Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 2, The Newbie Experience

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I put the Rock Band drum kit together today. It’s big. It looked pretty big in the store but in my living room it seems to expand. And it really seems like it’ll require a stool; I don’t think that playing standing up is going to work for very long, or very well. The drumkit stand seems like it’ll break down pretty easily, but the ‘drum heads’ are all one big, rather large, piece, so I’m a bit concerned about storage.

On the plus side, they aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be. There’s a Rock Band demo kiosk in the local Best Buy, and those drums are pretty darned loud. The sticks are regular drumsticks, and the drums at the store are plastic so the whole time someone is playing they’re bashing plastic with a wooden stick. Loud and unpleasant. But the drums that I got have a rubberized surface and aren’t too bad as far as noise goes. I still don’t think I’d practice my RB drum solos in the middle of the night though, out of respect for other folk in the apartment building.

As I mentioned in my last post, as of about 2-3 weeks ago I’d never played one of these games. Guitar Hero III was my introduction to the genre. Today I experienced Rock Band for the first time and I thought I’d compare the newbie experience.

Both games offer tutorials, but Rock Band’s guitar tutorial is longer and more informative. However if you fail the tests, you have to listen to the whole explanation before trying them again. In Guitar Hero if you fail you can just retry the test right away. Some guy named Izzy narrates the Rock Band tutorial and he’s fine. In GH3, the “god of rock” and some other character take turns. They’re pretty corny, but y’know, it’s just a tutorial; I guess its not a big deal.
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Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: The Guitars

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I’m a Johnny-come-lately to this whole world of ‘virtual guitars.’ I finally picked up Guitar Hero 3 a couple of weeks ago, and today Rock Band arrived. I’d found it really confusing, trying to decide which one to get. So in the end I got both. Great economics, huh? I thought I might capture my impressions in a series of posts, in case anyone else is trying to pick one of the two.

These posts are based on the PS3 versions of the games. I’m not going to go into a whole big thing about console preference. I have a PS3, an XBox 360 and a Wii, and my personal preference is for the PS3 over the XBox 360, mostly because its a lot quieter when its running, and because I don’t care about online multiplayer.

Guitar Hero III w/Guitar Controller will run you about $100. The Rock Band bundle is $170 and comes with a guitar controller, drum set controller, and a microphone. Right there, you have a compelling reason to go with Rock Band if you’re living in a multi-gamer household.

On the PS3, the controllers are not interchangeable at this time, though as of this writing there are heavy rumors of a patch that will let you use the GH 3 guitar controller with Rock Band. My understanding is that on the 360, the GH 3 controller will work with Rock Band, but not vice versa.

Let’s compare the two guitar controllers. This is a definite ‘out of the box’ comparison. I haven’t actually played Rock Band as of the time of this writing. 🙂 But the differences just struck me so I wanted to capture them right away.
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The Year Without A NaNoWriMo

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Back in October I wrote on this blog that I’d decided to do NaNoWriMo this year (depressingly that post is only three down the page from this one. (Must…write…more…blog…entries). Keen observers will note that although we are 2/3s of the way through November, no further mention of NaNo has been made. No word count trackers have appeared. No status reports. No nuttin’.

So why’d I decide in the end to reverse my decision and not do NaNo this year? Well first of all, the decision to do it made on Oct. 15th came from without, not within. I’d been talking to a few friends of mine who encouraged me to do it, and their enthusiasm was infectious enough that I caught it. And maybe for some people that’s enough. Heck it might have been enough for me some other year. But not this year.

I’d been approaching November assuming I’d do NaNo since I’d done it the past two years. Assuming I’d do it, and dreading the idea. I kept telling myself that I’d get pumped for it and it would be an exciting challenge once again. But I never got pumped. And without being enthusiastic to do it in the first place, I realized the whole month would just be a misery, so I opted out.
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Voice of the Gods

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Yeah, I’ve been one heck of a poor blogger lately. I’ve got a post about NaNo in my head…been there for about 2 weeks. I’ll write it down one of the days. But anyway…

Last night I finished Trudi Canavan’s Voice of the Gods, which completes her “Age of the Five” trilogy. If was good…actually it was really good, until the very end which stumbled a bit. And the foreshadowing was heavy enough that there were no real surprises at the end, which takes a little away from it, but still I have to call it a satisfying finish to a satisfying series. I definitely give the trilogy as a whole a thumbs up, with the caveat that some readers might find the first book a bit impersonal. Books 2 & 3 were much more character-driven.

As expected from the title, book three focuses a lot on the Pentadrians, who were the ‘bad guys’ of Book 1. But one of the wonderful things about these books is that neither side is really ‘the bad guys’. There are good and bad people on each side of the conflict, which gives the world a very realistic vibe. Auraya is still a major focus, but Canavan manages to keep the cast of characters broad enough that things never grow dull.

