So I’ve been playing GTA IV for over 2 weeks now and I have to say, this game is still a blast.  It’s making it hard to play anything else.  I’ve downloaded 3 demos over the past couple days and I just get bored in the middle of them and want to head back to GTA.

Sometimes I just wander around trying to get achievements (finally lost a 4 Star Wanted level and survived 5 minutes a 6 Stars) other times I do one of the many missions available to me and other times I just go around blowing the crap out of things.  Even the multiplayer is fun (if not more intense than I generally need).

I’m afraid GTAIV will end up like GTAIII or Oblivion where I just kind of quit about 30% into the game.  Oh well though, I’ve gotten plenty of hours of entertainment out of the thing.

Anyway, if you’ve got a console and haven’t picked this up yet, what’s your deal?  Go do it already.

Well, I ended up going to the midnight launch of GTA IV last night.  I’m pretty excited about the game but nothing fevered or anything.  Best Buy is right down the street though and my friend had preordered it and wanted to get it RIGHT AWAY.  After playing some Army of Two while waiting for midnight to roll around, we headed out to the Best Buy and got in line.

We got there about 2 minutes before midnight and there were maybe 40 people there.  There were 2 seperate lines, one for preorders and one for non preorders.  I didn’t bother to preorder it since I figured they’d have about eleventy billion copies.  I was right.  And judging from my experience with Halo 3 and GHIII, I thought that it would be faster to just show up and pick it up rather than having to wait for them to look it up in the system (and wait in the line for them looking up everyone elses games in the system).   I ended up being right and saving about … 20 seconds.

Still, I’m now the proud owner of GTA IV for the 360 and have played it for a grand total of one hour.  I won’t really get to play it tonight until I get back from the gym though (look at that, actually not sitting around!).

Besides sit on my ass video games though,  I’m also in the process of trying to find a new bike.  When I moved I didn’t bring it with me and instead borrowed an extra one my parents had.  They ended up needing it back though and now I am currently bikeless.  Luckily the weather here has been so crappy it’s not an issue but I’m back on the market and looking.  I haven’t really bought a bike since I was 12 though so it’s a bit of an experience.

I think I’m looking for more of a hybrid/commuter bike (certainly not a road bike and I doubt I’ll be doing any mountain biking) so if anyone has any suggestions I’m willing to listen.  Right now my short list is something like this:

• Fuji CrossTown
• Fuji Absolute 2.0
• Trek 7.3 FX
• Trek 7.2 FX
• Giant Cyprus DX
• Giant Sedona DX
• GT Nomad LTD

I’d be open to suggestions though, so if anyone knows a $500-ish bike that’s good for mostly on road/trail riding let me know.

So over New Year’s I acquired this new little music game called Rock Band. And while it’s totally cool and has lots of cool tracks, there’s something about it that’s just not quite as good as Guitar Hero. It’s not the looks, Rock Band looks better than Guitar Hero in about every way imaginable. And it’s not the options, Rock Band lets you customize your character in so many cool ways that GH can’t even look directly at Rock Band without feeling ashamed. And it’s not necessarily the tracks either, Rock Band has a number of good tracks and absolutely zero Slipknot. And it’s certainly not the unholy blight that is boss battles, someone should repeatedly punch Neversoft in the crotch for coming up with that gameplay mechanic.

Still, there’s something about Rock Band that isn’t quite as good as GH3 … oh wait, I figured it out. Rock Band’s guitar sucks. While I don’t mind the removal of the clicky strum bar (GH guitars click when you strum up or down while Rock Band Guitars do not) the instrument itself seems poorly designed. Looking at the back of it, there are screws everywhere. You even have to unscrew the back panel to put new batteries in. Plus, instead of having one large bump on the middle button on the neck, the Rock Band guitar has little bumps that are hard to feel on 3 buttons on the neck (1, 3, 5). This makes it a lot harder for me to tell what button I’m actually on. And while I haven’t played the guitar portion of the game enough for it to happen, I’m pretty sure that my guitar is going to fall apart at some point here and I’ll have to get it replaced by EA.

All of this is my way to say, if I’m playing by myself and it’s just the guitar part, I’m probably going to try to play it on GH3 for now. Their better constructed guitar and massive set list make for a generally better solo guitar experience. The one area they’ve been behind in though was the downloadable track list section. Rock Band gets 3 new tracks a week (from which you can buy songs individually or as a pack) while Guitar Hero sporadically gets new 3 song track packs. Often they contain 3 songs by the same crappy pop/emo artist.

