Weekly Wrap-Up: Mar. 30 – Apr. 3
Hello, procrastinators! We here at The Daily Procrastinator hope that your weekend has allowed you to catch up on your sleep, spend some time relaxing, and dedicate only minimal time to productive activity. I tried to model appropriate procrastinator behavior by spending four days at a hotel on the beach. Does everyone see how that’s done? Good.
As always, The Daily Procrastinator published a healthy crop of thoughts, opinions, reminiscences, and reviews for your reading pleasure. TallGirl really carried the team this week. Let’s look back at the week and make sure you didn’t miss anything.
The week began as TallGirl was wisked into the past by the Niles Canyon Railway, a historically accurate steam-powered passenger train that offers both passengers and observers a glance into the world their grandparents knew. The granddaughter of a railway enthusiast, TallGirl found herself mirroring her grandfather’s fondness for the railway.
TallGirl’s gaze remained focused on the past as her recollection of childhood Hershey’s kisses were refuted by eating one in the present. Have the kisses changed, or has TallGirl’s palate evolved?
As a follow-up to last week's grumpy koala, here's a jumping armadillo. Yes, they can do that.
BigRedPoet piped up with a review of the latest of the “I wish I was a rock star” video games, Guitar Hero: Metallica. Check out his assessment of the game’s graphics, the list of available songs, and the gameplay.
TallGirl returned with some ruminations on modern marketing, packaging, and branding practices, including some ridiculous claims about the purposes and capabilities of the new Pepsi logo.
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The Daily Procrastinator: Contributing to the Dramatic Reduction of Your Personal Productivity
Guitar Hero: Metallica
On Saturday night at midnight, my pre-ordered copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica became available at my local video game dealer. They opened the door at midnight especially for those of us who just couldn’t wait until Sunday morning. Of course, I was involved in a heated bout of darts and tap beers, so I ended up waiting until Sunday after all.
On Sunday, though, the glory of this latest installment in the Guitar Hero family of games shone down upon me. I spent hours playing the game, first tinkering with some of the quickplay options, later completing 48% of the story mode. I rate this game a rock-solid 9/10.
Like Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band, this game allows four-player gameplay including guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.
For starters, the game is amazing to look at. Every menu has been customized to reflect Metallica’s logos, old t-shirt designs, and other metalhead content. While actually playing the game, the animated James, Lars, Kirk, and Rob are more lifelike than any Guitar Hero characters ever. Having seen Metallica in concert many times, I can attest that the animated characters don’t just look like the real thing; they behave like the real thing, too. Trujillo stalks and storms, Hetfield gestures to the crowd, Lars stands up at the drum set, and Kirk wanders around like some confused, Satanic waif. It’s pretty much perfect.
Is it real or is it Guitar Hero?
The song selection available in Guitar Hero: Metallica is impressive. The vast majority of the tracks are drawn from Metallica’s career, with a smaller selection of songs chosen by the band from artists who influenced them. My only complaint about the game–the reason I rate it 9 instead of 10–involves the song selection. In the repertoire of Metallica songs, I just don’t understand the selection of “Frantic.” I hate this song. It feels like the game creators were cruising along and selecting great old Metallica songs…and suddenly thought, “Oh, crap. We should include something from St. Anger.” No. No, you shouldn’t. That album is trash. I’m also not crazy about “All Nightmare Long,” but I’ll get over it. In the non-Metallica track list, I can do without Corrosion of Conformiy’s “Albatross.” This song is repetitive and uninspired. It does not ROCK. Conversely, Mastodon’s “Blood and Thunder” does, indeed, rock…but the vocals are of the Cookie-Monster variety. That’s just not fun to try to sing. Even considering these weak points, the song selection is, as I mentioned earlier, impressive. Metallica songs from their best albums (Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and …And Justice For All) abound.
