Category: Music

PANAMA!

I know it’s a bit wierd that I might show such enthusiasm for a Guitar Hero game after (mostly) politely snubbing the last one to be released, but have you seen the track list for Guitar Hero: Van Halen yet? I was mostly on the fence before, but then I saw the tracks. It has “Panama” and “Jump”, so I’m absolutely there. “Unchained” doesn’t hurt either.

What’s really got me excited however, are the songs that aren’t by Van Halen. Any Judas Priest is welcome, but another go at “Painkiller” has got me dancing in my seat, and the fact that I finally get some more Queen is icing on the cake. I also greatly appreciate “Pain” and “Space Truckin'”. I’ve got to say that it’s really a great overall selection of filler music. Yes, we’ll always have to put up with a few shoddy choices like Fountains of Wayne and Weezer (and why is Lenny Kravitz here? Activision, can you please make one Guitar Hero game without Lenny Kravitz? Please?), but it far surpasses GH: Aerosmith’s meh-tastic choices and GH: Metallica’s a-bit-too-metal-for-my-tastes track list.

TE Hits the Road: Fargo ’09

Hi all! Yeah, it’s yet another article about the once-again yearly trip I take down to Fargo/Grand Forks. I say once-again because there was a stretch in there for a few years where we didn’t go at all, but for the last three years, it’s been an essential part of summer. The only difference is that now, instead of going down with my family, it’s me and the woman. There are pros and cons for both parties, but I don’t really care who I go with. The Fargo/Grand Forks trip is the only summer staple I still have left, so I’m holding onto it as tight as I can.

That aside, I’ve decided that this year I’m just going to mash up all the pictures I took instead of trying to do anything more inspired with them. No categories, no long-winded stories, no character commentary. Nope. Just going to put them on the page and make some quick notes where I deem necessary.

Also there are tons of pictures,. Enjoy 😉

This is a cake. This is what Stephanie and I ate for breakfast. Actually I had a bowl of Reese Puffs cereal beforehand because she was taking a really long time to get to my house. But yeah, cake for breakfast. Woo!

We struck a deal before we left that she would drive there, and I would drive home. I wasn’t told until we’d arrived at the hotel, but apparently I had been voted to drive everywhere while we were in Fargo.

GPS. Lifesaver.

I bought a huge jawbreaker on a stick at the Duty-Free. It’s been ages since I’d had one of these bad boys, and I felt it was absolutely necessary. My mission was to finish it by the time we got home. I did one better and finished it before we were even back in Canada. The passport is there for scale.

She opted for the jawbreaker’s smaller cousin, the cherry Jelly Belly sucker.

I think I might have had a better chance of getting in here when I used to come down with my family. The girlfriend seems wholly opposed to entering a restaurant so garishly decorated. But we went to TGI Friday’s, so I don’t know. Maybe she’s got a fear of aliens?

I feel it’s important to mention that I used that baby pool to its full extent.

Our facilities. This is the most interesting photo ever.

Aah! Too much sunlight!

“Take one of me on the couch!”

“Now take one of me on the bed!”

See? TGI Friday’s. Hard on the eyes though it my be, no trip to the United States is complete without a stop in either here or Chili’s. I wish Canadian chains or those that extended into Canada knew how to make such wonderful fries.

Dear God! Six years with this camera and still I take blurry pictures! I’m a horribly lazy photographer.

So good.

Also awesome, but far less new to me.

For years, I’ve refused to believe that this DVD exists. Well ,outside Amazon, anyway. But I found it! I really found it! Now I can’t say Hot Topic never did anything for me.

More crap I bought. Teenage Zombies was ten bucks, and the rest I consider to be things absolutely essential for me to own. I was hunting Friday the 13th and American Dad Vol 4, but Ghostbusters Vol 1 came out of nowhere and made me the happiest girl in the world.

Like the trip to Fargo itself, no summer is complete without a small tub of Americone Dream.

TGI Friday’s was having a two-for-one burger day, and I had ordered a burger for dinner, so they gave me this second one to take home. I ate it that night and forcefully regretted eating two giant cheese-slathered burgers in one night. A task a younger me would ahve faced with aplomb.