According to the GH leader boards however, there’s a new set of songs coming out that look to be awesome:

• Journey - “Any Way You Want It”
• Foreigner - “Jukebox Hero”
• Boston - “Peace of Mind”

Unfortunately there isn’t any information on which are covers (I’d assume all of them but who knows). Still, these would definitely be fun and a great set of songs to add to the game. If only they had a World Tour mode like Rock Band that would randomly through groups of songs (including ones that you’ve bought online) into sets that you have to play through to get money and fans.

As most everyone who reads this blog knows by now, I’m pretty into video games. I spend a lot of time talking about them and my need to spend money on them. One of the first games I played on any system, though, was Bionic Commando.

With its sweet theme music awesome, grappling hook mechanic, and your eventual face-off (literally and figuratively) with Hitler, you know that this game is a classic. That’s why when I heard rumbling of a PS3 port/polish of the original game last year, I got really excited.

A few months went by and there was no news. Eventually I read a rumor on Gamespot that the polish/redo of the original game was going so well they were actually going to make it into a whole new game. Not that long ago, screens and video started coming out of the new game. It looks alright but not really anything like the original (besides using the grappling hook/bionic arm concept).

I was afraid that they’d given up on the remake to do the whole new game. It turns out that my fears were unfounded as IGN now has a preview trailer for it up and it’s apparently called Bionic Commando Rearmed. Supposedly Rearmed will be coming out sometime in March and it looks awesome. I’ve watched it at least 4 times today and I don’t stop wanting to make sweet, sweet love to it. So glorious!

Activision does want money from Harmonix to let me use the PS3 GH3 guitar with Rock Band.  Activision, you suck.

Anyone want to buy a copy of GH3?  I think I’ll be trying to sell this and get Rock Band instead since they are apparently not complete jackasses about how you use their controller.

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of games that I get to play with fake plastic instruments.  I’ve been a Guitar Hero fan since the first one came out over a year and a half ago.  In fact, we’ve got some pictures of the controller on the design for this very site.  As you may also know, I bought a PS3 last winter and am a big fan of the machine.

So when I found out that both GHIII and Rock Band were coming out for it this year I was pretty excited.  The fact that I’d get twice the music fun and a couple new ways to play (and DRUMS!) I was really excited.  So, after getting hooked on the demo for GHIII in late October, I bought the game at launch–I even went out at midnight and picked it up (since my girlfriend was sitting around playing Viva Pinata I didn’t have much else to do).

Unfortunately, when Rock Band came out, I didn’t pick it up.  Mostly since I still had one fake guitar game that I hadn’t gotten around to beating but also because I had heard that the PS3 GHIII guitar  wasn’t going to work with it.  That turned out to be true and I was glad that I hadn’t spent $170 on a game that I was missing a peripheral for.

Then, last week I heard some good news.  Harmonix was going to release a patch to enable the GHIII guitar to work with Rock Band.  This was definitely good news.  Now, I could go out and buy the bundle when I was done with GHIII and get some new music game excitement.

Sadly the scheduled release date for the patch came and went and it was never released.  I (among many others) started to wonder what had happened to this great new functionality.  Well, it turns out that the culprit is Activision, the company that owns the rights to the Guitar Hero name and bought plastic guitar manufacturer RedOctane.  Apparently, Activision (which will soon be the worlds largest video game publisher thanks to an upcoming merger with Vivendi Games to become Activision Blizzard) is afraid that their colored plastic guitar cash cow may go away and are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening … including being complete jackasses by threatening Sony to not actually release the Rock Band patch that enables compatibility.  Supposedly they’ve threatened platform support on upcoming Activision titles (like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, etc.).

Let me just be the level headed one here, Activision, and say that you guys are complete morons.  I know you’d like to be the only plastic guitar game in town and it was a good run but you can’t hold onto a monopoly forever.  Denying that and trying to lock people into your bullshit isn’t going to make it any better.  In fact, I’m now less likely to buy your future games with peripherals since I know that they’ll only ever work with your game.  When I’m going to waste a bunch of money on a novelty peripheral, I’d like to know that if I wanted to, I could use it on almost any game.  The fact that you seem to think a $50 device that I paid for should be useless unless I keep giving you money makes me think that you are jackasses.

And while right now this is only a PS3 issue, I’ve heard rumblings from a 1UP podcast that Activision is actually looking to break Rock Band compatibility from the GHIII controller on the Xbox 360 as well.  So yeah, no matter what system you’re on, Activision would like to screw you over.

Hope you guys like the fact that I’m not going to buy your crappy music game again (I’ve got an idea for a boss battle … it’s me giving you the middle finger).   With your crappy downloadable content system (3 packs, really?), inability to get quick-play co-op in the game, the continued lack of a rhythm/bass career track included, and your complete misunderstanding of why Guitar Hero was fun … see Boss Battles you have managed to quickly run a great franchise into mediocrity.  It takes real talent to do that AND make EA look like the good guys and yet somehow Activision, you’ve managed to do it.  Bravo. ::slow clap::

I saw some news on Kotaku today that will make 2/3rds of the nerd herd here sad. The Warhammer Online MMORPG has been delayed for another 2-5 months.

