Welcome To New England

Where the sun sets EXTREMELY fast. I was caught off guard by how quickly it got dark here.

The flight was uneventful, save for me making some unanticipated progress on Wipeout Pure for the PSP. I hadn’t expected to do as well as I did, and am now motivated to keep playing.

Also, I stepped outside the home of the In-Laws as a big brown UPS truck showed up, and when I got out the door, the lady in brown (hereafter known as Bringer Of Miracles) dropped this in my hands.

For once, as this American holiday draws near, I truly give thanks.

Well, except for the whole not-being-able-to-actually-play-it-for-four-days thing…

Flying For Turkey

Last post before bedtime and waking up at 4 am just to get down to the airport in time. The destination? Maine. The reason? The very domestic and Uber Middle Class excuse of spending the holidays with the In Laws. In this case, American Thanksgiving. I’ve been told that aside from the Mother, Father and Sister-In-Law that I already know very well, there will be an Aunt and Uncle that want to see who their niece got married off to, and this will involve much turkey, pumpkin pie, baby back ribs and lobster. Hopefully not all at once. I’m interested to see how this goes since it will be the first time in years I’ve been to a small town, and my first time in Maine. And of course, there’s Rock Band waiting for me at their home.

Oh hey, speaking of Rock Band…

It’s only fitting that since this a Thanksgiving occasion, the next Rock Band video is a performance by Iron Maiden of their famous “We were killed by your stupid white people” song, Run To The Hills.

The “If I Had The Money Game”

Today I was the playing the above game and decided that If I Had The Money, and I wanted to actually get an exercise bike, I would probably forego the usual kind and instead shell out a few thousand dollars for a machine I used to see in Singapore arcades:

The game to the left is called “Propcycle” by Namco. It is the one and only time in my entire life that I have actually been motivated to exercise.

The way the game works is that you sit on a silly looking, yellow exercise bike that has been wired into the arcade cabinet. You play a young boy who has built a flying bicycle. The only catch is that the bike is actually powered by your pedaling, so once you launch off the pad, your sole means of staying aloft is your own real, physical stamina at being able to maintain pedaling. As you play the game, you will engage in a variety of activities such as chasing after balloons and running through them to pop them, or a simple timed lap, where you just follow the floating rings through the air and try and cruise them as they add precious seconds to your rapidly diminishing timer. I found the game extremely novel, and actually a bit of fun to play in Singapore arcades. However, a major obstacle to my enjoyment of the game was my own lack of physical fitness. Being a typical gamer, once I was given an actual objective (like get to the finish line, as opposed to “bike in place for 20 minutes”) I completely forgot about any aversion I may have had to exercise or exertion and simply concentrated on trying to achieve my goal. Unfortunately, where my hands can keep me sustained in gaming action for hours at a time, my body as a whole is really only good for a few minutes, and after 2 or 3 rounds of this game, I would usually find myself out of breath and exhausted, for the simple reason that I’d notice the clock was ticking, or that the finish line was in sight, and I would go full out into a mad pedaling spree to finish up the level. Unlike simply pushing a button rapidly, this is not something your recover from mere moments afterwards. It’s the only game I’ve ever seen that made one of the people I hung out with actually throw up outside the arcade because they’d pushed themselves too hard, too fast in their effort to finish.

Apparently, after doing some checking, the game is considered neither a high demand item, nor a vintage collectible, so right just now, if you were crazy enough to actually want to buy it, a Hong Kong importer is willing to sell it for the astoundingly reasonable price of $2950, which is a pretty amazing amount when you consider that if you were a supremely geeky young gamer that actually took the time to call up arcade vendors in the 80′s (I’m not saying I did that, just, y’know, in case you WERE one of those kids that looked through the Edmonton yellow pages to find that only about 6 companies in the city did it in the mid-80′s…) and asked them about the prices on full cabinets, the average game of Q*Bert cost about that much as well, let alone a laser-disc behemoth like Dragon’s Lair.

