The Beatles: Rock Band came out earlier this week, which should mean that in the lead-up to the release date I'd be very excited (I was) and that after bringing it home and giving it a go I'd be enjoying the game thoroughly (I'm not).

"I'm not" I say? Does the game suck? Well, I don't know yet.

On the morning of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (a work day, unfortunately), I got the usual message from the mail room that a package had arrived for me to pick up. Ooooo, exciting! I was thinking, because I knew exactly what waiting for me.

The remainder of the work day was not ordinary, but rather uneventful: picked-up the package, went to lunch w/ dad (although I didn't have to pay for his meal this time), browsed the CD store with him to check out the release of the digitally remastered Beatles albums, worked until all enthusiasm was drained from me, read the local rag on the train ride home, ate dinner, watched CSI: New York on TV...

...and THEN, it was time to play The Beatles: Rock Band with the family.

We were all pretty excited. For me, because it's a new toy; for my brother, probably the same reason; for my parents, because they finally get to play to songs that they grew up with (a change to having to play Boston in Rock Band 2 over and over again - don't get me wrong, I looove Boston, but repetition does remove the mirror sheen on even the nicest things).

So we plugged-in/turned-on all the controllers, loaded-up the disc, and... wait, what's up with my controller? The Xbox guide button on my fake plastic guitar just kept flashing; couldn't register as a controller with the Xbox. Oh F***!!!

I kept the expletive thoughts to my inner voice, conceded my position as 'lead guitar' and let the family play on without me. I went back to my room and sulked by browsing the internet for the guitar tablature to emotion-infused meaningful songs I know so I could learn to play them then and there on my real guitar :(

NOT my favourite peripheral right now...

I've had this problem before (this is actually the 3rd fake plastic guitar I've gone through: the first one having a broken strum bar and the second one having this same flashing light issue) and the guitar is still under warranty, but it means having to send the damn thing back and waiting anywhere from a week to a month for a replacement... again (stupid courier costs associated with returning items when buying from an internet vendor).

Not that I'd want to: I'd rather head for the nearest store, buy a new WIRELESS guitar, and pray the thing doesn't get a bung strum bar. And if it does, at least I'll have the option of going down to the store and venting my frustrations out on the nearest store employee who will likely be some unsuspecting teenager who has absolutely nothing to do with the failings and design faults of my fake plastic guitar.

*sigh*

As you can imagine, I'm not very happy right now. Here I am, blogging about another situation that is out of my control. So, this lunch time, I'm gonna go fill my stomach with tasty fast-food, knowing full well that what I'm putting into me isn't very good for my body and that my patronage is lining the pockets of already-rich corporate billionaires overseas.

At least I still have control over that.

So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.

To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.

Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soacked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"

As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.

The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).

While this isn't a dick creature, it turns out boob creatures aren't allowed

This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).

When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.

So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...

I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?

(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)

I made it pretty obvious in a post this month that I got Rock Band 2 and was loving it. Several days on, I'm still loving it, although I have left it and the Xbox back at my family's place since I couldn't be bothered bringing all those fake plastic instruments back to my apartment.

Yes, I'm Xbox-less right now :( The removal of said gaming machine has given me a lot more time to work on PC-related stuff (ie: this blog and other ongoing website developments) and general responsibilities (eg: cleaning, cooking). Without the Xbox the TV is only used to watch broadcast television, so I went and hooked-up my PC to it so I could watch my videos and have music in the lounge again.

So yeah, I'm blogging from my lounge today, and will be for several days to come while I continue life Xbox-less. I'd take photos of the PC-next-to-the-TV setup, but I don't have a digital camera. Yes, you read that right: this tech-savvy IT guy DOES NOT HAVE A DIGITAL CAMERA (and I'll probably turn that into a blog post for another day in April).

Anyway, back to Rock Band 2

My mind wanders

So I was introduced to the world of fake plastic instruments through Guitar Hero 3. Being a (fake-)guitar-only game, it got me pretty good with the 5-button guitar side of things, and it also got me really excited about the evolution of the music & rhythym game genre when it turned into Rock Band (or Guitar Hero: World Tour if you wish to stick with the GH franchise). So when Rock Band came out, and my friends brought it around one night, I instantly loved it.

