitar Hero Aerosmith, you loser!

Rock Band Gets a UK Release Date

May 23rd 2008. This is the good news. The bad news? Are you sitting down? You have to buy the actual game software seperate from all the instruments, although the instruments (guitar, microphone and drum-kit) are available together in their own 'Instrument Edition'. The actual game will be around the £40 mark, whereas the 'Instrument Edition' will cost a whopping £129.99. For those of you with a cacklulator, that's £170. Which is US$340. Consider this: in the USA, this game cost a mere $150 and that's with the game included.

The fact that we're getting exclusive tracks is completely beside the point (and not only because they're not that exclusive). Held to ransom? Not so much. Bent over a barrel and taken roughly? Yep.

Also, it's a timed Xbox 360 exclusive, so the PS3 and Wii owning Rock Band wannabes are getting an even harsher deal.

For shame, EA.

I Needs Me My Rock Band

The USA have been clacking along to the tunes of Rock Band for a good while now, yet we in Europe have yet to be even given a release date. It's lucky Activision are milking the Guitar Hero cash-cow and released Guitar Hero III before Christmas, otherwise we'd have had to go and play real guitars, drums and learn how to sing.

Well, GHIII has been and pretty much gone (well, that's unfair as there are a fair few downloadable songs on offer) and, well, we need something else to click our strum bars to. Residents of the US have been spoilt for choice, as both games have been available to them for ages now. Lucky fuckers.

EA, Harmonix, get this game over here soon. At the very least give us a frickin' release date. Yes, the exclusive songs are awesome (Hysteria by Muse is a more than welcome inclusion), but they're pretty useless if we don't have the game to play them on. At the mo, they be nought more than mere pipe-dreams.

Pipe-dreams!

Please, EA, please. It's either that or we'll have to buy Guitar Hero Aerosmith.

And no-one wants that.