The game was originally supposed to come out in February but has been pushed back until some time in Q2 2008. Apparently this is not actually a delay but rather them taking more time to get the RvR stuff right (Realm Vs. Realm … not that those words will clear anything up for you non MMORPGers).

Included in the update is some news that Mythic, who is developing the addictiongame, was impacted by the most recent round of layoffs announced by EA (who gobbled them up like a delicious treat sometime last year). This makes me glad that I never actually applied for the jobs there that I was thinking about (not really).

Anyway, those who want to can feel free to lament their sorrows by LARPing about it in the privacy of their own home.

Also note, it has not yet been specified weather you’ll be able to virtually paint your own character’s figure in the game. Crossing my fingers!

Ok, so I just feel a need to get it out that I broke down and purchased GH3 this weekend.  I wasn’t really planning on buying it immediately but it just kind of happened.  I’ll give some of my feelings on the game in a bit but first a brief history.

I picked up the original Guitar Hero in April of last year for my PS2.  I played the crap out of it and liked it enough that we even added the controller to the redesign of the site.  I got GH2 as a gift around Christmas and while I enjoyed it, it seemed to lose some of the magic of the original game.

I played it off and on for about a month but then in February I bought my HDTV and ended up getting a PS3.  I’ve detailed the issues I had getting that workin and even with my post saying that GH controller was mostly working with the PS3 I’ve since reversed my stance due to inescapable lag that had made playing any of the more difficult songs nearly impossible.

(more…)

I was trying not to let Chuckles recent WRN posts shame me into posting but sadly they have finally done so. I’ve been meaning to post for a while but then never really doing it. Mostly out of boredom, my life hasn’t been too exciting lately and I can only spend so long boring the internet before finally giving up.

Just a quick run down of things that are pretty enjoyable right now:

• Fall Weather - I was sick of all that summer stuff
• Everyday is another shooter - this PS3 game is pretty cool little shooter that has a nice lo-fi feel
• On-Demand movies - Ricochet, Idle Hands, and Futureworld
• Capital Amber - Replaced Spotted Cow as my beer of choice

Things I’d like to do for a bit:

• Not have to work. Seriously, I just want to spend a month sitting around doing nothing.
• Orange Box - PS3 version doesn’t come out until Dec. 17 and I don’t want to buy it for 360
• GH3/Rock Band - How tough will it be to ‘play’ guitar and sing the part on Rock Band?
• See a decent movie - Fido and Planet Terror on DVD and Amercian Gangster at the theater

Anyway, we’ll start small and work our way back up to a real post.

P.S. I also have no idea what happened to those posts from July/Aug/Sep/Oct. Blogoblin got them I suppose.

So, I’d heard some rumbling on the internet over the past month or so that the issues with the Guitar Hero controller not working with GH1&2 on the PS3 had been mostly resolved. So yesterday on my way home from a particularly stressful day at work (this week has been pretty crazy), I stopped by RadioShack and bought a Playstation to USB adapter.

When I got home I opened the PS-USB adapter packaging (thankfully not an injury-inducing blister pack) and connected the new adapter to my GH controller + extension cord and then plugged the USB end into the PS3’s USB ports. When I plugged it in, it immediately started ‘working.’ By that I mean it does the same thing that always happens if you’re in a Playstation system menu and you have a GH controller plugged in, it thinks you’re holding the ‘down’ button in.

I promptly unplugged the GH controller and tried to press buttons on either of the two PS3 controllers I have or the PS3 remote. None of those buttons seemed to do anything though. I ended up holding down the PS button to bring up the controller menu and then just pressed ‘O’ to quit.

Back in the main menu I could navigate with the controller again and started up GHII from the menu. I then quickly plugged in the GH controller. I was amazed when the game detected button presses from it! When I got to the menu though I quickly noticed that it got confused by strumming up vs. down. It used to be that strumming down moved you down and up moved you up but now up moves you down and down moves you up.

I then played a couple songs on it and realized that the whammy bar was also not working. Unfortunately it didn’t detect its use at all. Still, the whammy bar isn’t that essential to playing the game and without it you can get about 98% [non-scientific number] of the enjoyment out of it without it.

So if anyone was holding off spending $600 on a PS3 simply because it wouldn’t play the PS2 version of  Guitar Hero you can now spend freely. Guitar Hero is actually operational on the PS3. You can finally get rid of that PS2 dead weight that has been holding you down.

Next up, I’ll be hooking up some PS2 controllers to see how gameplay works with those. Exciting!