A Couple of Rock Band 2 Notes

First, has anyone seen this Rock Band show that VH1 did leading up to the release of Rock Band 2? I hadn't seen it until I tripped over it on InDemand just now. Sebastian Bach and Alice Cooper judged a competition to whittle 15 RB2 players down to (I don't know? One band? Two bands?) Weird. The "episodes" are really short, and I wish they were full-length 22 minutes instead of the 7-8 minutes they are.

In other news, I played a little RB2 over the B's nap today with the sole and vain intent of gold starring as many songs playing Vocals on Expert as I could. I got a few! (Some of them are DLC and not RB2 songs, and these don't count the DLC that I'd already gold starred in RB1, as I didn't re-do those.) I am confident that many of these that I succeeded on would be the LAST ones you all would guess.

I now have gold stars on:

1) Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)
2) Drain You
3) Give It Away
4) One Way or Another
5) Hangin' On the Telephone
6) Today
7) You Oughta Know
8) Limelight (Original)
9) Tom Sawyer (Original)

Yeah, um...hmm. You gold star what you can, you know? Not necessarily your favorite stuff. You Oughta Know is actually ridiculously easy to gold star on vocals. I got a 97% and I didn't even think I was perfect on when to use overdrive and I still got the gold stars. Thanks Alanis!

Craftiness

I finished two projects recently, making some new toys for the B out of some pretty basic supplies.

Project 1: Lower case letter puzzle



We have a Melissa and Doug upper case letter puzzle that helped me teach her the upper case alphabet pretty quickly, but I'm always worried that we'll lose a letter or two and you can't get replacement letters for those puzzles. As much as I love our Melissa and Doug puzzles, I decided to try to make a basic one that would be easy to make replacement parts for if something went missing in the depths of the house that only a two-going-on-three year old can find.

I used clear packing tape, a cardboard box, one sheet of green construction paper, a sharpie, a pen, a pair of scissors, some glue, and an exacto knife. I drew the letters with a sharpie on the smaller pieces of cardboard salvaged from the old moving box that had come apart, making them nice and round and easy to read. Then I cut around the letters, trying to make the silhouette of the piece look as much like the shape of the letter as possible without getting too ornate. (Because then making replacement pieces would seem difficult when it's time to make them, and the likelihood of getting it done would be lower.)

Then I took the two long sides of the cardboard box body and cut them to the same size. I put the green construction paper over the piece that would be the "bottom" of the puzzle and taped it in place. Then I laid the cut-out letters on the piece that would be the "top", trying to arrange them evenly from side to side and top to bottom. I drew around the pieces with the pen and then used the exacto knife to cut out squares that were just larger than the pieces. (I used all the scrap cardboard under the piece to keep the exacto knife from cutting, for example, the carpeting, or my leg.)

Then I glued the two pieces together, the piece with the holes on the top and the piece covered in green construction paper underneath. I taped the sides for good measure, and ended up using the packing tape over the top (cutting out the holes with the exacto knife) just to make it more durable.

I drew the letter in each hole so she could match up the shapes of the letter pieces with the puzzle, and she was ready to play!



Total cost: We actually already had all of the parts I used for this project around the house. It was probably about a dollar's worth of tape, a little bit of household glue, and then a cut-up moving box that had fallen apart under the weight of the items in it when I tried to move it from one place to another in the garage. So basically, this one was free because of what I had around the house.

Project 2: Felt play food



I saw a post on the CRAFT magazine blog where someone had made some play food out of sheets of felt, and I thought I'd give it a go, especially since I finally got the front bedroom, where we are storing a lot of boxes and things, straightened out enough to set up my sewing machine.

For this, I just got some different colors of felt sheets at the craft store and then cut out food shapes freehand. Then I went to the sewing machine and sewed them together with appropriate colors of thread, stuffing some with polyfill to make them puffy and leaving others just a flat two-ply of felt.


Left column: bread slices
Top right: bacon
Bottom right: pepperoni pizza slices


Top: carrot
Middle: lettuce
Bottom: tomato, slice of cheese


Left to right: orange, banana, apple, watermelon



Total cost: About 8 sheets of craft felt at 20 cents each: $1.60 + tax. One bottle of puffy fabric paint for the tomato: $1.49 + tax. I also want to go and get a bottle of orange to make lines on the carrot, a bottle of black to put seeds on the watermelon, and white to put a little shiny highlight on the apple and the orange. I already had the polyfill, but that's not too expensive if you needed to buy it, and I already had a set of different colored spools of thread that came with my sewing machine when I bought it. If you didn't have the colors of thread you need for the different foods, that part could add up a little because those spools of thread are always more than I think they'll be whenever I look at them in the store. But still, a lot less than buying play food from a store, and most of that stuff is plastic and not really as fun to play with than fun, soft, squishy food.

