Ok, so I wasn't very clear about the challenge I had proposed in the previous post. Here are the guidelines. Number of human players: 2 (on same team) Game: NBA Jam for the Sega Genesis game system. No emulators, no tournament edition, no earlier arcade versions. Difficulty: 3 Speed: 3 Tag mode: on computer assistance: off quarters: 5 minutes. Send us a video that shows a score of 140 points or more and we will post the video and give you a signed copy of NBA Jam.
New Addendum!!!!
As it has come to my attention that it is perhaps more important to Quest and to Jam than it is to be a purist. As such, I have decided to allow Emulator play and single player games to count in The Quest For 140. If any player is able to score 140 points alone, without the aid of another human player, that player is clearly worthy of the World Record. While I am skeptical of Emulation, I wish to fully promote this challenge and given consideration to the age of the Sega Genesis system, I realize that not everyone will have one around, or wish to purchase one. The challenge remains however. Hushed voices in back alleys behind game stores in the suburbs are beginning to grow louder, and players around the globe are pressing A + B with fiery passion. Go forth, score a lot of points!
"Can't BUY a bucket!" The sports caster's voice rang out through the packed stadium. The game had been over for nearly 4 quarters but all the fans still waited with baited breath to witness what might just be the greatest miracle in Jam history. The ball bounced from the rim, up, up... too high for Grant's early jump but Mitch came down with the board, completely unaware of what was at stake. The score was 98-8 with fifteen seconds left in the fourth, the good guys needed two more points and they just lost possession.
Pippen, who had been on fire for the last 3 quarters just missed his second 3 in a row, and now it was time to play defense. Pippen rushed toward Mitch Richmond pushing furiously, missing wildly. Mitch took the ball up the floor and managed to sneak past Pippen at half court. 5 seconds left.
In the NBA, 5 seconds is an eternity. But here, on this court, 5 seconds isn't even 5 seconds, it's like 1.5 seconds and there's no way to stop the clock.
Pippen kicked it into high gear while Grant dropped back to clog the lane and guard against the easy bucket off the pass. Pippen caught up with Richmond, and pushing with all the fury in his 16-bit heart managed to knock the ball away from him. Somehow in the chaos, Grant, having abandoned his spot in the post, and in the kind of moment he has prepared for his whole life, scraped the ball off the hardwood, lights flashed, dreams seemed attainable, 1 seconds left, Bulls possession. Grant took one step toward the basket, but there was too little time, he had to shoot. Somewhere behind half court, with 1 second left on the clock Horace Grant chose to take a full form jumper. He went up, froze in mid air, and the dream Andy X and I shared was shattered once again.
Chicago Wins.
final score: 98-8
"Noooo!" I screamed. I had actually been screaming that for the last 10 seconds, fearing the worst.
"Goddamm it!" yelled Andy X, and threw his little black three-button to the floor.
Statement of intent.
Andy X and I intend to play on the same NBA Jam team and score 100 points against any opponent during normal regulation play.
Game System: Sega Genesis
Team of choice: Chicago Bulls
Quarter length: 5 minutes.
Game speed: 3
Game difficulty: 3
Computer assistance: off
This goal shall be known as The Quest For 100, and we won't stop playing until we have succeeded.
When we first started "The Quest", the most we could ever score in a single game was like 60 points. By now, the previous two times we played we had gotten nerve shatteringly close to the golden number, but 98 was the farthest we had reached yet.
Andy X and I, feeling a little bitter at one another, unable to shake the feeling that we both let one another down in one of the worst single quarter performances either of us could remember, decided to take a break to eat some cereal or something. I honestly don't remember what we did besides stave off tears of shame, and disappointment. By the end of the third quarter we had scored 88 points and looked poised to shatter the 100 point mark. 98 points was a monstrous failure, a break-down of the highest order, and a point of shame for both of us. It would be two days before we took up the quest again.
:Two days later:
"Let's score 100 points in NBA Jam," Andrew said.
"ookay," I said, reluctant to be so openly confident after the debacle of two days earlier.
"We're going to do it."
I wasn't sure that I believed him.
