Kalamaf Drackonsbane » Guitar Hero

Goodbye WoW, again, for now

kalamaf — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:24:39 +0000

Yesterday my time card expired and I didn’t even miss it, so I guess it’s time to take another break. I’ll miss my lil dwarves and gnomes though, with their bald shiny heads and funky hairdos; keep those hair loss treatments away from my toons while I’m gone!

Summer is coming and business will get busier, plus I’ve got a stack of unplayed XBox 360 games to break into. First I should probably finish off Eternal Sonata, if I can remember what I was doing when I last played. Overall I like the game, but the combat system is a little grating. I prefer the old Final Fantasy style of fighting in my RPG’s, or all out hack & slash Diablo style. This quick time event, hit B to try and dodge enemy attacks for less damage, it’s annoying as fuck. Sure, I don’t need to do it, but if I don’t I end up burning through healing items after every single fight.

I’ve been playing through Guitar Hero: Metallica over the last week, and it’s pretty fun. Definitely a huge improvement over GH: Aeroshit, and either I’ve been getting better still, or it’s just easier. I haven’t failed anything on Hard guitar so far, and I’ve even been doing well on Hard drums. Solos are a lot easier to hit in GH games, I think because the notes are bigger and not crammed together so tight like in Rock Band. Goons are raving about break-neck speed in RB though, the notes go faster so they’re spread out further, apparently it makes it easier for most people. I’ll give it a try one of these days.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

kalamaf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:36:54 +0000

Since I’m not a huge Aerosmith fan and the game only contains around 40 songs but sports a full price sticker, I decided to just rent Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. I’m glad I did. It’s fun, and easier than GH3 overall. I played through all the songs on Hard and never failed any of them, never even came that close to failing really although I did get only 3 stars on a few of them. Some of the songs are really fun (She Sells Sanctuary, Draw the Line) and others are just a chore (Train Kept a Rollin’), though they’re all more fun than reading Leptovox reviews (random thought of the day!)

Achievements are much more realistic in this one compared to GH3, almost too easy in a way. In two days play time I had unlocked 32/49 and gained 560GS. If I had a co-op partner I could easily do most of the others, but due to a family emergency I won’t be able to play at all over the next few days. The only achievement that would cause a problem for me is scoring 325k on Train. Fuck that song, I’ve only played it once on hard and scored 105k, I just don’t like it enough to play it over and over and over. As it is I’d have to create several bands and replay the hard tour on each to get enough money to buy everything in the Vault, there’s a shitload of guitars costing between $500 and $4000 each.

Engobi Guitar Hero competition

kalamaf — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:23:31 +0000

ENGOBI, the company responsible for the first caffeine infused snack chip, is having a Guitar Hero contest. Announcing the Engobi “Don’t be a Piano Hero” contest! Make a video of you and your friends rocking out with your plastic guitars and upload them to Engobi. The winner will get this awesome XBox 360 customized Fender Stratocaster along with some Engobi swag and other cool items.

Engobi snacks currently come in two flavors; Lemon Lift and Cinnamon Surge. I haven’t had a chance to try either of them, I don’t think they’ve made their way into this little town yet. Looks like a good alternative to the slew of energy drinks already on the market.

Wireless Guitar

kalamaf — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:41:47 +0000

The wireless guitars are finally available for the XBox 360, and they’re definitely nice to have. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a guitar by itself, only in the GH3 bundle for $99. I ended up buying a bundle and packing the unopened copy of GH3 in with my used-but-perfect-condition Xplorer guitar and will sell it off for $70 or so. My biggest beef with the Les Paul is that it’s loud. Most GH3 guitars do click quite loudly anyway when strumming, but this one seems to be the worst one yet. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck on my part, or if all Les Pauls are that loud.

World of WarGuitar

kalamaf — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:10:11 +0000

If only this were true! Good job Blizzard on a spectacular April Fool’s joke. I’m sure I wasn’t alone on this line of thinking, but when the Activision/Blizzard merger was first announced I thought “Cool, they should add a bard class to WoW and let people use Guitar controllers to play it.” And now here we are, April 1st and just such a thing is announced. It’s a great joke and they put a lot of effort into it, going so far as to make up screen shots of the game play in action. They didn’t even just copy/paste from an existing guitar hero either, the on-screen notes are different shapes and everything.