The main dresser on our first morning. It’s covered in crap we bought and other such things. The Playstation 2 is there because I hate overpaying for movies I don’t really want to watch and every time I bring my DVD player I forget the remote.

Seriously. You’d think I would know how to take a not-blurry picture by now.

I usually grab a jug of Hawaiian puch on my southernly adventures, only this time I picked the “light” version. Trying to watch those calories…

West Acres mall. It’s huge, and wonderful. It’s probably the best mall ever. It’s not a lot better than Winnipeg’s biggest mall, but I only get to go there like once a year and I don’t get bored of it. Also I looooove Mrs. Fields’ cookies.

We went to the Lone Star Texas Grill on our second night. We’d never been there, but were pleasantly surprised. The steak I had was excellent (especially since I hadn’t had a steak for several weeks at that point), and there was a pail of peanuts on the table to keep me busy while we were waiting for the food to come.

That evening we ventured over into downtown Fargo, and on our way back, we ended up accidentally driving through some sort of classic car show-off night. Don’t know for sure what was going down, but we took a bunch of pictures.

I used the Fargo onion to determine that we were going the right way on the way back into the hotel/shopping part of the city.

I guess it’s just out of habit that I keep taking pictures of the Fargo TRU. We didn’t go in this year, but it looked just as sad as ever on the outside.

All packed up! I don’t subscribe to Nintendo Power anymore, but I felt like picking up an issue for old time’s sake. This one was the perfect candidate, because the only things I really want to read about are the new Mario & Luigi game and Wii Sports Resort.

This is how many towels we used over the course of two days.

I’m going to miss that wonderful continental breakfast buffet. It’s really the highlight of all my best hotel stays.

On our way home we stopped in Grand Forks to investigate the Columbia Mall among other shops. It’s just as boring as ever, if not moreso because they don’t even have the cookie place in the food court anymore.

Evidence that she does eat.

There was a completely random mailbox on the side of the road nearl Kohl’s. I felt that I should capture its soul incase it disappears between now and next year.

This makeup is all blurry! Let’s go somewhere else.

I bought these movies at Best Buy. Zombie Strippers is pretty hilarious, Zombie Diaries was disturbing, and Trailer Park of Terror-though I expected the most from it-was merely okay.

No, I did not buy Friady the 13th twice. I don’t know how it got into this picture. On the other hand, Jason X was five bucks and was the last missing piece in my collection, and the Elm Street four-pack was $10 and completed its own collection. Mallrats I couldn’t understand why I didn’t already own.

We hit Rock 30 games on the second night, and I picked these up there. I have no idea why in God’s name I had sold Donkey Kong, as it is one of the greatest original Game Boy games ever, and FF8 I own on PC, but would rather play through my PS2. I will not say how much I paid for either of these items. I will say that one was just a little more expensive than it should have been, and the other was hideously overpriced. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

And that’s pretty much it. Following in the general spirit of this “article”, I really don’t have much more to wrap up with, so I’ll leave it at that.

~FIN

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits

If you ask the average consumer whether they preferred the Guitar Hero or Rock Band franchise, most would likely be curious what’s to prefer, since they’re both pretty much the same game at this point. If you asked someone very into gaming, however, the clear cut winner would be Rock Band nine times out of ten.

The game structure remains similar enough in both series that it won’t influence anyone’s opinions too heavily; what it really comes down to is how each game is sold. In the case of Rock Band, you either buy the Rock Band or Rock Band 2 game disc, and then it’s up to you to download extra music from the music store to enlarge your library as you see fit. On the other hand, Activision’s plan for Guitar Hero is to throw as many discs at us poor schlubs as possible, and offer very little in the way of DLC.

The big difference here is that with Rock Band, you get to choose which songs are added to your game, and you won’t have to pay for half-a-disc worth of songs you’re indifferent to or flat-out hate. Guitar Hero, on the other hand, forces you to buy the songs they want you to play. It’s a damn shame, but the franchise that started a revolution in music gaming has been poorly marketed and left behind the trend to the point where it’s starting to be passed over by people who are addicted to the genre. Myself included. Actually, it sounds a lot like Nintendo’s life story. Only I don’t see a Wii-sized comeback in Guitar Hero’s future.