The game started magnificently. Through the first quarter we had scored 30 points. Through the second the tally was 62 and were on pace for 125 points. By the third quarter we took off running, and through our blend of ferocious pushing, unflappable blocking, and the power of the On-Fire three-point shot, racked up 90 points by the end of the third. We had a single quarter to score 10 points. The last time we played, two days prior however, we were unable to score 12 points in a quarter, a paltry number to our usual 25+ point quarters. We knew what we were up against: fate. Would we ever reach the one hundred point mark? How much damage would The Quest for 100 do to us before we could finally claim sweet, personal, esoteric moral victory. What would be left of us?
The beginning of the 4th didn't look good. Pippen, who had been "on fire" for the previous three quarters lost his on-fire almost immediately. Our hearts were raddled, and our minds addled by the overwhelming fear of failure. We could do nothing right. Finally we managed to drain two, two point buckets, and with a third shot from beyond the arc, get on fire one last time to set the score to 97 to six. Threatening to break our on-fire streak, Danny Manning drove down the court, unwittingly and knowingly participating in the greatest humiliation in his humiliating career on the Clippers. Pippen, our aggressive defensive mastermind caught up as he pulled up for the long jay. Pippen stole the ball and approached the three point line with terrorfied bravada.
"From Downtown!" Yelled the caster's voice.
Swish!
By the end of our careers we had nearly doubled our original 60 point marks, and eventiually reaching 118, with a glimpse at the upper most limits of NBA Jam scoring. We predict that 140 points in a single game is attainable, however we posit that any significant point totals over 140 would be impossible due to the physical limitations of the game. In the spirit of the quest for 100, we ask any fan of NBA Jam to present us with a video of a two-person team of players who have scored 140 points against the computer, and implementing the NBA Jam settings posted above in the "Statement of Intent." We will post your video on our page and give you a copy of NBA Jam signed by both Andy X and myself, D.L. Hughley Butler. Good luck. And remember, as Andy X says, "Lose yourself in the JAM!"
This is why sports writers don't make predictions like this right before they could potentially become irrelevant. It looks like the Nuggets won't be winning the championship after all.
Ever since His Airness first ascended to the heavens (sometime during his on again, off again years in Chicago), talk of the second coming of Michael Jordan and the 90's Chicago Bulls teams has been derailing, confusing, and more or less saturating the discussion surrounding the NBA. Vince Carter was MJ until it turned out he wasn't, Chris Webber was MJ right up until the point he couldn't be, Kobe Bryant might have been MJ until we learned we didn't like him, and we decided he was just Kobe, and now seriously, for real this time, Lebron is MJ, and to make things even more boring, the Cavs this year are the Bulls (srsly!) We've been living with this discussion of who's the next Michael Jordan long enough that the backlash against it is just as much apart of the whole charade as the doe eyed participation.
When Lebron James made that 3-point buzzer beater at the end of the second game of the Orlando series it became official though, Lebron James is Michael Jordan. ESPN dot com ran about 100 special little videos comparing Lebron's buzzer beater to Jordan's "The Shot." After the game, Lebron James made the statement to the media, speaking to the Cleveland fans, "You guys don't have to worry about the old 23 in black and red no more, because the new 23 is in wine and gold..."
The new 23? Holy shit. This is serious... and LAME.
But here's my position: While Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have picked up the needle and thread of the magic quilt of the 90's Bulls teams (kept in the basement of the NBA Folk Art Museum?), it is way less boring to draw that same thread through a different team, one much less "written in the stars": the 2009 Nuggets. And they're going to win the championship (crosses fingers.)
The other day, I was watching the Lakers/Nuggets series with some friends when my friend Michael posed the question to the group, "How much does Chris Andersen want to be Dennis Rodman?" The answer of course, is 100%. And why not?
The thing I remember most about the Chicago Bulls from the 90's wasn't their winning percentage, or Jordan's PER, what I remember most, and what I remember knowing and caring about most was how cool they were, how complete a story they told. When I talked with Andy X about the idea behind this article he looked at me puzzled and asked "you think the Bulls were the coolest team from the 90's?" I don't know, I was 10 in 1995, but to me they were like a comic book super-hero squad. And maybe 10 year olds today can look on Lebron and see what I saw in Michael Jordan. Maybe? In terms of effectiveness, the comparisons are there. In terms of prowess and dominance, yes definitely...but cool, style? I don't know, I'm not 10 anymore, but I doubt it. And as for the rest of the Cavaliers, there's no discussion. Delonte West? Anderson Varejão? Ilgauskas? I mean, they're fine, I wouldn't have any problem with them if it weren't for this ridiculous victory lap of a season (which looks to be coming to an end, sans victory) and this pinheaded comparison to the Bulls.