The book ended leaving me wanting for more. I’d grown to care about these characters, and there were cases where two individuals would be at odds due to misunderstandings, and I wanted Canavan to write more so they could all come to an understanding, but it was not meant to be. Ever been in that situation where you have two good friends, and you introduce them to each other and find they don’t like each other, and you just want to do whatever you can to help each of them realize what a great person the other is? Yeah, that was what I needed Canavan to do at the end of the trilogy.

Perhaps some day she’ll write more in this world and do that for me. Until then, I think I’ll be checking out her Black Magician Trilogy.

Last of the Wilds

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Last of the Wilds is book 2 in Trudi Canavan’s Age of the Five trilogy. You might recall that although I enjoyed Book I, Priestess of the White, I was somewhat hesitant in recommending it, based on the fact that it was more event driven than character driven.

I’m glad to say that Wilds is a very different kind of book, and something I’m much more at ease recommending. This time out we have characters that do step out of the pages of the book and become real. Events are on a much smaller, more intimate scale: in Priestess there was essentially a world war; in Wilds very little happens that would impact ‘the common man.’ Thanks to the smaller scale, the camera is focused much more tightly on a handful of characters, and several disparate plot lines that weave in and out of each other. To me, this almost defines great fantasy.

Once again there is very little that is black or white, good or evil. Lots of shades of gray. In fact, now that I think about it, there really is no “bad guy” in this book, which makes it even more interesting because there is definitely strife. Everyone seems to be doing what they think is best for the world, and the set up for the third book is quite compelling.

With the change in ton and focus in Wilds I am much more confident in giving the trilogy a thumbs up. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into book 3: Voice of the Gods.

Another internet relationship horror story

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These pop up every so often, and we’ve all heard them before, to the point it’s become something of a cliche: that hot blooded young thing you fell for online turns out to be an 50-something overweight person of the same sex as you that still lives in his/her mom’s basement.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded, and honestly the stories are always fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way, so here you go, from LA Weekly:
The Life and Death of Jesse James: An internet love mystery

Re-entry

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So I’ve been at a new job — a full time gig — for a week now. I have to say, after a year of freelance and making my own hours, the adjustment has been pretty taxing.

There’s a ton of work to be done at the new gig and the org chart is fairly flat, which means lots of people coming at the team with lots of projects. So one of my first challenges is to build, quickly, an organizational system that’ll scale well and be easy to maintain. The company maintains a Basecamp account, but I don’t find that a good tool for an individual to track their tasks in, unless that individual is the only one using the account. It’s just too messy for me.

Right now I’m playing around with Backpack and Vitalist, and I hope to have a post about them not too far in the future, as I decide which one I prefer.

I’ve also picked up Getting Things Done again for a re-read. There’s some delicious irony in the fact that I’ve managed to lose my copy so I had to pop into B&N for a new one. While there I saw that David Allen has a second book out, Ready For Anything, and I picked that up too.

One of the first projects at the new gig has been to build an interstitial ad system, which at first blush seems pretty trivial, but the ‘edge cases’ make it more complex than you might think. By ‘edge cases’ I mean people who refuse first party cookies, who mask referrers, and so forth. I actually built 3 systems, eventually scrapping the first two. I might do a post on how I finally did it.

I’ve been unable to keep up with all my blogs since going full-time, and I really miss being on top of what’s going on in the world of tech. I’m hoping to winnow down my list so I can get back on top of things.

Anyway, haven’t had time to post a thing, and I’ve got some ideas I wanted to capture, so this is both a ‘keep-alive’ post and a note to myself.

Still not sure about NaNoWriMo this year….but I’m leaning towards skipping it.

Vudu

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I was reading Paul Stamatiou’s site for TechDispenser yesterday and he posted a review of the Vudu online movie rental service. Something about this gadget has gotten under my skin and I’m on a quest to slay it…enough so that I went back today and posted comments with my concerns.

This isn’t the first time I’ve commented about the unit. I posted this at Jaded’s Pub earlier this month:

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Following up on the discussion we were having in the hi-def movie thread, there’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net and and pay per movie to watch. The ‘stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights. You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/circuits/06pogue.html

You *can* buy the movie for “$15-$20” or rent it from $2-$4 (after which you have 24 hours to watch it).

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players?
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[source]

I still don’t get it. People think shelling out $400 to buy a piece of hardware that lets you buy more things from the people you bought the hardware from is a good deal? I mean, I get the whole ‘razors and razorblades’ thing, but $400 doesn’t feel like a bargain price for this piece of hardware. They aren’t subsidizing the cost of the thing to get it into your living room. And they’re using the bandwidth you pay for in order to service their other customers!

I really hope this gadget/service flames out, because it sets all sorts of bad precedents.