Christmas 3/4

Apparently, flying out to America isn't enough for me over Christmas. I've been thoroughly spoiled with three Christmas parties (and sets of presents) already - with one to come in North Carolina! I get to open my Cool Stuff whilst others have to look longingly at the wrapping paper and shoot me jealous looks.

A surprising amount of people have taken it upon themselves to buy me toothpaste and shower gel. Is this really because people know quite how badly prepared I am and expect me to travel everywhere with a bagful of gadgets, but no underwear or toothpaste? Or a subtle comment on how pleasant it is to be in my confined company? Surely the first, at Christmas.

The main problem with the timing of my Christmas presents so far, however, has been that of timing. I love getting copious amounts of chocolate, I really do. It's just a bit galling when I have to fly off and leave them behind for two weeks the next day. Guitar Hero Aerosmith seems awesome...but I've only played it for a short while before having to leave my XBox behind. And so on.

A few presents have been based on things I've blogged about over the past year. Wouldn't it be nice if that trend continues on into the New Year and up to my birthday? On an unrelated note, here's some links from the Internet:


<sub>Did you know you could buy a full-size T-Rex


But, I wonder if T-Rex will bounce on this?


Incidentally, isn't the wood panelling here nice? You know, on the wall behind the 47inch Giant Chocolate Fountain</sub>

Freshers' Fair '08

Today was the chaos that is Freshers' Fair, where hundreds of impressionable new students see the Guild Hall in daylight (and free of vomit and alcohol) for the first time, and cyncical final year students try every tactic they learned in their Business Studies lectures (which, let's face it, had to come in useful somewhere) to con the freshers out of their student loans.

I was on joint duty for CompSoc and LMS (Live Music Society), so it seemed logical to have the two stalls placed next to one another with Guitar Hero inbetween them. Unfortunately this rather impacted on my work ethic at times, but at least I looked rock 'n' roll:



Actually, it turned out to be a great idea, though it drew a lot more geeks over than it did musicians.

We got about 50 members for each society, which wasn't quite as good as I hoped, but we should get a bunch more over the next couple of weeks for each society. Now if you don't mind, I'm off to practise Guitar Hero III religiously for the next 50 hours straight. There was a chap there who could beat me at Dragonforce, and that just won't do.

We also sold a few more Tie-Dye Quartet albums, which was nice. Might need to print more if this keeps up ;)

So, so close

I've been guilty of neglecting Guitar Hero III for Rock Band recently, but I was just browsing through some pictures on my phone when I was reminded that I've not even managed to complete GH III yet - let alone perfect it. Disgraceful eh?


_{I actually wanted to cry after this}

I'll complete this finger-shredding epic one day...honestly. Just as soon as I beat Run To The Hills and Won't Be Fooled Again on drums on expert on Rock Band.

:(

It's Christmas!

I've just gotten home, spent ten minutes unpacking layers upon layers of paper, duct tape and cardboard, spent ten minutes more trying to set everything up and then 5 & 1/2 hours playing with my new toy. Then I had a leet meal cooked for me. It seems that despite what my homepage told me this morning, it is indeed Christmas.


_{Non-biodegradable plastic 1 - 0 Environment}


I have Rock Band.



_{What instructions manual?}

For those of you currently residing in a cave (but with an inexplicable 'net connection allowing you to read my blog) - Rock Band, released in the UK today, is the best game ever.


_{Apparently slot A went into hole J, once sliding under 'bit of plastic #14. Where's IKEA when you need them?'}

Imagine Guitar Hero III meets Singstar meets an electronic drumkit. I spent about 5 hours playing the drums yesterday, at the end of which I was actually sweating and all of my muscles ached. Who says computer games make you unfit eh?


_{Some may argue that having five Guitar Hero guitars is a bit much. Idiots.}

I've got the week off work, and Julie-oh's around to cook my food and bring me drinks, so now the only thing I need to worry about is whether to play drums or guitar, or have a go at singing, or shoot a lot of people in GTA IV (using the drumkit as a controller, obviously).


_{My vocal career was off to a bad start as I tried to work out which way up the microphone should go}

--

Idea: Next year my house will contain two guitarists, a drummer and a trumpeter. She was just complaining that there's no trumpet add-on for the game...but why not just use the vocals microphone? Another brilliant idea brought to you by Inacorp.

Guitar Hero Geekery

Geeks like computer games.
Geeks like building stuff.
Geeks like writing software.
Geeks like retro computing.
Geeks like to win at everything.