As I said though, I'm not ten anymore, and Cleveland has spent their cultural currency this season buying imaginary cameras to take imaginary pictures of themselves during the Disney: Family style pre-game circus.
With what's left over, Lebron's been saving up to start his own private Michael Jordan Memorial Collection. After game two in the Orlando series, he bought "The Shot", but he's really hoping to get that first Championship ring, and take it to the next level.
David Drake, a friend and blogger at www.somanyshrimp.com who's been hyping Gucci Mane recently, wrote of Pac, Biggie and peek period Jay Z,
"Their careers weren't dominated by thoughts of saving rap or some greatest-rapper/artiste-alive narrative that seems really important now to guys like Kanye & Wayne & late-period Jay-Z (never mind dudes like B.O.B. or Lupe or whoever else). One of the reasons I'm really enjoying new Gucci is that he's really having fun when he raps."
You have to build your ideas of cool from the past, but you don't copy and paste and hype hype hype. Birdman suffers because of this, but at least he's imitating someone other than Jordan, at least he's digging a little deeper. We're fans, not statisticians. Sure Bron is the best player in the world (don't even bring Kobe's name into this, and certainly no one's talking Melo in this contrived discussion) but that's not what I'm talking about. These Nuggets are cool; Chauncey, Melo, JR. Smith, Birdman, Nene. ( Just a little shout out to Andy X and Freedarko for christening my love of Melo, Nene and J.R. Smith.) It's not just their personas that are attractive though, its their play. You can spot the moment Carmelo takes the team on his back and starts nailing all those corner J's. You can tell when J.R. is taking the ball up the court that he's going to toss up a 25 foot 3-pointer in wildly bad taste, but hit it at a decent rate. When Billups is on the court, everything seems certain. One of the top overall point guards in the league.
And then there's The Birdman, and Nene, who compliment each other so nicely. Birdman, a recovering drug addict and white country boy with freakish athleticism and a passion for blocks and boards, and Nene the Brazilian in c'rows who battled back from testicular cancer last year, and is back playing his nimble seven foot basketball. I'm not 10 years old anymore but these Nuggets are doing it for me, just like the Bulls in the 90's. (oh yeah, I meant it, they're going to win the Championship. Maybe.)
Here at NDG we don't spend a lot of time and energy (doing anything?) focusing on games that have yet to be released. We eschew responsibility to "break stories", or "make news", or "take bribes" and have, all very intentionally and with great philosophical grounding, taken the stance to leave the maintenance of the game-hype-industrial-complex up to the forum hawks and news sites; the leaders in the inter-gallactic plot to turn gaming into a list of future promises, pics of Halo 3 collectors toys and stale "specs": graphics, features, control schemes, etc.
Despite this, I was unable to avoid the first official trailer to Red Dead Redemption - a sequel to Red Dead Revolver -currently in production by Rockstar San Diego. While all Rockstar games have been relatively professionally produced, and more or less unique (at least in style and execution, if not in premise,) it has always seemed that the GTA series held a special place in their... budget. With the release of GTA IV last summer, this trend appeared only more glaring. What GTA IV made even more obvious however, was that Rockstar is no fucking slouch and GTA IV was no Missile Defense System and as a result, you may have heard, Grand Theft Auto IV made enormous amounts of money ($300 million on the first day, $800 million in the first week, and with current sales figures at somewhere over a billion.) Judging from the trailer to Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar has apparently thrown a bunch of those dollars at their new "Sandbox" style take on the Red Dead series, and in doing, look poised to change this "GTA and the rest" character. More importantly however, Red Dead Redemption looks as hot as a panfried flapjack.
