Caught In The Whirlwind
Archive for October, 2007
QotD: Happy Halloween
01663 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
How are you celebrating Halloween today?
I'm not. I'm having a friend over to play some Guitar Hero III and we're going to rock out and hope that nobody comes to the door because I don't have anything to give them.
I'm really not big on Halloween really. Neither is the neighborhood I live in. We're usually lucky to have 2-3 people come by all night.
Shredding With A Plastic Guitar
01664 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
If you know me, you probably also know that I'm really into the Guitar
Hero series of game. Guitar Hero 1 was the game that really pushed me
over into the world of console gaming. So, it was with great
anticipation that I waited for Sunday to arrive. The release of Guitar
Hero 3.
I picked up the Playstation 2 version instead of the Wii version that I
could have bought since I plan on eventually purchasing a XBox 360 at
which point I'll re-buy the game for that platform (for the XBox Live
integration.) This means that I'd rather not have to re-buy my guitars
and such for the Wii even though it is technically the better platform
to play.
In any case, I'm really enjoying the game. I finished off hard mode
last night and I'm just going back through and working on learning some
of the songs I didn't do so great on my first time through. The song
list this time around is exceedingly good. My personal favorite at this
point is Muse's Knights of Cydonia, which isn't entirely unexpected
considering I was looking forward to that song since it was announced a
looong time ago. Other highlights include Metallica – One, Iron Maiden
- Number Of The Beast, The Who – The Seeker (a cover, but still fun to
play), Guns n' Roses – Welcome To The Jungle…and probably more that
I'm forgetting right now.
I should say that I think this is the best entry in the series yet
before I get to my annoyances so you don't think I'm being all down on
the game. But, as good as I think it is, there are some annoyances.
First up, boss battles. This time around, they added a battle mode
which is a competitive type of play focusing on trying to get your
opponent to lose. As you play, you collect various power up weapons
that you can use on your opponent. This multi-player mode made it's way
into the single player career in the form of battles with professional
guitar players Tom Morello and Slash.
My main complaint with this mode is…I just want to play the songs!
Battle Mode is mostly about luck. All of the power ups are random, so
you can get hit with some really bad stuff right off the bat or you
could skate by almost totally clean depending on what your opponent
ends up with. There's too much luck involved for my taste. The last song in the game isn't a song, but another boss battle and this one is dependent even more on luck than the previous two. It's just…not fun.
My second complaint: Lack of a quick play co-op mode. My preferred way of playing the game is in co-op with my friends. But they took that mode out (they're patching it in on the 360, but that doesn't help the PS2 gamers…) and replaced it with a co-op career mode that does basically the same thing. It's still fairly annoying though.
Third minor complaint: All of the videos in the game are recorded in wide screen. If you're playing on a standard def TV without using wide screen mode, instead of letter boxing the videos, they squish them up so everybody looks tall and skinny. Luckily my TV has a 16:9 mode that fixes it while the videos are playing, but it's fairly annoying to me. Not a game breaker.
All in all though, a worthy entry in the Guitar Hero series.
Rock Concert Movement #564: The Morning After Review
01665 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
It is traditional for your audience to "spread the word" after the show by telling their friends and family about the experience. This word of mouth advertising generally aids in generating "buzz" for your show and increasing your megastar power.
Frequently, these reviews begin by discussing how good their seats were, especially if the audience member was seated in the 4th row, dead center.
All right…I can't keep that up. I was trying, but it's hard to talk about everything i want to say and still keep that style up.
If you haven't gathered by now, I went out to Albany last night with my parents to see the Blue Man Group perform at the Times Union Center. In short, the show was awesome.
The premise of the show, if you've never seen it, is that the blue men are trying to learn how to put on a big time rock show by ordering an instructional video from an infomercial, with a credit card provided by a member of the audience. In fact, there was a TON of audience participation in the show, and the blue men often left the stage to grab some unsuspecting audience member or to engage the people in the "crappy seats"
The light show was very well done, one of the better ones that I've seen. Although not quite on the level of Trans Siberian Orchestra. Needs more lasers! There was a lot of electronic effects, from robot light type things playing the music to one song ("I Feel Love") where the singer came out wearing an electronic dress that lit up in time with the song. They also did an entire song wearing LCD screens and syncing up with the video that was playing on there, which was fairly cool.
The sound was really good considering we were so close in an arena with the majority of instruments on the stage being various kinds of drums. It wasn't terribly loud for a rock show and my ears are fine this morning which is a fairly rare thing to happen the morning after I go to a concert.
It's really hard for me to describe in words what happened (as you probably could tell by the rambling nature of this blog post…) but I'll try to highlight a few things.
Before the show began they had a couple of screens going with scrolling, entertaining text to keep people occupied while we waited.
One of the things was that we were going to play a trick on the people who came in late.
Whenever we saw question marks that were laid on their side scrolling across the screens, we were supposed to take out our cell phones and wave them around in the air, thus confusing the people who came in late into thinking there was some sort of cultural ritual involving question marks and cell phones.