Today is also the last before our trip to the USA. With any luck, this will be the final day in which I don’t have Rock Band in my life. Speaking of which…

Since this is the next to last day before our Thanksgiving trip, today’s Rock Band video is brought to you by Canadian band Rush with their song, Tom Sawyer.

More Typing

Still have not finished retyping out all the things I need to and bringing them over to my desktop computer, but hopefully that will be done today. We are now officially keeping farmer’s hours, having gone to bed at a little after 7 pm, and having a proper farmer’s breakfast at 5 am. Getting to the airport on time on Tuesday morning is not looking like it’s going to be a problem. Staying up past 9 pm however…

And now, back to Rock Band.

Strange whacky news has been ensuing over the weekend. Canadians in particular are now in the middle of a tug of war of confusion as local retailers (or at least some of them) have changed their sale date for the game YET AGAIN, only now they’re putting it back to November 20th, while others are still keeping their sale date to December 17th, causing many panicked, hardcore music game fans to cancel local pre-orders, pay ridiculous amounts of money to get it shipped from the USA (or worse yet, take a huge risk on buying out eBay pre-orders) and then canceling THOSE orders once again as the news from retailers shifts back to November 20th. In short, many Canadians are now exhausted with financially and mentally with having to keep up with the merry go round of shifting dates.

Also, some of those lucky Americans that took advantage of the stupidity of some retailers and got the game early were purchasers of the PS3 version. So far the news coming from them is ALL BAD. For starters, people that bought Guitar Hero III solely for the purpose of having a bass guitar for Rock Band may in fact be totally screwed. Early reports are that the GHIII guitar DOES NOT work with Rock Band after all, despite earlier assurances from Harmonix that it would. There are also reports surfacing that yes, for people that own Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80′s, you will, in fact, have to keep that PS2 around. The new Fender Strat controller still won’t work with those games. Oh well, I guess Sony manages to keep the PS2 alive a little bit longer with this move. Probably means that some point when my current PS2 dies, I’ll have to go out and buy another one just to keep playing my old Guitar Hero games.

As Rock Band moves closer and closer to release date (THREE DAYS!), I also find myself getting more than a little annoyed at the ignorance a lot of gamers display. But then most gamers play simply to enjoy and don’t follow the ups and downs of the industry. Nevertheless, I still find frustrating in the extreme when I see people looking at Rock Band and dismissively saying, “I can’t believe how pathetic these guys are, they just ripped off the creators of Guitar Hero! Bastards!” And then drop amazing comments like refusing to buy the game, because they want to support the makers of Guitar Hero and not be traitors to the brand.

I really, really, REALLY hope that somewhere on the Rock Band box is a sticker or something that says, loudly and clearly, “FROM THE MAKERS OF GUITAR HERO,” because it strikes me as intensely unfair that people would punish Harmonix for being brave enough to try and evolve, and support Neversoft, who took the series AWAY from the creators, and turned it into an ugly, deeply flawed, commercial venture that succeeds because of what Harmonix laid out previously, not because of the silly new additions Neversoft made to it in an effort to destroy the music playing experience–I still don’t understand why they hate the idea of letting players feel like they’re playing music so much–and make it feel more like a videogame that involves beating someone else rather than simply bettering your own skills. Why Activision thought it would be a good idea to give the series to a company that hates music so much and believes the only “legitimate gaming goodness” in the world comes from beating an opponent into submission is beyond me.

And finally, here’s a video, taken from the Harmonix website that shows off the performance animation for the characters in Rock Band. Harmonix took out all the play-meters and just left the background game engine intact so viewers could see the characters at work.

Dead Platforms

A minor–but by no means insurmountable, though extremely annoying–hitch has occurred in what I thought was going to be a straightforward task. One of the things that my agent is asking for to keep my material updated is the original synopses I wrote for the earlier novels. Unfortunately, those synopses are not on the current computer, and were scattered across two old laptops that I’d used during my time in Singapore. The first and older, was a badly manufactured local product with broken hinges on the monitor (meaning it could no longer stand on its own power and needed the screen to be rested against something behind it, like a stack of phone books). The other was the laptop I moved onto after the first started to fall apart.