Geeks like Guitar Hero.

Here's what happens when we put all of these together.

1. Slashbot
Slashbot is the creation of some engineering students from Texas, and is a fully mechanical solution to automating Guitar Hero. We've already got some solutions that just fire off signals to the game, having hacked the controller - but this bot just reads the notes from the screen, and then physically presses the buttons on the controller. Very cool stuff.


_{Cliffs of Dover. I'm almost this good..}

2. Shredz64
Shredz64 is about bringing the whole Guitar Hero experience to the Commodore 64. Click that link to watch a couple of videos, but this should give you an idea of what we're dealing with:



3. Lego Guitar Hero
Ever wanted a Lego Guitar Hero Controller? No - me neither. But it's still farking cool that someone's gone to the trouble of making one, and that it's fully functional and playable.


_{More pictures on the link above}

4. Finally...
No subject-specific geekery can ever be completed without answering the age-old question - Will It Blend?

The Escapist

Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw is yet another chap who decides to review computer games on the web.

Right, now that I've gotten rid of the female readers, I can tell you more. Not only are his videos a decent way to find out what that game you're thinking of getting is like, they're also bloody hilarious. You see, this chap, with his cheery little drawings, rambling sidetracks and relentless soliloquy manages to completely grab your attention and hold onto it whilst he takes you through his strange and disturbing little world.

He updates every Wednesday, but I highly recommend you check him out on The Escapist. For now though, here's one of his reviews on a subject close to my heart, Guitar Hero III:



I'm off to finish watching Yahtzee's Assassin's Creed review now, and drink some more tea for my hangover. Ciao.

Xx

--

Thanks to Will for putting me onto this guy.

Beaten by a kid

As I was browsing Moarplox (see below) I happened across this vide of a 9 year old performing far better than I can even hope to on Guitar Hero 3. Seriously, even if you're not a Guitar Hero fan, at least watch the first 20 seconds. When I play this song, I either wipe during that bit, or at 80% - he gets 100% for the intro:


_{Moarplox: "I can’t tell if this is bad parenting or just pure determination. Pretty neat in any case."}

This is the same kid I blogged about a while back for slaughtering Psychobilly Freakout without even looking at the screen. And he was only 8 then. Funny how the internet comes around isn't it?

Harmonica Hero

Why do I not already own this game?

Worst Guitar Hero Video Ever

So this video was recently brought to my attention after I posted that vid about the 8 year old 5*ing Psychobilly Freakout:


_{Warning: Do not watch unless you have a legally bought copy of this South Park episode. Or don't care about IP laws. You bastards.}

Now I've not personally gotten the 1million award yet, because I can't find anyone good enough to play multiplayer with me on the XBox version. But, when I do, I assure you I will be told I'm not a fag, I will be told that 'I rock'.

And, let's face it, is there anything more life affirming than such a compliment from that most divine entity, Guitar Hero? I think not.

--

By the way: Just beat Dragonforce's 'Through The Burning Storm' on a custom Guitar Hero disk, and had a 4x combo going quite a few times. Still only 3* though :(

Best Guitar Hero Video Yet

My best score so far on this song is a paltry 120k with 4*. This kid's brilliant, I'm pretty sure it's not faked too...

Weekend in Bath

So, sorry I haven't posted anything for a couple of days (like any of you care), but I decided another weekend on my own in Reading, with a broken boiler and 12 Krispy Kreme doughnuts for company would probably kill me, so I popped over to Bath to distract Lucie from her Uni work.

The weekend was fun, though I sorely missed the doughnuts, and the boiler problem hasn't yet gone away. I nearly killed myself with something a bit too spicy from Wagamama's (Two for one vouchers available from Studentbeans) and we saw Run Fatboy Run which was brilliant, if you're into Simon Pegg's style of humour.

Under the guise of selfless generosity I gave the guys Lu lives with my PS2 copy of Guitar Hero II, as I only play that on the 360 nowadays. I therefore spent most of the weekend ignoring her allowing her to get on with her work, whilst I played that with them. Impressively, between a few of us we managed to complete the entire game on Saturday in one sitting, which I've never seen done before. And we still had time for Top Gear afterwards.