So there is a record of my recent craftiness. Both projects were fun and the B seems to enjoy the end products, so it seems like time well spent.

I Guess I Have to Buy Singstar Now?

Good news: Queen music in a video game. Bad news: It's for Singstar.

So, hey, the good news is that there's now a music game that features Queen. The bad news is a) it's apparently for PS2?!? (wtf) b) there's no track list for it yet c) it's singing only and not for one of the "whole band" games. Not as fun, Sony, NOT AS FUN.

I suppose there's a few upsides. It's not going to be in Guitar Hero, thus forcing me to buy it, because, you know...Queen. I lied. There's only one upside, and that's it.

Does anyone know what the chances are that a PS2 Singstar game will run in emulation mode on PS3? I mean, I read an article on the Playstation blog that makes it sound like I can play songs from a PS2 Singstar game if I own a copy of a PS3 Singstar game, but DO NOT WANT. I just want to buy the one game with my Queen happiness in it. (I also know that the 40gb PS3 doesn't have any emulation software on it at all, but I'm pretty sure we just have a puny 20gb PS3 that should have it.)

**shakes fist at the world...why didn't Rock Band get there first?**

Songs I Wish Were In Rock Band

Now, please keep in mind that I don't listen to a lot of rock music. This list is going to be heavily weighted to the paltry number of groups that I enjoy, but here goes.

(No whining that the songs would be "too hard" to sing. Not everything should be able to be sung and five starred by everyone on Hard or Expert. Singing is hard, dammit, and a few of the songs in the game should be for the Big Kids who can do them.)

First, let's get the Queen out of the way. That there is a game called "Rock Band" that DOESN'T have a Queen song in it is pure madness. Here's my wish list for Queen songs for Rock Band. (Thank you, Wikipedia, for the handy list to jog my memory.)

1. Another One Bites the Dust (c'mon, EVERYONE would fight to play bass on this)
2. Bicycle Race (for the WIN)
3. Bohemian Rhapsody (stop laughing, everyone loves to sing along to this, and the keyboard solos on a song already in the game...you all know the one I mean, BOSTON...are at least as long)
4. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
5. Don't Stop Me Now
6. Fat Bottomed Girls (a two pack with Bicycle Race!!)
7. Flash (if only for the comedy value, and yes, this one's a bit of a joke and I don't really want it)
8. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy (how anyone ever listened to this and didn't suss out that Freddie was gay is BEYOND ME)
9. I Want to Break Free
10. One Vision (thrown in here for my husband)
11. Play the Game
12. Save Me
13. Stone Cold Crazy
    
14. The Miracle
15. These are the Days of our Lives
16. Tie Your Mother Down
17. Under Pressure
    
18. We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You (two-pack!)
19. Who Wants to Live Forever
    
20. You're My Best Friend

Okay, I forgot two songs originally, but I just added 'em. Anyone who gets this on a feed reader can see the edit. For everyone else, I'm not tellin'.

Styx songs:

1. Too Much Time on My Hands
2. Don't Let it End
3. Heavy Metal Poisoning
4. (Heck, I'd be pro-"Mr. Roboto", but I don't think many people are with me on that.)
5. Why Me

Other Blondie songs:

1. Heart of Glass
2. One Way or Another
3. Rapture (if I have to rap through Sabotage, you bastards have to rap with Blondie)
4. The Tide is High

Misc:

1. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones (hey, we've got Blitzkrieg Bop already, right?)
2. One Week - Barenaked Ladies (heck, ANYTHING by BNL would be okay by me)

So, what else do we want?

Rock Band Online Play, Plus One Funny Link

First, the link. Halloween is only months away, so if you have a 5-6 year old, consider these costumes when your child is trying to talk you into letting them be a firefighter or a princess AGAIN.

("Trick or treat" sounds a LITTLE like "exterminate", doesn't it?)

Also, I've been playing some Rock Band online multiplayer. When you can 95%+ songs as a singer on Expert, I've found that's pretty much like being a healer in an MMO. There's no chat (come on, PS3, even Mario Kart Wii lets me choose phrases from a rotating menu so that we can have some sort of rudimentary communication system) so it's hard to tell, but I do get a fair amount of friend adds after playing as a singer.

