I really didn't expect to do that; I guess it's all thanks to my new pedal. I still need work on Kool Thing, Hammerhead, The Perfect Drug, and a few others. I added some of my high scores to ScoreHero, and will add more later.

I've also been trying to raise my career score, and have almost broken the top 500 on the 360 leaderboards. I've been reading about the best overdrive paths to use, so I just thought I'd let everyone know:

Public Service Announcement

I haven't been able to play Rock Band for the last week and a half because our 360 Red Ringed. Luckily, a friend came over today and brought his Xbox, so we swapped HDDs, bought some new songs, and played for a while. I've been really wanting to play the MTV pack, and now the new Offspring/Avenged Sevenfold.

I finally decided to just mod the pedal that came with my Yamaha DTXplorer, since I play Rock Band more than Drummania nowadays (and it doesn't disable the pedal or anything). This is the best Rock Band pedal there is now (click for large):

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My roommate just signed up for GameFly, and got Dark Sector. I was never really all that interested in the game, but I figured I might as well play it since he's only renting it. I'm not going to write a full review since I haven't finished it (and probably never will), but I want to talk about a few things. For the record, I got to chapter 7 (out of 10) before I stopped playing.

Quick Thoughts

Dark Sector isn't a terrible game if you're a fan of the genre, but there are a lot of weaknesses. Enemies respawn far too often, which amounts to you ducking behind a wall for ten minutes shooting the same enemies. It copies Gears of War too much, including things that don't make sense: as GiantBomb pointed out, your running and sprinting speed is the same as GoW — which makes no sense here as Hayden (your character) is a skinny guy, not a giant man in armor.

The "glaive" is great, and is one of the only things that sets this game apart. It's a blade that acts as a boomerang; throw it to slice enemies in half, and it'll come back to you. You'll gain an "aftertouch" ability which lets you slow down time and actually direct the glaive mid-flight, which is what I spent most of the game doing.

Aside from that it's a pretty standard shooter.

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No, I don't care about Gold Starring it!

Now that my drums are working almost perfectly, I'm trying to raise some of my scores. I just re-calibrated Rock Band, because it still felt off. I tried harder this time and tested it, and it really felt like it made a difference. I basically have to just guess the settings though, because the "calibration tool" never works.

I five-starred a whole bunch of songs: Dead on Arrival (as you can see. I don't think I've played it since the first month we got RB), Next to You (Yes!), March of the Pigs (although I think I've only played that one once before, not a huge NIN fan), and some others. I still haven't gotten 5 on Run to the Hills, but I'm closer (4 and 3/4?).

I even passed Blinded by Fear for the first time (3 stars), but I played cheaply and purposely missed half of the hi-hat notes. If you just alternate hands (hi-hat, snare) and still hit the bass pedal, it's not too hard, and you'll still maintain your health. I don't think I can physically play that song correctly all the way through, it's just too fast.

So now I only have a small bunch of 4-stars left (including DLC), and just that one 3-star!

There are a whole bunch of mods that can be, and should be, done to the Rock Band drums if you're serious about playing. How do you increase the sensitivity? How do you dampen the noise? What about that crappy bass pedal that always breaks? We discuss all of these things, and the different solutions people have come up with.

Contents:

00:00 - Introduction, Pad silencers/rebound
03:16 - Rock Band Drumsoft
09:44 - Sensitivity mods
15:22 - Bass Pedals
25:00 - Good Wood Mods

34 minutes, 13.5MB:

See a quick video of the mods at the bottom of this post, along with links to all things discussed (you might even want to watch the video first so you know what the stuff looks like when you listen). I also posted some score pics below to show my drums are working pretty well.
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The Rock Band Drum "In-between Sock Mod"

Here's a little guide I wrote for a Rock Band drum mod (based off of another mod). It's working great for me, but I'd love to get more feedback on it. If you try it, let me know how it works!

Could this be the shortest demo ever? Yes, this is on the "high-speed" version of the game ("throttle monkey"), and I did kill the tanks as fast as possible, but my very first try at the demo on normal wasn't much longer (30 secs?). The demo ends after you kill four tanks, so it's possible to play longer, but only if you suck.

It was pretty fun, but maybe at the 40 second mark you realize there's nothing else to do. The game got pretty mixed reviews, although it's only $5. Eh.

We finally got on the bandwagon! I've been really busy lately, so I haven't had time to make videos or write reviews, but I really wanted to talk about these two DS games. I got my friend Neofletcher to do a podcast with me, since he's also obsessed with the DS.

Both of these podcasts are very in-depth (i.e., LONG), and we really just did them for fun. We'll try to make future podcasts shorter. Originally it was going to be a single podcast, but I decided to split it in two because of the length.

See videos for both games at the bottom of this post.

Part 1: Space Invaders Extreme (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

This is an update to Space Invaders, similar to what they did with Pac-Man CE on Live Arcade. New enemies, new weapons, and best of all, the whole game thumps to the music (think Rez, Lumines)! As of this recording it's an import, but it's coming to the US on June 17th.

20 minutes, 8MB:

Corrections and Additional Info:
It's called "Fever Time" not "Frenzy."

I found out that the bosses in the PSP version are not shrunk down, it actually is a differently shaped field than on the DS, although they remove the borders on the PSP to give it slightly more height than the main PSP levels.

Part 2: Nanostray 2 (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

A sequel, this is a very traditional shmup (more so than Nanostray 1). Has D-pad control or touch-screen control.

43 minutes, 17MB:

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About a year ago I wrote a review for a product called the Thylus, a thumb stylus for the Nintendo DS. A few months ago Thylus asked me to do a promotional video for them, and here it is:

The purpose of this Rabbit Run is not to beat the level as quickly as possible, it's to show a lot of the cool weapons in the game. I could have played the whole battle with a machine gun, but that's not interesting.

Showing the controller on the screen was a bit of an experiment. This is NOT something I'm going to do for every video. I just did it in this case because, well, there are a lot of controls for Snowblind, but also because I was using a lot of the controls. The whole point of this run was to show off as many different weapons as I could, so I was constantly switching.

If you think it's interesting, let me know, and maybe I'll do it again with another game if it makes sense.

About the controls: It's possible to bring up a menu to switch weapons, but that pauses the game and really takes you out of the action. The "quick" way of switching is to use the d-pad. UP/DOWN cycles guns, LEFT cycles through Augmentations (things like invisibility, abbreviated as "AUG" below), RIGHT cycles grenades.

See run notes at the bottom of this post. See also: "Project: Snowblind" Review.

Game: Project: Snowblind
Level: Rescue (End battle only)
Developer / Publisher: Crystal Dynamics / Eidos Interactive
Game Released: February 22, 2005
System: Xbox
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Spoilers: Shows weapons, one battle.
Length of Run: 2:40 min.
Played By: Tommy Gun
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