Purist’s Profile

My PS3 broke after a 10-hour marathon of Rock Band with friends. It's been more than a week, and I still haven't even received my ship-back box. It will probably be three more weeks before I get it back repaired.

Symptoms: Depression, Irritability, Restlessness, Boredom, Confusion, and Sadness.

Have any of you experienced this? Is there a hotline I can call?

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

For a variety of different reasons, I don't listen to the radio. For one, I worked in a basement for 7 years, with no reception. I also commute to work on an underground subway. Finally, I'm hard of hearing, so I can't play radio sites at my desk's speakers at work.

Many thanks goes to HMX for introducing me to songs I wouldn't have otherwise heard. Now I got the soundtrack for the game in my head almost all day, especially after playing the night before. WHMX Radio, anyone?

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Spent some time on drums the last couple days. Medium is too easy, so I switched up to Hard. Oh my... What's with the kick pedal coming in right before a snare+pedal hit. Tripped me up big time! Also played a little dedicated bass, and it was so cool to hear notes you only registered unconsciously as you focused on guitars and vocals before. Speaking about guitars, I'm switching to Expert now, in the hopes that it'll help me beat my last three songs on Hard tour: Flirting With Disaster, GG&HT (duh!) and China Cat Sunflower.

Monday, March 24, 2008

I made the mistake of playing a Hard guitar song online, after weeks of not playing Rock Band. Talk about epic fail. At first I was confused, because I had already beaten the song on Hard, and it was one of the more enjoyable ones from early on in the solo tour (not like those hard bastards on the last tier).

I called my friend on the phone and apologized. Turns out that I was really rusty. I barely knew how to slide up and down the fret to the exact button positions, and that's what threw me off. I booted the game up the next day and tried practicing Enter Sandman on Hard, at %70 speed. I was slowly getting back into it.

Now keep in mind, that I had not yet passed Enter Sandman on the tour. Something about repeatedly switching from green to a blue+orange hammer-on was particularly tricky. After about 15 minutes of playing, and jumping up the speed a bit, I went into single player and tried it on the tour, and...passed it! Just barely, but I got through, which sent me flying to Moscow for the last (and hardest) tier.

Of course I got raped again on a couple songs, but did beat two of them: Highway Star, and Tran Kept A Rollin'. Highway Star was turning out to be a joke in terms of difficulty, until it went to the solo segment: Hammer-on reverse staircases galore. Dammit, I just flailed it as best I could and dropped an Overdrive on the rest, praying it would get me through.

Now, here's the interesting part. When I wrapped all this up, I went to try and beat Outside, which was also giving me a lot of problems a couple weeks back. However, now I could actually feel how limber my fingers were. Doing Sandman and those other hard-ass songs loosened me up a bit to the point where I was feeling like I could tackle anything thrown my way. I was really focused.

The result: A song that I initially had trouble in on Hard, turned out to be a pleasure this time. In fact, I probably didn't even need Overdrive for the save. I'm looking forward now to seeing if I can five-star some of my earlier songs.

Progressive difficulty...revisiting beginner songs...Rock Band is awesome. Warm up first!

Friday, March 7, 2008

So here I am, rocking with my bandmate, Satchmo, jumping from gig to gig and racking up as many songs as we can until we exhaust them all. Nothing left to play except setlists, some which we can control, and some which are labeled "Mystery".

We knock out the setlists we pick out, but when it came to those Mystery ones, they turned out to be some of the tougher songs in the game, which we hadn't practiced. Heck, a couple were even DLC, which I haven't even tried on the drums yet. Needless to say we failed on the third song on a list, losing us 9,000 fans. I should've picked an easier difficulty, but a lot of times that means no progress in terms of fans or money at all, so we weren't sure and we risked it.

We still had a blast, and I can't wait to pick up Roam by the B-52's this afternoon.

Thursday, February 7, 2008