I thought Shadow Priests coined this term ages ago?!

GH3 Progress! Finally!

kalamaf — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:22:49 +0000

Tonight I popped in Guitar Hero III and after playing through a few songs I decided to give 3’s and 7’s a shot, and I got through it on my first try! Only 3 stars of course, but beaten is beaten and on to Knights of Cydonia I go. And I beat that one too, first try as well. Encore, Cult of Personality, beaten. Number of the Beast, beaten. Cliffs of Dover, also beaten. I tried One but only got to 80%, the solo slaughtered me… I had star power saved up too but I didn’t use it in time. I think that’s one part I’ll definitely need to spend some time in practice mode for. And Slayer, damn Slayer, best I can get is 36% and that’s WITH star power. The back rolls really get me, I can barely hit a note during Mosh 1.

But anyway, I feel good about my progress tonight, I got through 5 more songs on hard and only have 2 + Lou left in order to finish it off. Then it’s a grind through Expert, which I still don’t find is any fun at all. Maybe after re-playing a bunch I’ll change my mind.

Tomorrow night though I think I’ll be going back to Rock Band and see if I can break through any of those final 5 songs on expert.

Guitar Hero 3 Brick Wall

kalamaf — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:00:18 +0000

Grrrr, I’m still stuck on set 7 in GH3 on hard difficulty. I did manage to scrape my way through Before I Forget, but Knights of Cydonia and 3’s & 7’s still kick my ass every time. Funny enough that I can play through the first 5 sets without failing and getting at least 4 stars a song though. I’m on my 4th band now and have bought everything in the store except for the last 2 unlockable guitars. Guitars I’ll likely never get since they require beating hard and expert. So that makes 2 more achievements I can’t get. Buy all guitars and buy everything in the store. Oh well, will keep practicing. Speaking of which, maybe I should try out practice mode, I hear it’s helpful =)

Rock Band/GH3/Burnout Updates

kalamaf — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:50:45 +0000

I’m still spending most of my gaming time on Rock Band, Guitar Hero 3 and Burnout Paradise and gradually improving in all three. For Rock Band I’ve beaten every song I have on hard and only have around 10 left to beat on expert, those are going to take a while though. The last 5 in the main game are all pretty rough with fast solos and chord changes, I just can’t keep up. I’ve been practicing a bit with the actual rock band guitar and the extra set of fret buttons do make the solos easier since you don’t need to strum those parts.

In the meantime I went back to Guitar Hero 3 and started up a couple new bands so I can rack up more cash to finish buying all the Store items. My best value is by playing on hard since I can 5 star most of the first 20 songs, that gets me $1200 per song. On expert I rarely get 5 stars even on the first few songs and 4 star expert only pays $1050. I bought all the available guitars and almost have enough to finish buying the characters, will probably just start a 4th band to make the last bit go faster. There’s also an achievement for earning a crazy amount of money, $350k or so, but that would probably require making a crap load of new bands just to earn money with. I’ll have to grab a pen & paper to see just how close I am to unlocking that one.

In Burnout Paradise I’ve found most of the smashes, billboards and super jumps but I haven’t done many of the events yet. I currently only have the class B license and have unlocked 16 of the 75 cars. Lots more to do in this one since I’m only 36% finished over all. Lots of challenges remain to be completed in the Freeburn online mode too, I’ve done 64/350, so if yer a Burnout fan on XBox Live look me up, gamertag Kalamaf.

Gaming Updates

kalamaf — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:46:40 +0000

Been making a bit of progress across the various games I’ve been playing lately. In EQ2 I’ve hit level 75 Inquisitor (and 106 AA) with Kalamaf and level 76 Provisioner with Azeem. Been spending the last couple of days in Fens of Nasthar since I pretty much skipped it earlier and went to Kunzar Jungle.

Quest whore update: 2177 quests completed, still ranked 25 on Mistmoore.