With Activision flooding the market with “Hero”-branded games, it’s getting hard to keep up with all of them. I’ve purposefully neglected to buy two titles already, and I don’t see myself too interested in buying any of the upcoming games (with the exception Guitar Hero: Van Halen, obviously). The one GH game that I was very excited about, however, was Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. It may seem a bit redundant for me to want the “greatest Hits” version of a game series that I’ve been ragging on for being stale and overused, but I have a very good reason: these are the songs I want to play.

GH: Smash Hits contains a handful of the most popular tracks from all the GH series games that came before World Tour. This is important to me because these are the songs I played and obsessed over while I was still smitten with the genre. Only now they aren’t covers anymore. It brings back a ton of memories and while it follows the trend of running the Guitar Hero name into the ground, it’s got a few redeeming qualities that I’m very much enjoying.

The most obvious change, and the main reason of the game’s existence (other than another udder on Activision’s cash cow), is that all the songs can now be played with a full band, rather than being restricted to guitar and bass, or in the case of GH1 songs, guitar only. This alone does not add nearly enough value to justify my purchase, as I bought the Wii version, and I rarely do any multiplayering on my Wii. Also I do not own Wii drums and do not plan on buying any. What does add the value is that all the note charts have been mostly re-written, making use of all the new GH gimmicks like the slide bar sections and the open note on bass. Most songs are also a Hell of a lot harder, and these changes make the game seem fresh and adds a new challenge to songs I’d long since mastered. The only song that’s noticeably easier is ironically enough Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames”, which is now entirely possible to play through thanks to the slide bar sections.

The other little things that I really love are that the game finally provides a star meter. It was always a pain in the ass playing songs over and over, but never knowing exactly how far away you were from earning that fifth star. The game also lets you choose from any song right at the start of the game when you choose quickplay mode. It’s not something I would have ever benefited from, as I always blaze through career mode before touching anything else, but it’s a super-nice feature for casual players and people who just bought it and want to get the most out of it at a party they’re having that night. I dunno. Little things matter.

The career mode structure is also very nice. It’s back to the set list format, rather than World Tour‘s me-too gig setup. You unlock new sets by earning so many stars, and new sets unlock very, very quickly. Therefore, you can usually skip right to the songs you want to play without having to pick through too much of the other material. The only exception is the final set, which unlocks after you’ve played all the encore songs. But those are all the super-difficult songs anyway, and I doubt you want to play the new version of “Play With Me” without a nice, long warm-up anyway. (read: it’s very hard!)

I’d also like to make a little side note here, where must admit that I’ve forgotten how much fun it is to play these guitar-based games just for the sake of playing them. The last few I’ve been playing on the 360, and it’s really just become entirely about the achievements. Playing this on Wii has rekindled a lot of feelings of love for the actual gameplay, rather than the chase for arbitrary virtual medals. Just sayin’.

There are a couple of gripes I have with the game though. While the songs that Activision picked make an excellent roster of playable songs, the game only offers 40-some songs. This is essentially Guitar Hero’s Greatest Hits album, and everyone knows that the standard hits album is much longer than a band’s standard albums. There are 86 songs in World Tour, Guitar Hero 5 will have 85. We should have gotten at least 60 in Smash Hits (the entire GH1 soundtrack wouldn’t have been a bad idea). Also, there are no bonus songs! You earn money through career mode, but all it’s used for is bland clothing options. Get Ready 2 Rokk and Decontrol were probably my most-played tracks on GH1, so I’m very upset to see that no bonus songs from any of the GH games have been included. I expected Monkey Steals The Peach’s “Guitar Hero” at the very, very least.

But everything else aside, I really just bought Smash Hits because Guitar Hero doesn’t have a lag calibration option and nobody’s re-released it. All I really want is to play the first Guitar Hero game. That’s it. But I guess the fourteen tracks they provided here will be more than enough. I got what I really pined for-“Killer Queen”, “More Than a Feeling”, “Take it Off”, “Godzilla” and “Unsung”- but I sure do miss “Crossroads”, “Spanish Castle Magic”, “Texas Flood” and “Frankenstein”. Also, how could they possibly say this is the best of Guitar Hero music and have not included “Iron Man”. That’s like the biggest song ever. not a personal favourite, really, but it’s insanely well-known. Fuck, I think I’m just going to go play GH1 for a while, lag or not. I love those songs so much…