So what makes Red Dead Redemption look so good? The graphics, which are so legs open in the trailer, are very impressive, but honestly, lots of games look great these days. The gallant cinematic feel is nice for a trailer, but we all know we aren't going to be getting Western Gear Solid VI or Final Tumbleweed XXXIV. What makes Red Dead Redemption seem so promising is the hope of a game world half as richly conceived and ecstatically executed as GTA IV, with a bow legged, hunched-back ambling gate, a subtle snarl and a slow drawl - the pace of freedom, boredom and Morrowind; the pace of stories by the camp fire, chewin' on straw, and walkin' a horse to water. Red Dead Redemption proposes to breath the air of the fantasy of the American frontier West, and from the looks of this trailer, you'll hear a low crackle at the back of its' throat from the hard years in the dusty desert. Gruff, quiet, tense, and terse - this trailer is sweet.
A trivial, slipshod, rehash of all the cliches from Dragon Warrior on; an amalgam of the crudest story-telling techniques featuring some of the least-affecting dialogue ever written; a game stuck in the period before 16-bit roleplaying games became art, Sword of Vermilion is a somewhat bizarre game-- technically questionable, but fascinating in the way that clunky medieval paintings of sword wielding jesuses are fascinating. It has a commitment to real-time action that would later be re-introduced to role-playing games and tagged years later as innovative, but it is also a mess of cluttered, quaint, and counter-intuitive menus. Getting treasure out of a treasure chest involves not only opening an ugly menu and then scrolling (which, as always is accompanied by an awful chirping sound effect) down to to the "open" option, but, having opened the chest, you must then re-open the menu, and then-scroll (more of that awful tone) down to "take," at which point you get a cheery little tune and a message like: "you opened the chest, and there was a candle inside!" Also, my first ever favorite RPG. You'd be mostly blameless for taking a tone not-dissimilar to that of our esteemed video-game reviewing colleague about the game:
Or, you can take a little trip through history. Shall we?
As I ran laps around Perley elementary's big, barren field behind the playground every day after school I balanced my fatigue and buoyed my squat fourth-grader legs along with thoughts that every lap around the vast lot was one more penciled "x" in a box on a cross country club fill-out sheet, each filled box building on the last, springing forward on the page from left to right, onward and onward as I rounded the monkey bars and went back out for more. Surely there was some goal, some reward, some t-shirt you could win for running the most laps, but I don't remember it. The goal was always just to get farther, get more points. I was determined, and the thought of going farther excited me, and that was all there was. Having only been old enough to be in awe of my brother as his 80's twitch skills got him all the way through Shinobi on the master system I only came into my own as a video game player with a bit of an inferiority complex. I knew that I would never be able to score as many points as my brother as my quick-fingered and guitar-soloing brother. In order to prevail in the same way he had prevailed, then, I'd need another way around. Steadily earned experience points would come to replace the hi-scores I'd known. Sword of Vermilion, with it's simple boss sequences and not-quite-action combat style (link to battles) was perfect for me because it could be beaten with the same sheer force of will and patience that propelled me around the field at cross country practice. Thus, it was the first non-disney-sponsored game that stubby-fingered and stubby-legged me could be comfortable with and good enough at to call my own.
At the time I didn't know what I was getting into. But, imagining the sun setting over Vermilion's Malaga, big-shouldered and kingly and beside my queen, I had a home in a kingdom not far from that beaten-down Perley grounds. There were rewards for those untold laps and dungeon crawl toils, I suppose, but they were mostly in my head.
Here I was, a child of twelve. Brendan and I sat to the side of a newly finished, still mostly empty basement playing Exile III: Ruined World on my family's new 200 meghertz pentium computer made by NEC; a machine that my father exclaimed to me when he first bought it a year before,
"You know what I just bought? A 200 megahertz Pentium computer! Can you believe that?
"That's fast?" I asked.
I knew how fast that was - fast enough to play any game I wanted. I lived for those moments, and so do most PC gamers still; the time when you can finally accept the Graphics-Messiah into your heart, and live a fulfilled life as a gamer.
I have memories from about the same time in my life of my father driving me to church in Worcester Massachusetts on Tuesday for choir practice, myself a boy soprano in an Episcopal boys choir, my dad, casually spelling mine and my carpool friend's name in hexademical representation of ASCII.