There are some fairly well-established proto-communication techniques at work in PS3 Rock Band, though. One of them was told to me by the good Dr. Heimlich, which is the idea that you waggle up and down on the difficulty setting menu when you don't want to do the song the leader has chosen. It's also interesting to watch (or be involved in) the delicate negotiations that occur between the two people using the guitar to see who plays guitar and who plays bass. That's usually a pause-move to the one you want-wait to see if the other guy moves there too sort of affair. I actually prefer most of the bass lines so most of the time I would imagine the other person relieved at 'getting' to play guitar when I indicated that I wanted bass, although I did get overruled a couple of times. Frankly, if you can play on Expert on the guitar, I'm fine with you taking whichever one you want and I'll play the other one on Medium.

But still, frustrating to play and have no way to communicate other than by waggling on menus, just out-and-out leaving the group, or adding someone as a friend if you enjoyed playing with them. Seriously, how hard is it to add a menu of prefab phrases? Please? Otherwise, it's pretty fun, especially when you get to watch someone kill songs on Expert, which I normally only get to see when I play with the aforementioned Dr. Heimlich.

And yeah, though there are a lot of power players there playing on Hard or Expert, there are a lot of people who play on Medium, too, which makes it less embarrassing when I want to play guitar or bass and have to play on Medium if it's anything higher than the first two difficulty categories.

It's a good time, really. As soon as we get our drum pad replacement (It broke on day 60 of its 60 day warranty, which EA is now enforcing! Yikes, that was close!) I might give them a go, though I still find the placement of the first two drums disorienting. But that's the subject for another whiny post.

Wii Fit Loses One Customer (Me): Cue Rending of Garments at Nintendo HQ (Not Really)

I learned this morning that the sophisticated calculations of fitness and overall health done by the Wii Fit and its balance board include, nay, depend heavily on BMI, or the "Body Mass Index".

See, now that's where they lost me. WiiFit has apparently already started telling little children that they're "fat" based nearly solely on BMI.

Let me just tell you right now that BMI is a deeply-flawed measurement. Muscle weighs far more than fat, and most, if not all, professional athletes would probably come up as "overweight" when measured by the BMI stick. That probably includes even sports like cycling, where no one in their right minds could look at those riders and say they were overweight by any stretch of the imagination.

See, when I was riding and racing before I had the baby, I was wearing a size 4 or 6. I would challenge anyone outside of Project Runway and America's Next Top Model land to call anyone who can legitimately fit into a 4 or 6 of just about any clothing brand "overweight", but my BMI at the time nudged me just out of "healthy" and into "slightly overweight".

It's just a flawed measurement, and it's bullshit to use it anymore. Especially when there's software out there spinning in a Wii with little girls standing on a glorified scale in front of it, already bombarded by retouched and 'shopped images of impossible women in the media, and they're being called "fat" when they could just as easily merely be committing the sin of being athletic. Lord forbid. I'm just as concerned about childhood obesity as everyone else, but name-calling kids who are playing a video game is probably not the most productive way to combat it.

And I really was going to buy that game, too. I think I'll buy a USB converter for my DDR pad instead and start playing that again. At least when DDR makes fun of me, it's because I legitimately missed steps, not because I failed against an inherently flawed measurement system. Tsugaru heavy, here I come.

You May Have Played Too Much Rock Band Around Your Toddler When...

...she looks at you, says, "Sing...Maps?"

And then sings, "MaaaAAAaaaa--aaaAAAaaa--aaaAAAaaaps!"

Mall Madness

This game, Mall Madness, came up on my RSS feed for Amazon deals.

Funny thing about this game, from when it was published when I was a kid. Now, we didn't have allowances, nor did we save up for the things we wanted. We pretty much asked for things, and if there was any reason at all for us to have them, we'd get them...sometimes right away, sometimes at the next 'gift holiday' like a birthday or Christmas. If there was no reason for us to have them, or if my mom and/or dad thought the particular item was without virtue for us, we obviously didn't get it.

There were just a few times in my childhood that I look back on and think, "Oh, that's where I found out what sort of stuff annoyed my parents." Wanting the game Mall Madness was one of those times. I can't remember which one of us asked for it, but I distinctly remember the tirade launched into about the subject matter of this game. The gamer in me wonders what the engine behind the subject matter is, and whether it's a good game or not, but I think, regardless of whether the B ever wants the game or not, I'll never be able to buy it. I think I'd always hear my mom in my head telling me she didn't think I should play it.

