It’s been awhile since my last post. Just been busy at work and tired overall. I know I still owe you a File Server post and a Hot Pot post. Those will still come, I promise.
Anyway some weekends ago, Tekman held a gathering at his place and I got to check out a bunch of new board games including Polarity (more info) and Shadows Over Camelot (more info). Wrexen brought over his Rock Band for Xbox 360 and I gave it a whirl and it was a lot of fun. So I decided to get one and began looking for deals.
I had a $50 Circuit City Gift Card (which I had redeemed through MyPoints), but Rock Band was $170 at Circuit City. And the fact I had to pay sales tax made it even worse. The best deal I found was at Buy.com for $150 shipped (after $10 Google Checkout discount). We were looking at $135 @ Circuit City (after GC) or $150 @ Buy.com. Wasting a $50 GC to save $15 sounded quite unreasonable.
So I started researching a bit more into Rock Band and noticed it only came with 1 guitar, 1 microphone, and 1 drum set. The game is a 4-player game and can support up to 2 guitars (1 guitar, 1 bass). So I started researching on how much guitars cost. Apparently Guitar Hero III guitars worked on Rock Band, but not vice versa, which sucked. They also didn’t really sell wireless guitars separately, unless you bought the Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Bundle and one of the reason why I’ve delayed purchasing GH3 was the fact that the original set included a wired guitar.
Anyway, I decided I would get GH3 just for the wireless guitar and figure out what to do there. Everywhere I’ve checked, GH3 with the wireless guitar was $100, so even with sales tax, it made the purchase much more swallowable. In Chinese we have a saying: 吞的露 (In Catonese, it’s really keng dat lok, but I’m not really sure how to write keng). Basically it refers to something you can tolerate.
So everything was all set and I made my orders. The total came up to a little over $200, which wasn’t too bad. I got my packages on Tuesday and gave it a whirl. It was indeed true that the GH3 guitar worked on Rock Band, but the Rock Band guitar did not work on GH3. I actually liked using the GH3 wireless guitar more than the Rock Band wired one, and decided some time down the line, I’ll probably sell the wired Rock Band guitar and get another wireless GH3 guitar. I did noticed that the wired guitar had extra buttons closer to the base of the guitar. At first I thought that was just the difference between a bass guitar and a regular guitar, but Desperajo said the lower buttons were more for people who wanted to look like they were riffing.
I invited some friends over tonight and we rocked till almost 3am. I think we started at around 9pm. Since not much of the music has been unlocked, we were playing in band tour mode, and for some reason, after every song, it would need to connect to the server and upload data or something and that took a big chunk of time.
Actually, before we started playing, we watched the South Park – Guitar Queer-o (S11E13). A hilarious episode if you haven’t seen it yet. It actually prompted me to get the Kansas – Carry On Wayward Son song.
Throughout the night, people have been complaining about the drum beats weren’t actually matching the music and I recall there was some way to calibrate it. I went into Options > Calibrate System, but after selecting LCD, it didn’t give me any options for calibration. Thinking that there was no actual calibration, we continued playing. The drum beats seem to have come a eighth of a note too early, so often times you had to force yourself to ignore the music and just play by looking at the screen, which then threw off other people. Haha.
Anyway, I was searching for calibration solutions online and found these 2 guides:
- Black Magic method of Manual Rockband Calibration
- Alternate Black Magic method of Rockband Calibration
Apparently instead of selecting LCD, there was this “manual” option hidden at the bottom. I haven’t followed the exact steps on calibration, but a quick calibration based on the simple on-screen instructions resulted in me being a much better drum player. Haha.
Awesome! I thought I was crazy because every time I felt like I played the drums I didn’t feel like I could actually play on the beat in Easy mode. When most everyone didn’t complain about the problem, I just thought my sense of rhythm was off — I was actually playing a bit slow although it felt like I was playing when I should have been to match the music. I imagine this isn’t so much of a problem when playing at higher difficultly levels when there’s less space between the notes.
Not sure if you noticed or play GH3 much, but I noticed on the new Xbox Live News feature that today and tomorrow they’re offering a free download of “Dream On” by Aerosmith.
Turns out Circuit City is having a sale on Guitar Hero III this week for $90 + an extra 10% discount coupon. Since I bought it less than 2 weeks ago, I got them to price match the $90 price ($10 back), but they wouldn’t budge with the extra 10% discount since according to the rep, they don’t price match coupons. If I pushed further, I’m pretty I would’ve gotten it, but I decided to not push the issue as I was satisfied with $10 back.