Well, as it turns out the people who sat next to me were a group of older individuals who seemed to have no real idea what was going on. They also arrived late.
The first time the question marks showed up, everyone started waving their cell phones around and I turned and looked at them to see what their reaction was and they were awfully confused looking. It was worth it.
That same group of people was being picked on in the beginning of the show when they were trying to pull somebody from the audience to use their credit card to purchase their rock concert instructional video. The blue men came off the stage and went right to our row and tried to take the purse from one of the ladies sitting at the end. She ended up slapping the guy's hand and he went off to somebody in the front row who was more cooperative. She also had a heck of a lot of stuff in her purse…
During the show, they threw out an awful lot of stuff into the audience, drumsticks (to the first row anyway), guitar picks and lots of streamers and cotton balls (from their pipe drum/cotton ball launchers that they used during the encore.) My dad was able to grab one of the streamers they flung out into the crowd at the end of the show and I almost got a guitar pick, but it bounced out of my hand.
Overall, I recommend going to see the show if you've never been. It's a combination of humor, good music and just plain fun that's really hard to pass up.
QotD: On The iPhone…
01666 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Over a million iPhones have been sold. Have you: bought one, considered it, or decided it's not for you?
I was considering buying one. I really like the interface but at the time I was phone shopping (right after it came out) it's $500-600 price tag was very hard to swallow considering it was lacking several features which are present in other less expensive phones. I'm willing to shell out cash for a cool interface, but…not that much cash.
Perhaps next time around when they release the next revision and the price goes down a little bit. Also, at the time, the lack of third party applications was really a sticking point for me. I tried to ignore it as hard as I can, but in the end, it sealed it's fate.
Instead, I bought myself a Blackberry Curve which I fell in love with. This thing is just so useful that I often wonder how I ever survived with my Treo 650. With the Treo, everything felt kinda hacked together. Like tacking the phone onto an already ancient operating system. The curve feels much more integrated. I also love the little touches, like automatically going into standby mode when in the belt holster I have and dimming the screen in dark areas. The camera is fairly decent too, as far as cell phone cameras go. As long as it's not too dark out and the thing you're taking a picture of isn't moving very fast.
I think I'm definitely a blackberry convert now. As much as I like Apple, they're going to have to do something seriously cool to win me back from the Blackberry camp now.
Busy Busy Weekend
01667 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Well after the whole lot of nothing that was last week, this weekend is going to be an awful lot of activity. First up today I'm going over to my friends place to watch some Anime/Mystery Science Theater/Other movie type stuff which will be nice since I haven't really had a chance to relax recently.
Tomorrow though is the big activity day. Guitar Hero III is finally coming out, so obviously, I need to go pick up my pre-ordered copy from Best Buy tomorrow morning. Then back home to rock out before heading out to Albany with my parents to go see the Blue Man Group perform in Albany. October is the month of concerts.
In other news, I'm considering trading in my car for something that doesn't totally suck in the winter. Still thinking on the financial type stuff that's going to be involved in that though so that may or may not happen depending on certain other factors. We shall see. I'm probably going over to a few dealerships next weekend to check things out and get a feel for about how much this is going to run me. I'm almost totally done paying of my current car though, which is part of what brought this about.
Vox Hunt: [this is a good time]
01667 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Show us a good time.
It may be early for some, but it's a good time for me!
Just A Fish
01669 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I don't have much to say at the moment except that I took a good picture of my Three Spot/Blue Gourami last night that came out pretty good. So I figured I'd share.
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Vox Hunt: My Favorite Local Band
01670 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Show us your favorite local band.
Submitted by Soup.
There really isn't any local bands in my area that I really enjoy, but…I do enjoy local bands from other areas! So here's my pick:
Little Atlas (I've talked about them before) is a really cool local band from Florida that I discovered using the wonder that is the internet. They're very classic prog sounding but with a modern kind of twist to them. Very good stuff.
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The Nightmare in 3D
01673 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I went out to Syracuse with my friends yesterday to catch a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D. It was my first actual 3D movie and apparently I looked very interesting with the 3D glasses over the top of my actual glasses. Bah! The movie itself was really good. The 3D aspect of it was pretty impressive and it was nice seeing that movie on the big screen in an actual theater where the kids were actually fairly well behaved. Amazing! It's definitely holiday movie season though…let the trailers for horrible Christmas themed movies begin!
After the show we went out to dinner and then back to their place to watch some more Resident Evil playing. As a side effect of this, I now really want to buy a Playstation Portable due to the fact there's a lot of cool RPG type games coming out for it (or things that have already come out, like the Final Fantasy Tactics remake).
It's this time of year where I really hate being a gamer. Everybody dumps all of their cool releases on us at once. It's not very fair.
In other news, apparently there was a guy recording the Porcupine Tree show that we went to earlier in the week. It's a really, really awesome sounding bootleg, probably the best I've heard that wasn't directly recorded from the soundboard. Of course I downloaded it immediately. It's a nice thing to remember my first Porcupine Tree show with.
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