Sorry, I’m not home right now

Despite the fact that they were way outside my budget, I went out and bought tickets for No Doubt and Paramore this morning. They’re sorta crappy seats, but they were the cheaper ones and still so much more than I should have spent. But you should have seen the way here eyes lit up when she told me that her two favourite bands were coming to town together. There was no way I couldn’t get the tickets. Oh well…

I’ve never waited in line for concert tickets the day they go on sale before, and I don’t think I got a very good impression of what it’s really like. It could have been the low-profile Ticketmaster location (tucked away in the corner of a drugstore), but there were less than ten people in line. I wasn’t the only male, but it was the first time I’ve been the manliest guy in a crowd. The line me and the guys stood in on Wii day was way more intense than this one. I guess that either nobody cares about No Doubt anymore, or they all just went to different locations. In any case, I’m disappointed. I was expecting at least a little more out of this line.

Oh, and don’t tell her about these! They’re a surprise!

Promise not to stop when I say “when”

Well, it’s now the 24th of December, and I have successfully made one news post every day. Guess maybe I did have it in me after all. I know a couple were a bit crappy, but sometiimes that’s just how she goes.

Today, I was intending to talk about the best DLC for Rock Band, but I’d rather just make a bit of a spiel about how I hate working on computers that aren’t mine. See, I’m making this post from my girlfriend’s laptop, as I will not be home at all today, and I had to make the last post, right? But anyway, I’m finding this very uncomfortable. The whole compressed keyboard thing is a pain to adjust to, and making my typing way slower. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a vey nice laptop, and I wouldn’t mind owning one myself, but I just can’t stand adjusting to a new keyboard.

Much more of an issue is the fact that it’s running Windows Vista. Oh my God I hate Vista. It took me nearly half an hour to figure out how to access my FTP site or whatever through the network connections, and it really shouldn’t be that hard. I don’t think I could even do it again. And why doesn’t the “choose program” under “open with” have a bunch of default programs? I had to dig through the whole Windows directory to find the stupid Notepad. Notepad! And yes, I do all my HTMLing in Notepad. I’m sure it would be a lot easier with a program that would pick out wrong and useles code, but whatever. I’ve been doing it this way for six years, why change now? I hate change.

On a lighter note, we watched A Christmas Tale from that 6-movie set last night. It was actually a lot funnier than it was scary. The plot was about a bunch of kids who found a dangerous criminal who had fallen into a pit. She had robbed a bank, and the kids were trying to get her to give them the money before they’d help her out of the hole. Then there was voodoo and zombies and a slightly ambiguous ending. It was okay, nothing special. I think my favourite part was that there were four boys, and when they were coming up with nicknames to use while talking to the criminal, they named themselves after the A-Team. That was funny.

So yep. That concludes the 24 Days of Materialism. Hoped you enjoyed it as much as I hated finding a way to make a blog post every day for 24 days staight.

She’s a helluva thrill

Okay, video game soundtrack time. I guess you can all just leave the room now since nobody cares.

Yep. Megaman 9 official soundtrack. I was totally psyched for this one. Had it pre-ordered and everything. And it rocks. Like, for real, not just for the sake of the pun. Inticreates had a lot of extra processing power to work with for this game, but kept it down to NES-styled graphics. The best part is that they kept the music consistent with those graphics, and you get a disc full of wonderful 8-bit techno to rock out to with this one.

Honestly, there isn’t a lot else for me to say here. I want to talk on and on about it, but if you’ve played any of the NES Megaman games, you pretty much know what you’re signing up for here. I’d say it’s on par with the original game’s soundtrack as far as quality goes, and that’s pretty good. No song will ever trump the theme to Bubble Man’s stage, but the stage anthems are great contenders. The intro music is pretty rad too.

What else do I have to say? I love it. If you like chiptunes, then you’ll probably get a kick out of it. Just make sure you import it, and don’t get it through Amazon or the like, or else it’ll cost you like double. That’s a bad thing.

Just wanted you to know

Alright! Twelve days are gone and done with, and that means I’m halfway there! I think that alone is cause enough for celebration, as I’m pretty sure that none of us thought I would make it even this far. So here’s to twelve more days. I can do it!