For the curious, I was also not allowed to see the movie Xanadu as a kid...not because the subject matter of the movie was deemed too 'adult' for me, but because my mom had seen a commercial for it and thought it just looked dumb.

I think this is why subject matter in things tends not to bother me, but if something is just straight-out dumb, I tend to shun it.

PMOG

If anyone who reads this is playing PMOG, shoot me a message there. I'm kathyl on PMOG.

I Fought the Balrog and *I* Won

My LOTRO kinship took down the Balrog! Hardest fight in the game. :)

I'm the one in the front on the left, playing my lute. Click for larger version.

The Rumor on the Street Is...

EGM says that Samba de Amigo is coming to Nintendo Wii. Who wants to have some exciting maraca-based rhythm game fun?

I Fought a Balrog and the Balrog Won

Lord of the Rings: Online just released a content patch that introduces a huge new raid instance of 9 major bosses, including a Balrog as the last one. "You shall not pass!"

My kinship cleared "The Rift" to the Balrog two nights ago and got our first real shot at the fella last night. I honestly think we did really well to even get to the Balrog part of the fight. It's a mind-bendingly difficult instance that isn't very forgiving of anyone's attention wandering.

Card Arcade Game

Hey, some of you might care about this new arcade game which may or may not be landing on American soil sometime soon.

But who wants to play against an NPC?

Choosing a Class

So, I started playing an MMO again, like I mentioned in a recent post. It's something to do while the B is napping and I'm captive in the house. I didn't reactivate my WoW account, though, because everyone I know in there is leagues ahead of me in levels, and I'd be a big drag. Plus, there was a game I wanted to check out.

We got LotR: Shadows of Angmar. Initially, the mister was the one who bought it, but I found it really fun to play during B's naps, so I've really been monopolizing it. Now, that game is really quest-oriented, so if you're going to be flaky (as in, if she wakes up, I have to log out, and RIGHT NOW) then there's only one thing you can do.

And that's be a healer.

People will put up with just about anything if they can play with a healer. There are so few of us, and stuff is so much easier to do when you, you know, don't die. It's like being the kid in school who had the really great heated pool. You're popular because of what you bring to the table.

But what class should you choose, if you choose to play an MMORPG?

Answer this question: What do you like to do?

1. I like to watch numbers instead of the pretty fighting. I can do math in my head, and quickly. I like to do things as efficiently as possible. I like to be liked.
2. I like to stay out of the way, but still have some effect on stuff. I'm sneaky. I like to watch the pretty fighting. I'd get bored watching a bunch of numbers.
3. I like to make people mad at me. I can keep track of three or four things at a time. I like a flurry of activity and then I like to relax. I trust my fellow players to do their jobs.
4. Hulk smash!

Answer key:
1. You are a healer. Embrace it. Roll it. Put on the cloth, baby.
2. You are ranged DPS. Buy yourself a bow, find an out of the way place, and deal out the damage.
3. You are a tank. Get yourself some macros to pull all the enemies to you, increase your threat, and then sit back and let the healers keep you alive while the DPS does the killin'.
4. Wait, I'll use little words. You are up-close DPS. Try not to do too much, or you anger Mr. Tank.

And if you didn't answer 1, then do the healers a favor, and stay where they can bloody see you! If you run behind them, don't yell at them when you die. (For heaven's sake.)

(More updates coming soon, including B updates.)

Two Very Unrelated Things

I am just lifting my head out of a period of extreme weirdness here, and I have two odd things to share with you.

First, in playing a bit of LOTR: Shadows of Angmar, I encountered an odd situation. I was invited to help with a quest, and I warned everyone there that I might have to leave partway through if my napping baby woke up. It was all right with everyone there, but one of them said, "Dude, isn't that what your wife is for?"

There are a couple of things wrong with that. He assumed I was male because I was playing an MMORPG. He also assumed that it's the woman's job to attend to the baby. I just laughed and ignored it, because who wants to type enough in one of those tiny MMO chat windows enough info to set that guy straight? Plus, what's the right answer? "I am the mom"? That implies that it's always my job to get her when she wakes. Better to just ignore it.

Second, while I was playing, I had Snakes on a Plane on (Netflixed) in the background. Worst movie ever made. Seriously. I was only giving it about 40% of my attention, and it still bored me to tears. Just horrible. Why did we ever waste the queue space on it?

The worst part is that I'd heard from just about everyone how horrible it was, and I still had to see it for myself. Yikes.

