New Guitar Hero Track Pack

Red Octane continues to bleed us dry with incremental track packs for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II, and I continue to eat it up. Granted, this time around the offering is something new (three tracks by My Chemical Romance) as opposed to re-releases of tracks from Guitar Hero's debut outing.

Well, immediately upon their release, I forked over the Microsoft Points and subsequently played through the three tracks. My opinions on My Chemical Romance aren't secret; I don't much care for the band.

I will forego a lecture about my own musical tastes at the moment for a lesser point, which is to say that the fundamental draw of a music game hinges upon your ability to enjoy the music. What differentiates the "rhythm experience" of Guitar Hero from brain stem reflex of hitting buttons is listening to the music being interpreted. An inherent enjoyment of the music will engender an inherent enjoyment of the game. This leads into the answer to a common question: "Why don't you like DDR?" I don't like DDR because I loathe J-Pop and house music. Simple as that. And because you can't really dance to rock music, or any of the music I like, they won't make a DDR game around it, and subsequently I will not play DDR.

So, the songs themselves are already a black eye for this demo, because I dislike the glam-emocore it offers. However, a closer examination of the gameplay they offer would be more to the point of this review.

Three tracks are offered, all of them from The Black Parade. They are as follows, in order of ascending difficulty: "Famous Last Words," "Teenager," and "This is How I Disappear." All three songs present an interesting question, will bands be eager to publish songs in Guitar Hero (or Rock Band) format if, by doing so, they are revealing in a very visual and colorful form the simplicity of their work?

All three songs are illustrative of the structure My Chemical Romance seems to depend on, which is a riff consisting of power chords, each repeating for one or two bars before ascending or descending, whichever the song calls for. "Famous Last Words" is most guilty of this crime. Structurally it's similar to "Mother" by Danzig or "Holy Diver" by Dio, in that the song is mind-numbingly easy for the majority of its run time, interrupted by a solo whose difficulty is maddening when contrasted with the rest of the song. Despite the solo, upon completing it I earned a few point achievements I neglected to get in my rush to beat the game this spring. This is a testament to the song's ease, repetition, and interminable length.

If "Famouse Last Words" is the low point of the update, then "Teenager" is the high point. It's the most pleasing song to listen to, being light and rhythmically diverse when compared with the dark and plodding feel of the other two tracks. The difficulty is consistent throughout, making it a song I'd be likely to play through again if I felt like it. If I were to compare the song to any other, it would be MCR's other track offering in Guitar Hero II, "Dead!", except it's even less monotonous than "Dead!" is, which is a compliment considering how enjoyable the song is despite its formulaic refrain.

The final song in the track pack is "This Is How I Disappear," which in both sound and gameplay is a rehash of "The Beast and the Harlot" by Avenged Sevenfold (A7x, as their fans enjoy calling them, because brevity is apparently their thing). That's all there is to say about it, really. It will exercise your ability to double strum, and the solo is alright. That's all I can muster to write about it, really, which leads to kind of an anticlimax for this review which fits the anticlimax the song represents in the track pack.

Overall I'd rate this downloadable content as less than average. While its offering disappointed me, it may please devoted MCR fans who also like Guitar Hero. What I am pleased with is the precedent this sets. Obviously bands are interested in offering their music to the game industry, meaning that there could be track offerings from other bands in the future. Such a venture would be a race against the clock, however, because Guitar Hero III is due out soon enough, as well as Rock Band. The publisher's choice is such: wait until these new games are out to provide the content, or blow our load now? Seems like the former will prevail. Personally, I can still dream that there will be a Queens of the Stone Age track pack before the new titles release. I invite you to entertain your own wishes in this subject.

About Reviews

This blog is slowly coming together as I do a lot of scratching on a notebook at work. As previously stated, I intend to use this as a means of reviewing different products that happen to pass into my hands. I feel as though I need to state a few ground rules so you understand the game I'm playing with this whole venture.

• I assume that you care when chances are that you don't. I am a lowly college student with no ties to any industry that I speak of. You do not know me from Adam. However, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't think you'd read it and give it some thought.
• This is not Amazon.com and I will not treat it as such. If I wanted to write the type of review that is found at the end of a product listing, I would just do that there. A few things come along with this, relating to format and content. I will assign no numerical rating to any product or any aspect of a product. I will not itemize, be it in the form of breaking a game into "Graphics," "Sound," and "Gameplay," nor will I do a track-by-track breakdown of an album. That is poor form and not conducive to forming a cohesive opinion about a subject. This is not eBay, and there will be no "A+ would listen again."
• This is an opinion blog, and these are just opinions. Read and digest to get the views of a person who cares to write about things he's used or experienced. That is all of the weight I put into these words.
• I will not always be current. I am late to the party with many of these writings. Fact is, unlike professionals, I do not get my hands on a product before public release, and writing this isn't my full time job. I will often be months late with my appraisals of a product, depending on a number of factors, not the least of which is pure whim. As of this writing I still haven't beaten Zelda: Twilight Princess, which came out months ago and has been covered to death by all forms of press, but chances are I'll throw my two cents in anyway. I am a full time student with a full time job, and time doesn't permit a lot of commitment to this project. This leads into my next point, which is
• I will not report on something until I'm through with it. If what I'm saying is an initial impression, it will be clearly marked. Otherwise, I abstain until I have seen a satisfactory amount of the product.