Less fun was the hour I spent with Lucie shopping for makeup. I tried to be helpful and suggest products she could buy, but unfortunately not having any clue what all of the different little bottles actually did, I'm not sure I succeeded. I was pretty impressed by the sheer range of things you can do to your lips though; gloss, stick, pencil...I forget the rest, but there were at least ten things. I was also really amused by a shelf holding:

1. Eye-makeup
   To make your eyes look better...somehow (there was 'science' on the back of the bottle, but it made no sense to me)


2. Eye-makeup remover
   For when you realise the science was actually all lies, and your body doesn't need 76% of its daily 'beauterizers'


3. Eye-care cream
   Because you've just put a bunch of crap on your eyes and damaged them beyond repair

Right, back to work...

I passed Jordan!

My Guitar Hero career is now complete, I've finally completed that most stupidly hard of songs on expert, Jodan. I won't say it wasn't close, I think I was literally one missed note away from failing on two, if not three occasions, but I'm very proud of my 79%, 3* score.

Guitar Hero 360 goes wireless

The XBox 360, for all its wonderful features, always seems to lag behind in second place when it comes to Guitar Hero, which is, as far as I can tell, the only reason anyone would invest in a games console, a television or indeed, and electricity supply. That and reading my blog anyway.

So, late, but better than never, IGN have reported that Guitar Hero III for XBox 360 will get a wireless controller - and that's not even the best part:



Yes, they've finally moved the select button back to somewhere sensible, so I'll no longer be at a disadvantage on the 360 when it comes to getting those super-high scores with pinched star power.

Now to wait a few years for release.... :(

Lazy Sunday afternoons

Another weekend wasted, another week of work to go, woooo :/

Spent most of this one eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts (I love them so), cooking various fun things (roast pork with apple & cinnamon went down well) and playing on the 360. Completed Guitar Hero 2 again, which wasn't too much of a challenge given how often I've played most of the songs there - the new 360 songs were pretty good though, albeit a little hard. I like how my Gamer profile now has awards for completing it on expert, and failing a song on easy, thanks to Ben's girlfriend having a go on my account :D

Also been having some fun playing guitar and singing along with Ben to any songs we could find chords and lyrics for online. Any requests?

Games games games

So I've finally had some time to myself this weekend, with no large items of furniture to transport, no major moving in worries and a full set of utilities at last. Being free, finally, to get out of the house and do whatever I wanted, naturally I've spent quite a large portion of the weekend inside, playing games and making the most of my dirt cheap Xbox Live subscription - thank you Employee Purchase ;)

1. Guitar Hero | Greatest Hits (PS2 homebrew)
Lee Harris, the guy who beat me at that Guitar Hero competition in Birmingham has put a hell of a lot of work into two homebrew disks of Guitar Hero, each stuffed with custom-made tracks and mappings, both of which are labelled 'expert only'. This is pretty strictly enforced, with all other difficulty settings locked off, and the game defaulting to 'hyperspeed' mode (the hyperspeed cheat now unlocks 'megaspeed' - 4x normal rate, ouch!).

Along with all of the new tracks (some great, some less so, some well synched, some...not) he's also edited a lot of the loading menus et cetera, which is simply hilarious at times. I especially like what he's replaced the default 'gig expenses' such as 'Microphones, broken' and 'Dressing room, trashed' with ;) Oh, and 'In soviet Russia, hero guitars you" was pretty win too.

Getting the front panel off my PS2 and then getting the hang of the SwapMagic tool took so I could play this homebrew game took me some time, but was definitely worth it - and I can now play Katarmari Damacy, when I get my hands on it! Whoop.

On the downside, I did, rather retardedly, manage to overwrite all of my saved data for the original Guitar Hero II, but as I'm getting that for XBox tomorrow anyway, and all my scores are up on Scorehero, so I'm not too upset.

2. Dead Rising
On the front of the box we're clearly told that this game is not endorsed, licensed or influenced by Dawn Of The Dead. It feels odd that they somehow feel the need to state that, because a photographer being airlifted to the top of a zombie infested mall feels in no way like a ripoff of the film.

Note however, that I'm not complaining that this is (and it is) a game version of that utterly awesome film, because that's the very reason I love it. There's little more satisfying than walking up to a door and seeing it blocked by a host of zombies, and then noticing the lawnmower the game designers have placed thoughtfully just to the side of the door. Oh yeah.

The photography element of the game does give it something a bit more than just pure gore, and I'll admit I'm intrigued as to when I get Prestige Points for taking photos of the genre 'Erotica', but it feels a bit stilted and pointless to be honest. People don't play zombie games to show off their digital photography skills.