So here I was, semi-secretly sequestered in my basement with my best bud Brendan, sitting on swivle chairs in wet bathing suites and wrapped in too-large beach towels, sweating pubescently in the dry air-conditioned air while the summer which we had just briefly visited to earn our disappearance to the underground, awaited just a few feet above us.
At a time when japanese-cut-scene-polygonal-fetishism ruled the console RPG world, and the relative relief of the sprite and isometric graphics of the Baldur's Gate clan and Fallout 2 had just begun to be advertised heavily in PC gamer magazines, Exile III looked truly horrible.
None the less, on my families new blazingly fast "rig", we played only a light smattering of the PC gaming world's biggest brightest graphical beasts, Quake II and so forth and so on.
--
The game screen in the entire Exile series is a small rectangle, about 1/5th the size of any desktop. There are no cut scenes, and only slim traces of audio garnered from a few low-bit public domain sound libraries. There is no music to speak of, save for a few bars during a fan-art style title screen.
If an art historian were to guess the age of origin of the Exile III graphics, they might spot it as pre-medieval religious art, hyroglyphs, or even cave drawings.
Art Historian
"Thousands of years ago," they would explain, "mankind hadn't discovered the craft of visually representing three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface," taking long pauses to studder and move their hands about, "so they took creative liberties to get the point across."
But mankind named Jeff Vogel still didn't know how to solve that problem in 1997 and still doesn't today.
II
Sitting there in the stale underground air, Brendan and I were about to purchase a house. We had played for probably six hours that day. Later that night he would sleep over, and we would wake up extra early the next day to play for another six. My parents would look down on this behavior.
"Why don't you guys go outside again? Haven't you had enough of that game?", and his parents would have his head for it.
But we loved Exile III, and we were about to purchase a home together.
We had saved up money as I remember, for quite a long time. It was fairly expensive, the house was, and when we finally payed for it, got the key and went there, it was like no feeling I had ever had in a game. Accomplishment. A sense of place, of belonging, of meaning for these little collections of visible pixels that we had given so much emphasis to in our short lives. Huddled up in towels on office swivel chairs in my newly finished basement, we had shared in the imagination of a world to which we belonged, and from this house, had found some semblance of permanence in our shared fantasy. What I remember most though, despite the accomplishment of home ownership, was that once we went in our house, we were stymied from exploring the whole of our domain by a magical barrier which none in our party could dispel. A secret room in our own house thusly stayed secret indefinitely. Inside our own house. We were not the masters of the universe. The universe did not bend to us. It extended beyond our success; it did not want it or celebrate it, the Exile universe existed for its' own ends it seemed, and there was no possibility more exciting than this.
Your near-triple-double in that sad little, late march game against the sixers meant a lot to me. Forever, I'll remember--in the same way middle school history books remember the battles of Lexington and Concord--your step-back jumper in the fourth quarter as the shot that saved my ass.
However well my first fantasy basketball season had been going, it was your second-half breakout in the very last Sunday game at the very end of the first week of the playoffs that brought me back. Larry Hughes (Aka, tatoo'd Judas Iscariot) had done his best to deceive me. For slender reasons Yao missed a game. For no reason at all Tim Duncan missed a game. For my own unreasonable need to feel clever, newly healthy Danny Granger stayed on the bench, missing all of the week's games. All of this after the very symbol of my success, Devin Harris, got injured on the eve of playoffs. So, with the time running down on Sunday night, after all the other results were in, down 3-5, after you'd had a disgraceful start in a fiasco of a team performance, I found your game streaming on the internet in time for the second half and prayed.
Then, Spencer, you seven foot patron saint of post moves, you did it. Slashing past the same Samuel Dalembert I'd dropped you for, you scored with a running hook. I cursed you for making a beautiful touch pass instead of taking the three that'dve won it. Then, after taking a breather at the beginning of the fourth that wore away at my nerves, you hit that one, otherwise insignificant jumper and though your team lost anyway, I was saved.
It's too bad that the "political debates" Stu alludes to at the end of the clip exist because, Spencer Hawes, you are a 20-year-old millionare republican, but (in as much a display of my affection as anything) I'll forgive you that tonight and forever.