Today’s object of my affection is season two of Metalocalypse, Brendon Small’s wonderful black metal-themed satire. If you didn’t read last year’s review of season one, the show is about a band called Dethklok. It’s full of brilliant social commentary, satire on Hollywood and the media, and violence. Oh yes, so much violence. Season one was pretty bad, but season two takes everything up a notch and almost gets disturbing. And while it’s twice as funny as well, the fact that even I’m starting to think the violence is getting to be too much really says something.

But enough about the downside of things. The show is hilarious! This season parodies wonderful things like publicity stunts, “with-it” celebrity managers, rehab, and celebrities who decide to become government officials. “Deathgov” is definitely one of my favourite episodes. The season starts out right after the first ended, with Dethklok and the rest of the world recovering from an attempt on the band’s lives, though sadly it continues on throughout the season as self-contained episodes and shows barely any interest in a running story until the last two episodes. I was a little disappointed, but then I realized that the show was great anyway, so I’ll forget about it.

I think one of the greatest things about the DVD set in particular is the special features. Like the last season, this one’s special features are all just a bunch of extra material. Not blooper reels or deleted scenes, but rather entirely new short sketches. Or, well, not short. Most of them are really long and some even make fun of you for sitting through the entire thing. My favourite has the band sitting in their band meeting closet, only eyes visible, just naming bands. It’s hilarious in its own way, and the fact that it lasts for around twenty minutes (didn’t actually time it) is the icing on the cake. It’s nice to see that even the DVD extras are taking jabs at how puffed up the importance of DVD special features is. I guess the only things that would be considered special features are two music videos for a pair of songs from The Dethalbum. Also, Nathan reading Shakespeare makes a return, wonderful as ever. That should be enough to convince fans to rush out and buy this set.

So what am I going to do with my conclusuory (yes it is a word) paragraph? Not much. How many more positive adjectives do I need to use? You know what? I could really go for some spaghetti…

I’m doing fine

Day three, still doing good. Granted, I still have 21 more to go, but for 2008, posting three days in a row is a huge improvement. If I need to refresh your memory on what category I’m working on today, it’s music! I can imagine everyone groaning at that one. Yes, I know hearing me talk about music is boring. I’m sorry, but it’s something I have to do! I have bills to pay and mouths to feed!

Ah, been a while since I’ve said anything about Jimmy Eat World. Though really, I guess it makes sense. Up until last week, I never owned any of their CDs but Futures, and that I barely ever listened to. Well, I started listeneing to it again a while back, right around the last time I went to Grand Forks. Thought it would be something good to put on the iPod to make my playlist a little more girlfriend-friendly.

Other than that, they were really put out of my mind though. But when I started playing Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour, the tides changed just a little bit. If you weren’t aware, JEW’s biggest single, “The Middle”, is in both games. Back in the day it was real popular-like, and I was one of those hipster kids who shunned stuff that got popular like that, so I wrote it and the band off. Futures worked for me because it was so different and emo-tastic, but other than that I would never say I was a huge JEW fan. But plastically strumming along to the song, I found myself enamored of it, and decided to check out the rest of their work. So I downloaded the Jimmy Eat World discography. Now hold your pitchforks, download haters, there’s more to the story.

I quickly fell for Bleed American (features “The Middle”), and then I gave their newest disc, Chase This Light, a spin. Digitally. The short version is that I loved it right away. It turns out that the title track was actually being piped in through TRU’s satellite radio, and I loved that song but had no idea who it was (despite the fact that Jim Adkins has a very noticable voice).

In the here and now, I’m not as crazy about the album, but I’ve actually gone out and paid cash moneys for it, so that says something about how much I still like it. It’ll never have the profound effect on me that Futures did, but that was a different time, and I was a slightly different person. To be a little more descriptive, Chase This Light is a lot more poppy than Futures, and it doesn’t have even half the depth of the latter album, but it’s still a great listen, and I’m pretty sure that most people with open musical tastes would welcome it into their music collection with open arms, were they to receive it as a certain holiday gift. Yes, that means I recommend it. How often do I review things that I don’t recommend? Pretty much never. Especially not during the most wonderful time of the year.