Do you have any good taglines? Let me know in the comments.

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I play using my Yamaha DTXplorer (two cymbals and a hi-hat) with the MadCatz MIDI pro adapter. The only reason I’m not #1 on all the songs I FC’d is because some people “drum squeeze” to get more points, or because I didn’t use the optimal OD (overdrive) path. I don’t play songs multiple times in a row, so I never remember the path.

Some song notes:

This Ain’t a Scene: this was the second time I’ve played this song. It was really lucky, because the overdrive covered up a really long drumroll that I probably missed a few notes on, but it doesn’t count that. So I still ended up with 100%. A really poor overdrive path accounts for being so low on the leaderboard (I also may have overhit).

Young: Pretty surprised I was able to get this. It’s not that hard, I’m just really inconsistent with disco-beats.

Ring of Fire: the actual #1 on the leaderboard, no tie!

Half Crazy: I love this song!

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Post tags: gold stars, madcatz midi pro adapter, pro drums, yamaha dtxplorer

Remember when you could use that strategy in every game?  I think I almost won here, just had to make a little more noise (damn silencers!):

There’s an achievement for 100% notoriety, so at some point I was killing everyone on purpose.

The fun of the game is using different disguises and finding clever ways to kill your targets. All of that is still great, but the controls really don’t hold up.  The aiming doesn’t feel like they did anything to compensate for the lack of precision of analog sticks, and the button layout is…strange.

During each mission you can buy “intel” which gives you hints about characters, secret entrances, etc. I feel like that stuff should have been included in the mission briefing, and then you could decide which strategy to use. Without it you have to run around trying to learn the map layout and where the targets will be, but maybe I’m just being impatient.  Blood Money definitely has me excited for the next Hitman game — as long as they keep all the stuff that makes this one fun, and update the controls.

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In my last post I exposed GameStop’s wish list lies. Now it’s time to fix GameStop.com, so let me outline my proposal step-by-step — but first, I’ll fix those stupid mismatching icons:

There. That took me five damn minutes, GameStop. I would be happy to send you those graphics if you’d like. Okay, so now to fix the real problems.  The cornerstone of any relationship is honesty, and we can improve that in a few ways:

Step 1. Apply a liberal use of quotation marks

This menu bar could use a few changes:

No need to change the company tagline, just add a couple quotes:

They literally list some games with the normal retail price on their deals page, so:

Let’s fix that “hot item” text I hated so much in my last post, and the pop-up text:

Actually, I don’t think quotes are enough to fix that pop-up text.  We’ll re-write it in a minute.

Step 2. Add asterisks where needed

A lot of people don’t consider an open box to equal new, so a quick warning:

Why does anyone buy downloadable games and DLC at GameStop?

You’ll spend more on gas driving to GameStop than you’ll get in store credit:

Step 3. Re-write pop-up text

There’s still a lot to be done to fix your reputation, but that’s a pretty good start, and I think we have a bright future ahead of us.   Just stop asking me to pre-order every game.

Updated 10/12/11

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177 points away! If I had hit literally ONE more note I would have gotten it! I even FC’d the solo, although I used OD too late, and ended the song with 1/4 full. That would have done it too. So after that I just had to try again, and figured it should be easy since I was ready for a few parts that I messed up during the sightread:

Yay.

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I started with “I Feel Fine” and missed an Overdrive phrase. I played it again and missed one note, while OD was active I think, no gold star. Tried a different OD path, but broke combo three times. Gave up and tried the other song, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” It’s super fast and tiring on your right hand, but I did really well and GS’d it on my first try! Yes! Feeling good, I went back to I Feel Fine. I knew I could do it, and after a couple tries:

Sweeeeet! I was about to turn off the game, but figured I should play Helter Skelter just for the hell of it. I remembered that there are two weirdly timed drumrolls at the end, and that’s where most people mess up. Since I hadn’t played that song in a year, there was no way I would hit those, but it was good practice anyway. I started the song and was doing fine…got to the end, first weird drumroll…broke combo. Second drumroll…nailed it! Wait, did I miss a note or overhit on that first one?