I'll be straight with you. There has not been and may never be a true genesis party. The tyrannical will and evangelical vim for 16-bit revolution (the consummation of which, I suppose, would be the Genesis party) has been sapped by some combination of me n DLHB having a job, not having a job, the modern condition, basketball, and the technological superiority of the Xbox 360 over our old and cherished order of games. Every day, DLHB, gets up at 3:30 AM, and with a meager breakfast in his belly walks out into weather cold enough to kill a man, takes a train to a bus to a train to a ten-mile walk uphill to a train to one last final walk/leap/crouching punch/jumpkick through a particularly unfriendly suburb until at 10 he arrives to his thankless work.
Me, I'm less burdened by the troubles of reality so much as I am entirely apart from the human race. In trying to write the Fallout 3 review which would unify the nodumbgames theory of past and present video games, I have lost my way. I could go on and on about this condition, but suffice it to say, in order to save money on rent I've moved into a stasis pod:
These are the troubles, the excuses, and not the real dirt at all; for that, I apologize. What you, dear reader, want to know is not why we are rutted but how we, nodumbgames, will deliver "the goods." Well, I'm glad you mentioned that! Unified theories are still to come, but in the meantime I thought I'd shore some fragments against my ruins and go back to glorifying the past. The exactitudes of our current joys and dissappointments can only really be made sense of through an understanding of where we come from, of what kind of games we stand for, etc. So, I'd like to propose a series of posts with the theme: "how it is that we have come to do as we do." Genesis games may only be the half of it (the other half are late 90's computer RPG's: Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: torment), but they're the half I'm going to give thanks and praise to for a while. So, prepare yourself for a list of my favorite genesis games of all time.
With the volume down, too late to ignore the feelings of the family of 20 down in the basement, the four of us sat clicking in silence. When Rock Band 2 finally entered our lives, it smarted of privilege. The fan fare had been building, and our psychological medieval spanish villagers had been showing up for the parade, lining up in order, dressed in homemade clown, dragon, and Steve Vai costumes for almost a year. When the villagers finally found their triumphant day of simulated Rock 'n' Roll reckoning, the celebration had been cancelled due to inclement weather, and the dissatisfaction of getting something you've always wanted, without having to work for it. A year ago, before Andy X and I found a new beginning together in Illinois' own, The City of Chicago, we had eagerly spoken of starting a Rock Band fund. Drawing upon a long tradition of religious devotional procedures, we had arranged to set aside a certain amount of money (10% of our income, or 15 dollars; which ever was least) each month until we had enough money in our coffee tin to make the long walk to Target and purchase that big box with so many tens, fives, and ones. The fund never got started however. Neither of us could afford to set aside 15 dollars a month, and then our Xbox was stolen and all joy was drained from the world. Living in squalor, playing only Pirates! Gold on our Genesis emulators and dreaming of swashbuckling duels, the hope of cheap pine drum sticks and plastic button guitars seemed to be rocking gently in the surf of some far off shore we would never see.
So, how did we get here? Drum sticks and button guitars in hand, clicking in silence, and what to think of it? While visiting from afar, a friend of ours decided to purchase Rock Band 2 and leave it at our house (thanks R.O.B.) And that's what Rock Band 2 is all about. It's a great game, but it sometimes seems difficult to appreciate. It's also really expensive and if you are like us, you can't afford it unless your friend comes into town with money and buys it for you, and then leaves. One of the most impressive aspects of Rock Band, and the obvious intended mission behind the franchise, is its super-natural ability to bring a crowd together to play. Never in my life (and I have not owned a Wii) have I sat in a room with two female non-gamers, and two male gamers (who keep a gaming blog) and everyone has had a great time playing four way multiplayer for several hours. The concept is almost inconceivable to me. It seems as implausible as smoking pot with my grandparents the day after thanksgiving, and then cracking up as we search through the fridge eating turkey. It just wasn't going to happen in my lifetime...and now that it has...aaahh, it's a good thing, certainly, but it isn't a private gamer thing, it isn't your secret drug habit anymore. It's not yours, it's everyones. And this translates to the experience as well. How you gonna be sitting in your chair alone playing the drum track to Metallica's Battery? Or much less, the Vocals? This may well be the first video game that inherently makes fun of you for being a gamer nerd. It practically says aloud to you "Where your friends at? Loser!" if you try to master the drum track to that Rush song. As a socially well-adjusted twenty something who hasn't had gamer shame for a very long time, it is hard to go back to that place. And it's not just an issue of nerdyiess, the social experience of Rock Band 2, when you are playing with a full or mostly full "band" is so great, that playing alone can feel like playing monopoly alone. Sure, you're buying up all the best property, but what for? Practice? This doesn't just affect when when you play the game, it affects how you play the game. In the extreme egalitarian social gaming setting, the joy of the challenge, the joy of working at it to nail all the parts, the joy of actually playing the game is dulled, and pumped back up by the joy of sharing a pretty ridiculous and over -the-top experience with your friends. It's a little bit like that scene in the original Rollerball movie where all the dystopian drug-using rich people get together to use their lazer gun to blow up all the trees on the horizon.
