Hayley Williams almost a capella (Paramore)

October 26th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

Why this was done: So you can hear Hayley’s voice almost isolated.

How this was done: The video you’re seeing is not what the audio came from. The audio was captured by turning off all sounds (crowd, instruments, etc.), and playing with No Fail mode turned on, with a full band (but not playing). Some tracks can still be heard, as well as some booing, but it’s fairly quiet.

The video was done a second time, vocal only (no fail) just so you don’t have to stare at the full band charts. You can see my Hayley character singing (it’s hard to get an actual likeness with the RB creator).

That’s What You Get:

crushcrushcrush:

More Rock Band videos to come!

Posted in Rock Band, Videos (all), Videos (music/rhythm) | 3 Comments »

Frogger: The Later Years (image)

October 3rd, 2008 by Tommy Gun

I made this image for a random online game, but since it’s very game related I figured I’d post it here. I made it in response to this caption:

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.

frogger.jpg

Posted in Life, Other, Photos and Images | No Comments »

Well I feel like an idiot. Comments approved!

September 22nd, 2008 by Tommy Gun

This site gets so much spam (don’t they all?), that I really don’t bother checking the “marked as spam” comments (I have yet to see a false-positive in there). I have the site configured to email me whenever a real comment gets held for moderation, but for some reason, it stopped emailing me months ago! I haven’t been posting a whole lot recently, and when I post videos I figure most people simply comment on youtube, or on the various sites (NeoGAF, rock band forums, etc.) where I link to the video. Well I finally was going through some settings and found there were tons of comments held for moderation that I didn’t know about! So I went through them all and approved them, and will make sure that doesn’t happen again. Very sincere apologies to anyone who took the time to comment! They were not lost, just delayed!

Of some note are all the great comments on Half-Life 2: Episode 2 – “Little Rocket Man” Gnome Achievement Tips. Nine months later, and people are still leaving comments, which can now be seen! Thanks for all the extra tips!

Another good comment is the review by Eugenio, posted under my Getting Up Review.

So aside from that stuff, I’d just like to say that I will definitely be putting up some Rock Band videos! I wanted to wait until I had better drums, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon. I’ll be sure to get some full band videos — we may be having a “Rock Band 2 BBQ” in the next week or so.

I’d also like to get more content up, maybe some more podcasts (I wanted to do a GTAIV podcast, but my roommates took forever to finish the game! I beat it in three days). Now that I promise your comments will be seen — what do you want to see more of on this site? Guides? Gameplay videos? Rabbit Runs? Podcasts? More papercraft videos? :)

Posted in Life, Updates | No Comments »

Video: Tommy Gun’s Rock Band 2 and 3 Manual Calibration Guide (papercraft)

September 19th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

Rock BandI spent a bunch of time messing around with the RB2 manual calibration settings (I don’t have the new Strat), and decided to make a short video explaining them clearly and simply (I hope). I used this method to calibrate my system, and it works really well. So if you’re confused about exactly what the settings do, and which way you need to move them in order to sync up the game, this should explain all of that. I use the drums as an example, but obviously this also works with the guitar.

Let me know if I made any mistakes, and I can add some annotations to the video.

** Download the high-res divx version on the downloads page **

Edit: I originally made this video for RB2, but it also works for Rock Band 3, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Green Day: Rock Band!

Edit 2: a French tutorial has been posted by Stéphane

Posted in Rock Band, Videos (all), Videos (music/rhythm) | 5 Comments »

Quick “Rock Band 2″ Review

September 15th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

Rock BandYesterday, I got up and played Rock Band 2 from around 8am until 10pm, with a few breaks to eat. I still have a lot to unlock. My roommates were gone, so I played the whole thing Solo — which is a great new feature. World Tour can be played alone, and since I’m pretty good, I was able to amass stars and fans very quickly, which meant new venues kept unlocking and I didn’t have to replay many songs.

There are a lot of features I have yet to try, but let me run down some of the biggest improvements (and worst removals) Harmonix has made, and suggest some more changes. I haven’t played online at all, so I can’t comment on that, nor do I have any of the new instruments. I’m calling this a “quick” review only because I’m focusing on specific things that matter to us RB-obsessed players, not reviewing every part of the game.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Reviews, Rock Band | No Comments »

Some news about the Rock Band ION drumkit

July 30th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

Rock BandAs I’ve mentioned before, I have an electric Yamaha drumkit, and I would love to use it with Rock Band (my RB drums are pretty messed up now). Since the ION kit uses 1/4″ plugs, I was hoping I could just buy their brain and use my pads with it. I started a thread about it on the RB forums, and a lot of other people want it too (see whole thread). I emailed the company and actually got a direct response back:

Tommy,

Thanks for getting in touch. While we do expect to eventually offer the controller module separately, we intend to do so to allow Drum Rocker users who own multiple consoles to use a single Drum Rocker kit with all of their systems.

The module was designed specifically for use with the Drum Rocker drum and cymbal pads, which have a unique set of output characteristics (as do all electronic drum and cymbal pads). Lots of work has been done to ensure that Drum Rocker is optimized for Rock Band performance, in terms of trigger sensitivity, crosstalk rejection, latency, and more, and the design of the module has been tuned to deliver the best possible performance in conjunction with the Drum Rocker pads. Plugging another set of pads that happen to have 1/4″ outputs into the Drum Rocker module will not yield the same results as using a Drum Rocker kit, and in fact may not work at all, so we don’t recommend it.

However, if your goal is to have a single electronic drum set that can be used with your existing drum module and Rock Band as well, you can go at this from another angle. We would suggest that you get a Drum Rocker set, and use the Drum Rocker pads with your existing electronic drum module. If it’s got 1/4″ inputs and its input sensitivity can be adjusted, you should be able to combine the Drum Rocker pads with your existing module, and have exactly what you’re after – a single kit for playing games and playing music!

Hope this helps!

Customer Service – DrumRocker
Ion-Audio

So of course their solution is to have me buy the whole drumkit, as you’d expect — no thanks. I hope someone buys the brain anyway and tries it out.

Posted in Rock Band | 3 Comments »

Rock Band: 5-starred Blackened! (expert drums)

June 27th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

blackened-5star.jpg

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

Posted in Life, Photos and Images, Rock Band | No Comments »

The Best Rock Band pedal, 5-starred Disturbed Expert Drums

June 18th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

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):

rock-band-pedal-modded-yahama570.jpg
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Posted in Life, Photos and Images, Rock Band | No Comments »

Dark Sector, and Poor Game Design

May 19th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

darksector_1.jpgMy 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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Posted in Articles and Rants, Reviews | No Comments »

This picture speaks for itself.

May 16th, 2008 by Tommy Gun

dead-on-arrival-5s.jpg

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!

Posted in Life, Photos and Images, Rock Band | No Comments »

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