That night I stuck to the guitar part, but when I bought Rock Band 2 I resolved to try out the other parts: drumming and singing.

My family isn't the most musical kind out there but it's musical enough; my dad doesn't play any instruments, so any music genes must've come from my mother's side. She plays the classical guitar, my brother plays drums and some guitar, and I play piano and some guitar. We can all keep pitch, can keep in time, and sing to some degree.

Finally, all those years of singing in the shower and walking down the street as I hum the tune to what's blaring out of my MP3 player would come to fruition. RB2 would give me all the reason I needed to sing my lungs out. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened; I sung my lungs out (and my throat and voice too).

When I decided to tackle the singing component of RB2, I went straight to the Hard level (I can keep pitch right?) and picked a song that I enjoyed but didn't really realize was way out of my range until that very moment. The result: I was often flat or sharp, and ended-up shouting my way through choruses. At every step of the way, RB2 was there critiquing my progress after every major phrase with words like 'Good' or 'Awesome', except what mostly popped-up was 'Weak' along with a loss of my score multiplier and integrity of my throat.

Even after picking songs within my range, my throat and voice started crapping-out on me, and as I slipped below the 80% mark at the end-of-song score, even RB2 decided to stop heaping its hollow praises on me. I sucked, and RB2, myself, and my brother - who was unfortunate enough to be in the room - knew it.

So what now seeing that 1/4 of the Rock Band experience is locked-away from me? Well, I always have the fake plastic guitar to fall back on, and the drums are pretty fun (so at least I wasn't wrong about my ability to keep time). But it looks like 'learning to sing into a mic' is now on my to do list. That's right, the singing part has become my white whale and my sheer stubbornness - and the fact that I've spent hundreds of dollars on this game and I'll be damned if I'm not going to squeeze every last penny out of it, especially during the recession - is going to propel me forward.

Hopefully I'll have more luck than Captain Ahab, and won't destroy my voice in the process.

I've left today's blog a bit too late to write something approaching the average number of paragraphs I've had for every other entry thus far of Blog Every Day April, but I was held-up for good reason. That reason: Rock Band 2.

w00t

So I'm gonna leave it at: I just got Rock Band 2, and OMG it's awesome :D (proper blog coming post tomorrow)

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

I followed an interesting tangent of related topics in the gaps between work today. It started last night as I was at home trawling through some Devil May Cry 3 and 4 skill/combo videos. These videos are always played to some kind of metal; one of them was covered by 2 Rhapsody of Fire songs, and several others I couldn't name. It was then I discovered another power metal band, Kamelot.

Kamelot's When the Lights Are Down was the song being used, so I found which album it was on, did a bit of reading about the album, and it turns-out the album is a sequel to an earlier concept album, loosely based on the story of Goethe's Faust. It was this part caught my attention because my brother (film/theatre student) has been involved in several productions of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Intrigued by the naming coincedence, I continued my reading and learned that both Goethe and Marlowe wrote their stories based on a German legend about a man (Faust) who makes a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge.

I knew how the Marlowe version went from my brother, so I focused on learning about Goethe's version and about Goethe himself, and somewhere along the way I realized, "Holy crap, I've stumbled upon a literary heavyweight!"

You can read about Goethe's epic resumé and mark on history anywhere on the Internet just by Googling his name. As I did I felt both awed by his achievements, and stupid for not having heard of this guy before. The last time I felt like this, was when I threw "circles of hell" into Google (I was using the concept in a story of mine) and came across another epic: Dante's The Divine Comedy. Therein lay several other Devil May Cry and popular culture references.

So what did I learn? Plenty. And that power metal and video games can be educational too :P

As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.

I've never owned a point-and-click adventure game before, so this was rather new for me. That's probably one of the reasons it's so fun; the original game may be technically outdated (1999, 640x480 screen res), but most of the themes and the story still hold-up pretty well: saving the world, meeting a magical race, killing the evil witch, all clichés that I've never had the time to completely appreciate, until now.

I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor. However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes. I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements. Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?

Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.