Yes! 100% on my first try! Uh oh, was the achievement for FC’ing it, or just 100%? *achievement popping noise*

So happy. I still have a few achievements to get: two are for guitar, which I probably won’t get. Two are for vocal harmonies, which is really a crime I haven’t gotten those, since that’s what this game is all about! It’s entirely my fault for not playing it more…and not having the ability to sing. It would be awesome to 1k this game. We’ll see.

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It might be entertaining for the video game fans, but all those hours spent trying to cross the road to get home have left frogger extremely sleep deprived, and exhausted when he gets up for work in the morning.

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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

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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):

I tried attaching the sensors under the pedal, like with my last pedal, but the “bounce” of the pedal set it off because it’s too close, which was unplayable. So finally I attached it directly to the beater, which I know other people have tried, and it works perfectly. It goes off right on the beat, and you can do rapid hits and it won’t miss, since the beater has such a large throw. Since it’s from my real set, it has the back which gives great rebound, and it feels soooo nice. Proof that it works as well as I say (no double-bass):

Once we get our new Xbox, I WILL make some videos, I promise!

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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!

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I kept running into the same few people online — because it was late, or not many people play on Hard*, or everyone’s playing Guitar.

* I would play Expert, but the songs are random, and I can’t stand playing “Don’t Fear the Reaper” with its ten billion bass notes in a row.

After playing Shoombabi I think two times, we played again and got “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” This was the final result:

TIE! We both missed the SAME SINGLE NOTE! It wasn’t even an off-beat note or anything! It was almost at the very end of the song (the 986th note, not sure how many there are total). I know I hit it, and he said he hit it too, so what’s up? Either both our drums happened to glitch on us at the same time, or the game glitched. Crazy. Who else has gotten a tie (not counting 100% ties)?

Oh, and I did eventually get the achievement. :)

—————————
Update: Regarding the probability of this happening (if it wasn’t just a glitch):

Assuming there are exactly 1000 notes total, for the sake of simplicity, there’s a 1/1000 chance of randomly selecting a “chosen” note. But we BOTH missed the same note, which would be:

1/1000 * 1/1000 = 1 in 1,000,000!

Correction by WildBillKickoff:

Actually, the chances of missing the same note in a scenario like that would be 1 in 1000, assuming you both intentionally missed one random note. You can’t count the first 1 in 1000. It’s one in a million that you would both miss that one exact note.

However, that probability is only if we CHOSE to only miss one note! But we didn’t, we *accidentally* each missed only one note, and it was the same note. We could have missed more notes. So there’s the probability that we each missed one note only, and the probability that it was the same note, and the probability that we were playing against each other when it happened, and…. [insert head spinning emoticon]

Anyway, the point is, it was very unlikely!

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That’s right, I have two of the HIGHEST ROCK BAND DRUM SCORES in the WORLD*!

Okay, this isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds, but I’ve gotta milk this for all it’s worth, since this’ll surely last a whole…hour? (day? week?) Actually the first one is pretty good, five gold stars:

That was my fourth try, and it was so close to 100%. I missed maybe two notes (why no advanced stats?)! It’s an easy song, but there’s this part where it throws an extra snare note in, so it’s red/yellow, red/yellow. Everywhere else the second is a single yellow, so it always threw me off, and I missed a couple notes. I can definitely get 100% if I remember that.

Here’s my other #1, but really, it wasn’t a very good run at all (98% I think). It was on my first or second try:

Clearly, not many people are playing these songs, because I was nowhere near flawless. Both of these songs are downloadable, so not everyone has them. And most people are probably fighting for high scores on Metallica or whatever they think is the hardest song. And only the U.S. currently has Rock Band. *cough* Also, pretty much everyone, including me, has broken drums right now. Once everyone starts modding, things will be very different.

As far as the game goes, I have a big advantage here, because I play a lot of Drummania. To be honest though, I’m only an average drummania player (or a bad one, compared to most youtube videos). Most people who bought Rock Band have never played the drums before, so they’re learning for the first time how surprisingly difficult the bass pedal is — something I learned the hard way a few years ago. The truth is, pretty much any good DM player could destroy every song in this game (more on this in a minute).