I think that's all I intended to say. Those are the ground rules of this venture, for you to understand and for me to follow. This understanding makes it easier to write this blog. I hope we're all on the same page, because my first reviews are right around the corner.

Guitar Hero II Tournament Preliminaries

This is a covert communique from work.

Tonight, Y105 is hosting a Guitar Hero II tournament at Buffalo Wild Wings in Ontario, 7:00pm - 9:00pm. These are the preliminaries for a larger tournament which concludes with the finals on August 11 in the Richland Mall court. If you think you've got the stuff, come on out.

Nickname

I know it's vulgar to self assign a nickname, but I've always been fond of the moniker "Hoss."

Okkervil River's "The Stage Names" Arrives

A pleasant surprise awaited me in my inbox today. I'd pre-ordered Okkervil River's The Stage Names from Jagjaguwar's official site, simply because no record store around here will carry it when it's released. Well, I wasn't aware of a promotion the site was running, which allows pre-order customers to download the album long before its release date (August 7 or so). So, color me giddy that I have my dirty mitts on the whole thing at this very moment. First impressions will follow shortly, once I've had the opportunity to digest it.

Crash

I was in a car crash today.

So, immediately after swearing off of personal blogging, I go right on to tell you about my automobile accidents. I'm not famous for my resolve.

I had just left work and was headed down Rt-39 to the military surplus store in order to procure large mirrored aviator sunglasses for a musical I'm in. By the branch campus of OSU the car in front of me makes to turn, then doesn't. After the median ends, the car then aligns to make a u-turn.

My internal response to this is ",You gotta be kidding." No, he really wasn't. My safe four car lengths became an anxious three, followed by a precarious two, succeeded by an angering one, and finally...

Ker-slam.

Well, it was more like "screeech... ker-slam," as I had frantically slammed the brakes and pressed with all of the zeal of a man possessed. I was down to 15 miles per hour at the time of collision, when the passenger side front fender of my car slammed into his driver's side rear wheel well. His rear end swung out from the force and I kept rolllllling forward, coming to a stop at the shoulder of 39.

The following exchange is entirely predictable, aside from the wife of the man I hit being an insurance agent, which facilitated the process. There was the obligatory "Are you okay?" "Yeah, are you okay?" exchange, followed by the arrival of EMTs and police, and in my case, parents. We both gave our statements, he was found to be at fault for the smash-up, for making an illegal u-turn.

Aside from a sore back from tensing up as if I'd just grabbed a live wire and frayed nerves which could have easily come from a live wire as well, I was physically fine. My car is perfectly drivable, my brake stomping wasn't in vain. The front bumper is cracked and the right headlight is dimmed from the punch, what, on a human would be called a "shiner," on a car, is exactly the opposite. My puny saturn fucked up his Chrysler pretty well though. The body was fine, sure, but the wheel I collided with was tilted inward, the axle bent, requiring a tow.

It was my first crash in my whole driving career. I almost made it to 20 with a spotless record. Some people talk about living through crashes in slow motion, as if they were watching a bad movie of them driving badly. Others say it was over before they knew it, sped up like Benny Hill footage. For me, it was boring old real-time. I had time to think and react, although I did so poorly and to little real avail (aside from slowing down enough to turn a major accident into a minor one). All I could remark on during the event, aside from my own disbelief, was how together it felt, and how underwhelming. It was a squeal followed by a loud jarring, and the only remarkable thing was how the force of the collision didn't throw me in any direction other than upwards. A second in mid-air, followed by my ass meeting the seat again. I almost caught myself saying, "Hey, this isn't so bad."

It's easy to talk about how relieved I am that no damage was done, I've said it about forty times today. I don't care too much about my car or any scrapes that I get. I would not, however, deal too well with causing injury to someone else, or god forbid, killing them. That's the greatest relief. Despite all of this selflessness only revealed by a "near-life experience," I had one absurdly selfish thought after I saw that the other parties were okay, but before I inspected my own car. This is the thought I will leave you with:

"I just put $20 worth of gas in this goddamned car."

Mission Statement

To say that this is a personal blog is a mistake. I've played that game before, to disappointing results. This isn't going to be filled with writings about me, although they will be things pertaining to me. I want to use it as a way to publish opinion and commentary, reviews and speculation. Sure, if something happens to me which is amusing and worth sharing, I will share away. I will not post every day, nor every week. There will be no "checking in" with my audience, because that's fruitless.

So, now that you know what this is about, the show can get on the road.