The problem was trying to get said files off of these two laptops.

In the case of the first laptop, the broken monitor hinge had also cut the wires that connected the monitor’s power to the laptop. It still worked, but ONLY if the angle of the monitor were adjusted to some arbitrary degree that the wires would properly connect and the monitor would work. Once I’d managed to achieve that, I tried transferring the files off by use of a 3 1/2 disk (you remember those, I’m sure…) except that, to my horror, I found that the disk drive no longer worked. It whirred, gurgled and made all kinds of interesting mechanical noises, but it failed to be detected by the computer, let alone format a disc for use.

In the case of the second laptop, it still worked as well, but, being slimmer and designed for portability, its 3 1/2 disc drive was external. I plugged that in, and it too failed to work. Both of these laptops were manufactured a few years before USB ports became standard features in computers, so I can’t even just plug in a USB flash memory card and transfer the data off that way.

Which leaves me with the old school solution; I dragged out my most recent laptop, which DOES have USB ports built in, set up beside the first laptop which, after much fiddling, I managed to get working with its screen, and then, for fear of losing the “magic,” left it exactly where it was and broke out the newer laptop to use those touch typing skills I somehow had the foresight to pick up in high school (I figured at the time if I was going to be a writer, I should learn how to type. Probably the last time I ever used logic in my life) and managed to re-type my synopsis for my first novel.

Now I am going to do the same for the second today, and spend the rest of the time tidying up all this new stuff I have to give the agent, including my new blurb, reflecting my married status, new home in Toronto and–although it’s still a few days from now–by dedication to Rock Band.

Oh hey, what a segue! SPEAKING OF ROCK BAND…

IGN has now released the first online review of the game. It’s a bit weird how they approached it. First, they have different individuals that chose to specialize in different instruments give their take on each one, and then a final review of the game itself is given, totaling up an impressive six pages. This in itself is not what I find to be the weird part. I suspect that there may have been fears of being accused of being Harmonix fanboys, since they spend the majority of the six pages concentrating primarily on the flaws of the game. For every single instrument and for the game in general, they talk about what really bothers them about the game, and what potential pitfalls gamers face when they pick it up. They make almost sound like they don’t like the game very much… and then they give it a 9.4, decisively beating Guitar Hero III which, in their reviews, they had nothing but good things to say about, and, if their write-up is to be believed, was a very nearly flawless game which they gave an 8.9 to.

This is not to say that they bash Rock Band out of all reason, they obviously don’t, they have a great deal of love for the game. But I suppose that because the game is fairly expensive, and because some of their comments are based on the pre-production controllers they got (they weren’t big fans of the new guitar) they decided it would best to say “trust us, the game is good,” and then get the relevant concerns out that people who have to drop the dollars might want to know about since it’s a much heavier investment than a typical game.

They have also posted a video review which takes much the same tack as their written review, although the lack of score makes it out to seem like they don’t quite like the game as much as their final score would indicate.

More Writing Stuff

I have to sift through old laptops and go searching for files that have been scattered willy nilly in the wake of two hard drive crashes in as many years for manuscript files, plot synopses and other assorted Writerly PR things. I got an e-mail from my agent asking to update all my stuff, and to send him digital copies of all the previous books since a lot of publishers have apparently realized that the 21st century occurred and are now finally embracing digital formats for novels. I don’t know whether that means he actually has any publishers requesting to see the files, but still, who am I to argue? I also have to update my blurb on his website, since the last time I submitted it, I was a) in Singapore b) incredibly bitter and c) not remotely married. All these things have dramatically changed in the time since I wrote it, so I need to get on that. Oh, and finish that kid’s novel I’m working on.