Many Ways to Pay Tribute to Videogaming

About two minutes into this long-assed video of some guys doing some video game pantomiming (cooler than I'm making it sound) they do some Final Fantasy stuff, including the old "holding sword aloft" version of the post-battle celebration.

It's pretty good. Maybe it's even worth seven minutes of your life. So clicky clicky, huh?

Wii Have News

Apparently as a surprise for my mister's birthday, the news channel for the Wii has just gone live a day early, and it's actually fairly nice. In precisely eight minutes (the Wii keeps track of how much time you spend doing stuff...I guess so parents can go in and see how much time the kids have spent playing games instead of doing homework or something) on it and got a really nice snapshot of the news in many different categories.

After just about a week of Wii ownership, I must say, it's pretty cool. When the B gets up from her nap, we'll go out in search of a new SD memory card (I really like that the memory slot isn't proprietary) and maybe a rechargeable battery system. Between the Wii and the B's toys, we don't half go through some batteries these days. Maybe I'll get a couple of classic Nintendo controllers too, since we have the GC Mario DoubleDash on the way from Amazon for part of the mister's present.

Damn, where are all you good double-dashers when I need someone to win all the hard races to unlock everything?

Whee!

Our Wii came early! It only shipped from the next state over (Illinois) and the retailer upgraded us from three day shipping to two day + Saturday delivery.

At noon, it was dropped on our doorstep. The boxes looked like they'd been playing soccer with them, but everything inside was unmolested once I got 'em open.

There was a blip installing it, but it was my fault. Our Video 4 input has two different inputs, but once a cable is plugged into one type, it locks out the second one. I have a cable for my laptop in one of them, and I initially accidentally plugged the Wii in the other side and worried that it wasn't working. Moved it and everything was smooth as silk.

Our Miis are designed, our weather channel is set up, and I'm eying Altered Beast from the Wii store. (Only $5!) I played Zelda while the B slept, and a little while she played. I tried all the Wii Sports—I rule at boxing, mediocre at Bowling, and suck at Tennis.

When the B goes to bed, MONKEY BALL!

Wii, Bitches

So we've been trying to get a Wii. I think I wanted one, at this point, mostly because the "collector" in me wants the ultra-rare foil shiny thing safe in my binder. I mean, don't get me wrong—that's certainly not the only reason. It looks like a fun console, I can see us using it to unwind after the B goes to bed, and it's certainly the most money-conscious of the three "big" consoles. But they're hard as bejeezus to find.

We tried the early-morning stuff only to find we were too far back in line, or that the consoles were accidentally put on the shelf the day before. I was recently put onto an online app called "Refresh Thing", which has a page for Wii online retailers. I loaded it yesterday and checked it a couple of times, not really seeing any good leads.

I opened it again today, telling myself that I would not (and with the B, I cannot) obsessively refresh it over and over. I'd just check it occasionally, and if fate's hand reached down and showed me a store that had 'em in stock, I'd contemplate purchasing it.

Now, I'd ruled out several retailers who are forcing the console into $600 bundles with a bunch of games I don't want, but Circuit City (I know CK, you hate them...sorry) was on the short list of retailers because their bundle had only two games in it, and they were Zelda and Madden, which I could see us buying anyway. (Although I would happily switch Madden for Super Monkey Ball.) The first, and I mean FIRST time I loaded the page today, Circuit City was showing them in stock. I clicked through and grabbed my credit card, thinking I'd miss the window for sure.

The order did go through, but I still reasoned that they might have sold too many and would send out "sorry, it went out of stock while you were buying it" emails. I waited, happy that their website said it would ship today if it shipped at all, so at least I wouldn't have to wait too long for the verdict.

Around 5:00, the shipping confirmation popped into my email box, with real live tracking numbers and everything. The console and both games shipped, along with our extra Wiimote (our TV is shivering in anticipation of a Wiimotedisaster). Should be here by Wednesday.

And I don't have to wait in the cold in it in front of a Target before it opens this Sunday, which was the next super-sekrit release day.

Whee! Who wants some Monkey Ball action?

Hey, I Know What's Wrong With It!

It's not expensive enough.

In a year when rootkits were doled out, batteries exploded, and a console has been launched to dubious acclaim indeed, the way to fix it, surely, is to revamp the product so as to remove its only virtue, add silly features that only the geekiest of audiophiles give a rat's ass about, and then jack up the price on the thing and throw it into the marketplace as well.

WTF is going on at Sony Electronics? I really used to be in their corner but they've managed to run me off most doggedly.

Oh, and Happy New Year to all.