The game's pretty hard too, I've currently been dying before reaching the save point, possibly because I decide to take on a few of the missions first. Think State of Emergency with a bit more of a plotline, slightly better dialogue and a lot more zombies. Also it's not shit like State of Emergency was.

One note of annoyance though - when you're grappled by a zombie, you must quickly wiggle the left analogue stick from side to side to escape. This isn't mentioned in the manual however, so the first time you find out about this control is when you first get grappled. Unfortunately, the tutorial tip that tells you this scrolls so slowly from the right of the screen that by the time you've read it, you're dead. Grrr.

3. Viva Piñata
I was up at 9am today to play what is, to the casual observer, a children's game, and I got so addicted that I didn't manage to drag myself away until I noticed it was long past lunchtime. This game is absolutely brilliant, and you find yourself getting extremely disturbingly immersed in a word of paper animals stuffed with sweets.

When I say this is only apparently a game designed for kids, I'm not implying that it has intensely difficult strategies (though you do have to be on your toes to keep up with the million and one things happening) - I'm pointing out that it should be rated 18 at least for all of the adult themes contained in the game.

For example, mating. This is given a very fairytale spin in the game, with two animals, once certain conditions have been met, running together, having a hug, playing a minigame and then getting an egg delivered by Storkos. You watch this the first time and think 'how cute'. Then, accidentally, you click on the child they've created, and then on the mother, and watch an act of incest take place. Later on, you click on the same animal and the father, and watch some homosexual incest result in...yet another baby. What are kids supposed to deduce from this?

Then you've got violence and cannibalism - these guys don't just start fights for no reason, but when they've won, one of two things happens. Either, the winner rips open the loser's body and gorges on their intestines, or the devil comes along and bears the soul of the loser off to a dark hell for all eternity. Either way, I can see a hell of a lot of kids getting nightmares here.

Score Hero

Score Hero

I believe I briefly mentioned this earlier - it's a fansite for Guitar Hero (all versions) where people can upload their scores, compare them to others, and chat on the forums.

With the massive worldwide love of Guitar Hero it's no surprise that this site has gotten hundreds of thousands of users, and as such, their servers have been really struggling under the load. There's been a donation going on, and they'd managed to collect $8000 from the community when they got a lovely donation of $2000 from what I thought was a rather unlikely source - Harmonix.

Because, you see, ScoreHero isn't just a fansite for the game, it's also the central hub for cracking, pirating and modding the game - although the threads on these subjects are given with the caveat that you must find ps2 hacking tools yourself, and they are, to be fair, only really intended to allow you to play user-made songs.

Still though, I suppose anyone who's so fanatical about Guitar Hero they'll go to all the effort of hacking it to get extra songs is pretty much bound to buy any new releases anyway, so it's probably a good move on Harmonix's part...I'll stop rambling now.

Here's my fully completed scores page for PS2 Expert on Guitar Hero II. I'll fill in GH1 when I get around to playing it again :)

Choices

I've got those two lovely exams tomorrow...so I probably should have played less Guitar Hero today. On the other hand, I did manage to 5* Stop, Trippin' On A Hole and Freya today, and ace my high score for Jessica, so I'm still going to count the day as productive.

In other news...

For those of you who aren't so interested in naked women, here's some boring news about what I've been up to instead.

Exams
Had three of them now, Internet Programming With Java went quite well, and although I still haven't had my coursework back yet (go SEAS go!) I imagine I've done pretty well in that module, certainly over 70% (first).

Operating Systems was entirely exam based, and that turned out to be, to quote someone I heard after the exam, 'a big pile of lol' - pretty easy, should again have over 70% in that by a mile.

Today was Programming Language Concepts, which I'd been thinking was going to be the hardest of the lot, but I was already going in there with 23/25% from my coursework and lab classes - fortunately this one was pretty easy too, I imagine I got about 80% on the exam paper. Sylvia Wong rushed out of the exam hall after me when I left nice and early too, to offer me a placement doing research in the Uni, but I broke her heart and turned her down, like so many girls before.

Two more left now, both on Tuesday, neither of which I'm too worried about. The morning exam is a double module - 3 hours long, Software Engineering, but I can't imagine that one being too evil. The afternoon session is Human Computer Interaction with our beloved [name edited out], and although I don't actually know a single part of that module, there's so many official complaints and petitions flying into the department against that man, his (lack of) teaching skills and his joke of a module, that I could probably not even turn up and still get a decent mark.