And… just because you didn’t possibly think you’d get a post out of me without seeing something Rock Band related–FIVE DAYS! YEEEEEES!–here’s a video side-by-side comparison of songs that appear on both Guitar Hero III and Rock Band, but played on Hard. For some reason, Games Radar, the creators of the video, then made a bizarre leap of logic, saying that GHIII’s hard was equivalent to GHII’s Expert, and that RB’s Expert was equal to GHII’s Hard. I’m not entirely sure how you make that leap of logic when you play both games on Hard, and then arbitrarily make a decision about one game’s hard level based on playing it, then another about the other game’s Expert level WITHOUT playing it, but oh well…

To Begin With… Everything

Which is what Russel Hammond answered William Miller in Almost Famous when asked, “What do you love about music?” Except of course I’m changing the question to, “What do you love about Rock Band?“

More news rolling out as the Final Days (SIX DAYS!) approach. In the USA, the game has already shipped to stores in advance of its “street date” (meaning the day on which a product is officially supposed to go on sale) to some of the more bigger, more clueless stores, and enterprising gamers have been taking advantage of this by going in, asking about the game, being told, unsurprisingly, “Oh, it’s in the back,” and then asking to buy the game, usually involving forking over a little extra cash when the register rings it up as “Not To Be Sold Yet,” or talking animatedly to the clueless staff member to distract them when the message comes up on the till. I have already seen pictures of people playing the game at home. It pains me.

Also, Harmonix has also finally announced the pricing on downloadable content, or DLC as the kids call it, and the prices are surprisingly reasonable. A “three pack” of songs is going to cost $5.50, including full compatibility with guitar, bass, vocals and drums. If you choose to buy a song individually, you’re going to pay $1.99. These prices will fluctuate depending on the song, with some individual songs (like, say, the old bonus tracks from Guitar Hero) going for as little as $0.99, and some of the higher profile songs (like, maybe, hopefully, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven?) weighing in at $2.99.

This is a nice break from the Swill Merchants at Activision who charge $6.25 for a three pack… and that’s it. Their strategy is to put one “high demand” song on every three pack, and scatter these around to force gamers to spend upwards of $18 to get three songs they really like spread out across nine songs. Once again Activision, I hope you get the karma coming to you for what you’re doing to music in your bid for software supremacy.

And finally, here’s the complete “compilation video” of all the songs that will appear on the final game.

Shopping In The Morning

Is extremely hard to do when your body is saying, “Dude, it’s midnight. Go to sleep.”

Nevertheless, that is what happened earlier today, when dragged our sorry selves down to Bloor to run a few errands, send out some mail, buy some groceries, and shop at th Evil, EVIL bookstore that has too many things we want at prices we can afford. Since one particular movie is an HD-DVD exclusive (at least for now) I had no issues with picking it up, and we are now the owners of this:

Since I haven’t seen the movie, I’m going into it with only the vaguest idea that it’s supposed to be good. Though having enjoyed Shaun of the Dead immensely, I can’t imagine that it would be too terrible a film. The premise is solid, and hopefully more of that Clever British Humor is on display.

And, just to keep the momentum going, there’s this:

SEVEN DAYS!

More Disjointed Days

Having only been conscious for a very short while, there’s not much to talk about…

Except, of course, Rock Band. We are now, for all intents and purposes exactly one week away from the sale of the game. In America. Earlier today there was finally an official announcement from Harmonix saying that the French/English language issues on the packaging have held up the game’s release in the Great White North, and Canucks will be getting the game on December 17th in three flavors; Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Playstation 2. The only versions available at this time will be the “Special Edition” which includes the game, one guitar, one microphone and one drum set, or the game all by its lonesome, for people that already have a guitar and aren’t interested in purchasing all the other instruments. Single bundle combos will go on sale next year.

This another one of those times when it really pays off to be a cynic and have no faith in multi-national companies, as I can still look forward to the game arriving at the doorstep of the In-Laws when we go down next week, so aside from some painful moments of caressing the box and reading the instructions, I’ll still be able to actually play the game by Saturday when we return home.

And, just to keep things going, here’s Yet Another Rock Band trailer:

Strange Days

Having just woken up before midnight, there’s barely anything to talk about at all. Before bed, coffee was purchased at a local shop in the neighborhood, some of the children’s novel was written, that’s about it, really.

And, to keep the Rock Band fever going, here’s a quick video of some of the venues that players will find themselves performing in…