Leaderboards vs. 100% scores:

This raises an interesting question: what happens to the leaderboards when people get 100%? This is different from guitar for two reasons:

1. Guitar can activate overdrive anytime, which means people will be able to find better “routes.” Yes, drum overdrive gives you a choice, but it’s very limited, and waiting can actually can be detrimental because it’ll take away notes.

   There’s also a guitar technique called “squeezing” where you activate SP right after a note, and hit the last note early, so it’ll still count (not sure if this works in RB though, it was a GH thing). Basically you just get a couple extra notes under star power.

2. Guitar can whammy more overdrive out of sustained notes, which drums can’t do. Even if it’s just a split-second more, that can be enough to give a slightly higher score.

So when people get 100% on drum songs, and use all their overdrive…that should be the highest possible score. What happens to the leaderboards? Do the newest ones go to the top, or the oldest? If it’s the oldest, there should be a mad rush to 100% every song you can, first, to secure your spot.

There’s another interesting (weird?) thing about the leaderboards: you’re competing against all difficulties! You can see the checkmarks at the left side; they’re color-coded (black, bronze, silver, gold) to what difficulty it was played on. I guess Expert will always have the highest possible score? Still, not really fair, is it? Why would people playing on Easy want to know how they rank against Expert? I suppose this prevents Expert players from spamming the Easy leaderboards, but…eh.

Drummania vs. Rock Band:

So, back to Drummania. It’s way harder than Rock Band drums. Go watch any of the Extreme difficulty DM videos on youtube, and your head will explode. For a point of reference, here are two (the center column is the bass):

Children’s Sketchbook extreme FC (seeing what insane things people can Full Combo in DM makes RB look like child’s play):

DD4 ext speed x1 — his score isn’t very good, but he’s playing on 1x, which is really hard to read, but it makes for a good notechart comparison because RB is fairly slow:

One last screenshot. This one is by no means a high score (#1 is around 250k?), but just more proof that Rock Band isn’t very hard — because, again, I’m not a very good drummer. This was my first time playing this song on Expert (I played it a couple times on Hard), so it was a sight-read (I believe this is in the second-to-last tier of drum songs):

I was being cautious with the overdrive, since I didn’t know if the song would get harder, otherwise I would have had a higher score.

Right now it seems the hardware is holding a lot of people back, not the songs, but I’m sure we’ll see more insane stuff as DLC.

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NGamer is a fairly new UK Nintendo magazine (and, might I say, a pretty damn cool one. I’d get a subscription if I could). Some months they do a list of the top Nintendo “happenings” around the world. In issue #5 (Jan 2007), they did a top 15, and my konga video got #3:

(...)
Read the rest of CRG mentioned in NGamer magazine! Twice! (scans) (168 words)

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Post tags: game crazy, gamestop

Okay, it’s not a cause at all, but I love the images and I’m all for the idea of getting a Wii and a 360 instead of a PS3. Of course, nothing says you have to spend $600 on consoles, and nothing says you can’t buy all three — but if you have that much money lying around….

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Click for large version

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After playing Guitar Hero every other day for a couple weeks and failing at 98% on Bark at the Moon (Expert) I had just about given up, even though it was the only song I had left to pass in Career Mode (I only played BatM occassionally–it hurts). Well my friend from the Navy has been here on leave this month, so I got him addicted too. Just to show him how insane it gets on Expert, I played BatM, not expecting to actually pass it, especially since I’m way out of practice. I was even explaining it while I was playing–”See, it’s really tempting to use star power right here, but you really shouldn’t, because this isn’t even the hard part!” Maybe it was because I was a bit more relaxed this time, but I was finally able to pass it! We both screamed joyful obscenities really loudly when I did because my “rock meter” was completely in the red (i.e., zero “health” left). Terrible score, only a three star review, but I’ll take it. Considering they’ll probably double the difficulty in the sequel, I probably can’t stay happy for too long.

Screenshots:

Click for large version

Here’s a screenshot of what happens after you win. You may have already read about it online, but don’t click if you don’t want to know:

SPOILER

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(...)
Read the rest of Nintendo Revolution [Wii] Controller Design (concept poster) (452 words)

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