Guitar Hero: Metallica also raises the bar of difficulty in the world of “rock star” type games. There’s a new Expert Plus mode for drums that includes double kick pedals for the bass drum. Also, the complex guitar solos make many of the songs difficult to play on guitar, even on the Medium difficulty setting. I can see that I’ll be spending many, many hours trying to work my way up to Hard or Expert.
On the whole, the game creators responsible for Guitar Hero: Metallica have programmed a masterpiece. As soon as I can speak again (my vocal cords are shot from fronting my band), I’m going to tell everyone I know to go out and buy it.
Rock Band: Shatterer of Dreams
In my head, I’m a rock singer. No, not just in my head – I’ve been told too many damn times that I have a “good” voice to think that I don’t have talent in the vocals department. Yeah, after church the compliments come rolling in, and my mom was always busting my chops about joining the choir back in high school. But I’m a teacher now, and the opportunities to show off the vox just don’t present themselves. Those talent shows the school puts on? They’re for the kids, man, not the teachers.
So when Rock Band came out a couple years ago it was a siren call – here was my chance to live out my rock-and-roll dreams by fronting a band made up of guys who like playing with tiny plastic guitars while I show off some REAL musical talent. I mean, if youtube’s any indication, any six year old can master Guitar Hero on expert if they put enough time into it. I’m out of college, married with two daughters and a job; I don’t have the requisite time to master those five buttons (and anybody’ll tell you moving from Medium to Hard is a HUGE jump- I think the game needs some re-working). But Rock Band was different. Rock Band didn’t require manual dexterity. Rock Band offered a mic. Hell yeah, I was gonna be the Star Dog Champion.
Reality kicked in almost immediately. One, I’m not allowed to play XBox when my wife’s home, so time that I could’ve spent rocking out was instead spent watching the Food Network. I have a feeling that kind of thing doesn’t happen to Sammy Hagar. Second, the song lineup did not necessarily cater to my musical stylings. And by that I mean there were songs I didn’t know on the list. That makes singing the songs difficult, because singing’s about confidence, not trying to read the lyrics while matching the tone of your voice to a little arrow – and speaking of which are we sure the makers of Rock Band programmed the pitch right on some of these songs in the first place? Honestly, there’s no way I score a 79% on “Detroit Rock City” – Paul Stanley ain’t that much of a vocalist, and I sound JUST LIKE HIM when I’m jamming to KISS’s greatest hits on the way to work.
Mainly, though, unlike Guitar Hero, this game is meant for more than one player – the game is Rock Band, not Rock Singer. I’m not quite sure, but I have a nagging feeling there’s something slightly pathetic about standing alone in front of the TV belting out the lyrics to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (but, dammit, those screams make me feel so alive). But there I am, knocking out the songs at “Hard” and even turning it up to 11 (”Expert”) when the song’s a real rocker (metal horns flying as “Run to the Hills” blares out of the speakers).
So one weekend I invite some guys over to jam. We set up the drum kit (whose “Easy” setting is a crock. Drummers require more coordination than I’ll ever be able to exhibit) and connect the guitars and then they start asking who’s going to sing. I say I will. Their response of “You will?” deflates me a bit, but I know I’m getting 94% on most songs so they’re in for a surprise.
We start out with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and I practically ace it at the “Hard” level, and yet my bandmates don’t remark on my vocal stylings at all. They’re looking for another song. So we go on to STP’s “Vasoline” and still no remarks. Then one of the guitarists suggests we switch around, so I get a guitar and play bass while he sings Radiohead’s “Creep” and aces it. Hell, anyone could ace that one, particularly on “Medium” where he was at. He then goes on to sing “Interstate Love Song”, another STP, and I’m thinking I didn’t buy this game to play guitar. “Medium” on guitar is friggin” boring, but “Hard” will lead me to fail out at some point before the solo on most songs. So I’m stuck watching our new singer bound around my stage- er, my living room singing about leaving on a southern train on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m stuck playing a fucking plastic guitar and adding in background vocals while he gets the spotlight, the interviews, the magazine covers and all the women!
Man, the rock star life takes a toll, I’m telling you. No wonder Dokken broke up.