Guitar Hero
I've found the wonders of Scorehero, and I'm going through each song on expert, beating my highest score before I upload that to my account - I think that'll replace my scrobbling habits as my avatar on most forums when I get it done. I've got myself some gold stars too now (100% completes), on Heart Shaped Box and Can You Hear Me Knockin', both on expert. Woooo.

Keeping Busy
Got some fun plans to keep myself occupied once this revision (and all associated procrastination) is at an end, because there's only so many weeks I can sit at home playing various musical instruments and computer games before I develop arthritis. Lu's coming to visit on the 23rd, staying 'til Friday or Saturday, and then I'm off to Reading on the 29th for my Microsoft intern open day, to meet all the business studies kids I'll be interning with - seriously, there's barely a techie among them!

Got a jazz gig for a thousand or so people at the Graduation Ball on the 3rd - which we should really get together and practise for at some point, as we're playing for a couple of hours. I'll probably try and get home (Cardiff) at some point in-between that and Paris (13th - 16th), and then there's the final MSP open day in Cambridge, to see some of the guys one last time, collect my rightful prizes as top MSP (hopefully), and some other swag, and check out Microsoft's R&D department. With any luck there'll be a nice social night before that too, with more free beer.

Then it's off on the 1st of July to Reading, to start my new life as a soulless serf! Can't wait :)

Fun & Games

Now I may sound like a bit of an idiot here, to those of you who already knew this - but Mahjong isn't just the Japanese version of solitaire. It's actually a 4 player gambling game, which is absolutely ace.

Tim had a set (and a lovely book containing rules and history) so spent the later hours of tonight playing that with him & Julie-oh, and not revising. Naturally, I won, as with all games ever, but only on the 'money' side (though we just played for points) - I never actually got to call for 'Mahjong' - which, incidentally means 'The Game Of The Sparrows', due to the twittering noise made when North & South wind wash the tiles before East wind calls 'Pow'. You can't make this stuff up.

In other 'games I'm great at' news, I've got Guitar Hero II up in my room now, going through my widescreen TV - it actually has a mode which supports widescreen and makes it look nice, which is fun. I've taken to playing it hyperspeed, because I'm getting a hacked game called Guitar Hero Greatest Hits, which is experts-only soon, and I'll need to be used to hyperspeed, as that's the default. Talking of default, I'm apparently on the default scoreboard for GHGH, which is cool. Haven't got the game hooked up to my speakers yet, but I assume I can just run the audio out of the TV into the speakers - I just hope there's no sound/audio lag if I do that.



Off to bed now, exam at 9.30am Saturday, in the notoriously cold Gem sports hall, ouch.

Xx

Close...but no guitar

Another Guitar Hero II competition at Subculture last night - only managed to come second, but I'm not too disappointed - the guy who beat me was definitely better, and I had a good time too. What I was a bit miffed about was that I'd been expecting the competition to be up on the main stage - or at least the final to be there, but instead the whole thing was tucked around behind the bar instead.

Got another GHII t-shirt, along with some temporary tattoos (one of which is still on my head), and a couple of other odd bits of merchandise - nothing as cool as the plastic guitars from the competition in Cardiff though. The prize wasn't quite as cool either - it was a copy of Guitar Hero II for the XBox (because, of course, the winner's bound to need a copy of the game...great thinking guys).

One of the girls running the event got more and more...friendly...towards me as the night wore on, but unfortunately for her, her chances ran out around the time she said "Well I don't like the sort of music you like, but I really love all the values and things". She was under the impression I lived in a field somewhere in 1968, bless her, nothing like judging a book by its cover eh? If only she knew what a fascist bastard I was at heart...

The competition itself was a bit different too - the 'first round', as it were, was just a competition to see who could get the highest score. As I was the first one to go for it I just picked a fairly high scoring song, Madhouse, and got 240k on it - which seemed pretty good to me. Checked back a while later and someone had gotten 290k! Evil. Naturally I had to text home and find out what my highest scoring song was on career mode, Monkey Wrench, which I then got a very nice 365k on.

Unfortunately, when I came back an hour or so later, Mr. Lee Harris was just polishing off a rather nice 495k run through of X-Stream, one of the bonus tracks I hadn't played much. I had a couple of goes at it, and got chatting to him, but I think my best was only around 420k on it - I got 99% (as did he) but didn't know where to use the star powers, and broke my combo once too often.

Still though, he and I ended in the final, playing Six (another bonus track, which according to career mode I haven't yet completed!), where he fairly trounced me, and walked away the deserved winner. We even got to go up on stage and wave, great fun - bring on the next competition!