Actually it's exactly like that.
Now, Technically Speaking: Drums 9.5/10: The drum set has consistently been the most popular instrument among our friends. Why? I think the answer is simple: where the Rock Band and Guitar Hero guitars are glorified controllers invented by the developers of Guitar Hero only a few moons ago, the drum set controller is not nearly as abstracted. The Rock Band drums are really only a mere modification on an old form, the drum set, and as such they take advantage of some of the memetic power of that old form. The amazing part is that they are able to do this while still being simple enough for anyone to play. At certain points in any given song in RB2, the game will inform the drummer to solo. While this feature, if implemented on the guitar controller would have absolutely nothing to do with the melodic and harmonic creativity of a real guitar solo, on drums, your creativity is rewarded with a solo that will sound like a rock drum solo. This is an astounding achievement . The best New Media, or creative media, provides the user with a legitimately creative experience, stripped of the aspects that make the creative experience that is being simplified and simulated, seem so inaccessible. While the Rock Band 2 drums do not actually represent all the creative power of a real drum set, they take a giant step in the right direction and the rewards are great. There are downsides to the drum set as well. Many Rock 'n' Roll drum parts are virtually identical, and the classic rock beat can get old. There isn't quite enough diversity between the songs, and I've found myself itching for something that has more Rock 'n' Roll bravado to it. That's where the guitars come in. The Guitar 8.5/10: The guitars in Rock Band 2 are very good. The new controller is a definite improvement over the Guitar Hero controllers of old. The inlaid buttons are pleasant and more mature (though some beginners complain about it being harder), the tone switch (which allows you to change the guitar tone) is a great feature, and the fake wooden panelling is just generally less of an eye sore than black plastic. The only problem Andy X and I have found with the guitars in RB2 is that they are way too easy during a rather long beginning section for anyone that has that has spent a significant amount of time honing their chops on the Guitar Hero franchise, as is the case with Andy X and I. We suspected that this was a permanent feature of Rock Band 2, but have been delighted to realize that the guitar parts do get harder, becoming maddeningly difficult metal guitar exercises later on. Still, since the franchise is not so focused toward guitar excellence, the role of the guitar suffers.
Vocals 6.3/10: Meh. It's fun to sing along. That's the best I can say. The worst I can say is that it isn't as much fun to get graded on it. The connection between what you are doing, and what the game is judging you on is pretty weak for the vocals. You can sing songs relatively horribly and not face any game consequences. Also, if you don't know the song already, it isn't really that much fun. This is not the case with the guitars or the drums, as the notation is very easily read and represents your interaction with the game and the song exactly. The notation for the vocals is indicative rather than absolute, and thus if you are singing and don't know the song, you can easily get lost as you try to swoop your vocals around to get the arrow to match the line above the text, often staying consistently a syllable behind in the lyrics. This does not produce a rewarding result, and you will quickly want to sub-in on the drums or guitars. On the plus side, it makes everyone sound like Damo Suzuki.
Song Selection 9.0/10 Super sweet! Many more songs, and many more recognizable and good songs than Guitar Hero 3 (the last of these rhythm games that I've played.)
With swollen glands in my neck, while wearing a christmas present fleece I like to pretend is a snuggie, I've played a lot of Fallout 3 this week. It is a magnificent game, the best sequel to Morrowind there never was. I'll be back with a full review promptly. Rest assured I'll be taking care of some feral ghouls in the meantime.