In Guitar Hero III I’ve finally managed to 5 star Slayer – Raining Blood on medium and got past my block on hard as well which was Same Old Song and Dance. The battle with Slash took several tries to get through but I finally pulled that off and continued on my way. They’re getting to be quite a challenge though and I think it’s going to be a long time til I can get past set 7. I’ll be practicing on the easier songs and try to 5 star as many as I can. So far I’ve only 5′d half a dozen songs on hard difficulty. I took a big gulp and shifted up to Expert and after a couple tries each I passed the first 4 songs, barely, at around 80% notes hit.

Blizzard/Activision merger

kalamaf — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:22:26 +0000

This has been all over the internet for the last few days and by now it probably isn’t news to anyone, but I had to comment on the first thing that popped into my head. World of Warcraft currently has no bard class, right? (It’s been so long I actually can’t remember). Anyway, imagine having a cross over of sorts where Blizzard adds a bard class, or maybe an Entertainer trade skill, where you have to use a Guitar controller to play your songs. How cool would that be?!

Guitar Hero 3 Updates

kalamaf — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 06:45:45 +0000

Earlier this week I finally finished my first minor goal of getting 5 stars on all songs in easy mode. The only one giving me trouble was Slayer of course, took several tries but I finally managed to nail it. My next task was to finally beat Lou on medium. I had tried a few times last week and just couldn’t seem to nail it. Just bad luck on the attacks I guess, but on the last run I got a whammy and a string cut, both of which I used during Lou’s fast parts. He tanked hard and I finally completed Medium difficulty.

From there I tried a couple of songs on Hard but didn’t have much luck. Instead I spent the next couple of sessions just trying to improve my previous scores and maybe 5 star everything in medium. As of tonight I’m only missing 5 songs for that goal. I 5′d One and also broke 250k for the first time. Then I moved on to hard and surprised myself by getting through the first 12 tracks. Even Tom Morello only took a half a dozen tries to beat this time. Of course I’m barely scraping by though with 3 stars on all but 2 songs which I managed a 4 and a 5 on.

Frets on Fire

kalamaf — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:01:56 +0000

If you’ve got Guitar Hero for the XBox 360, or the newly released GH3 for PC, then you’ve got all you need to enjoy this great free game. The 360 wired guitar works great on Windows XP or Vista, just plug it in and windows will download the driver for it.

Frets on Fire is an open source project that you can snag for free from sourceforge.net. It’s pretty unforgiving though compared to Guitar Hero 3, you have to hit the notes perfectly. What I really like is that you can download additional songs and if you can’t find the songs you want to play, it includes a song editor so you import new songs that are in OGG format. You can also import Guitar Hero songs, but I haven’t tried that out yet.

In the Meantime…

kalamaf — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:17:03 +0000

So today while waiting for RoK to patch I’ve been doing a bunch of random other things. I did a bit of maintenance on my blogs/websites for about an hour and then went browsing YouTube for videos of songs done on Guitar Hero 3 Expert. Some of them are just insane, I can’t imagine ever beating those harder songs at the end of the game. Aside from the song that rolls through the credits, Slayer’s Raining Blood is the hardest song in the game. It’s the only one I failed on easy level (nailed it the 2nd try though). I expect it will be the first one I fail on Medium as well and as for Hard difficulty, I’ve managed to complete 2 songs so far, getting better.

As for those people 5 starring or even perfecting some of these crazy ones, I don’t know if they’re just insanely good or really do have nothing better to do. Addiction is a bad thing, even if it’s video games, maybe some drug rehabilitation would be good for them… or maybe not… it is just a game after all. So many of the comments on YouTube are just plain insulting.

Now if only more people would learn to record through a VCR or computer instead of just recording the TV with a camcorder.

Guitar Hero II

kalamaf — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:54:47 +0000

Borrowed GHII from someone so I could check out the songs in it, so far I’m pretty disappointed. The songs are a lot easier than those in #3, I played through a few on easy and got 99% on all of them, so I switched over to medium and still get 95% on most tracks. I’ve played through the first 15 songs in career mode and so far they’re mostly songs that I either don’t like, or have never heard of. I checked out the bonus songs as well and again, mostly stuff I’ve never heard of. The best things I’ve found so far is Trogdor in the bonus songs, it’s awesome that they got Strong Bad in there for it!

I’m hoping there will be at least some good songs in there, but at least the achievements are easy. I already have more Gamer Points from GH2 than GH3.