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Okay, I will never pick up on WoW no matter how often everyone else posts about it. But everyone has such a good time playing and talking about Guitar Hero / Rock Band, I figured it was worth a look. After all, I did enjoy DDR a lot, and I was good at it without taking too long to get good at it. With the recent release of Guitar Hero 4, I was able to pick up the game and two Les Paul Controllers for about $75. GH3 is a welcome addition to my PS3 game collection which is growing very slowly on account of available moneys and lack of games.God what a hopeless idiot I am for not knowing GH3 and Rock Band are not the same companies anymore, right? I guess there is a lot of drama between red octane and harmonix and activision, but oh well. This game was cheap, I have two guitars for it so I can play with Alison, and I'm enjoying the game. A recent update to the PS3 will allow my controllers to work with rock band should I decide to get it anyways. After about a week I am around the hard-medium-to-easy-hard stage. I can beat the normal tracks in medium with about 95% notes hit, and I can play one or two hard songs, but difficult songs mess me up on medium and I'm trying to play the harder songs to get my note recognition faster before really moving on. Overall I like the game and how it is similar to DDR, but what annoyed me is the career mode. I don't really care to battle guitars. I don't care about winning money or custom characters. I don't want to fight to unlock songs. And I want to play co-op with Alison which forced us through another career mode but oh well. I just want to play a guitar, play any of the songs I want to, and be a rock hero wooo! Pretty much immediately I was putting in the cheat code to unlock all songs, and much prefer it this way. I don't know a lot of the songs but they are fun to play. Has anyone played the new one? What tips are there for stepping up from medium to hard? Doh! Forgot to mention my favorite song: Paint It, Black by The Rolling Stones in 1966. I can't believe it's that old of a song.
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Quakecon came and went quickly this year. The usual group had grown a bit. Tim brought down 8 people from Ohio to stay at my apartment. Luckily it was only for the first and last nights. They reserved a room at the Hilton Anatole for the majority of the event. It was nice to see Tim and we had fun driving in my car, but as always I wish more of my friends would come down. This was the first year that I volunteered with Tim, Adam, March, and Matt. The day that is typically wasted standing in line I spent helping lay down cat5 cabling, crimping network cables (I suck at it) and doing check-in. It was a long day but it felt good to give back to the event a little. My main motivation however was the fact that I had no one to stand in line with this year. Overall the convention was pretty good but it seems to be stalling a little bit. 2005 was a huge year that saw us kicked out of the Gaylord Texan for being rowdy. 2006 was "almost a year without Quakecon". With only a month or so advance notice and a significantly smaller BYOC, QC kind of returned to its roots so to speak. A lot of the big sponsors and shows such as hard ocp were missing, and to this day it is still hurting. 2007 and 2008 have grown since then, learning to maximize the hilton anatole's arena for maximum BYOC and sponsor area. 07 was fun because Will came down. 08 was a year by myself again. Featuring Quake Live as the main event this year, I was disappointed at the lack of Quakewars! There were about 6 main servers, but it was hard to keep enough players in one. Hell this game was still beta during the last Quakecon! The problem in my opinion was bots in the servers. It's something that may turn into a rant in itself one day. Bots should not count as players in game servers! You would be playing the game like normal and all of a sudden you notice you are on a team of bots versus a team of humans. Umm...wonder who's gonna win that one? Of course no one wants to join your team to help because its full of stupid bots and you're going to lose. I played a little quakelive and it's fun and it's everything quake4 is supposed to be, but I spent most of my time in Quake 3 Arena servers. I played some really great players, even got into a 1v1 match which tied at one match each before he had to leave. The BYOC was its normal self, and is always great. Quakecon's problem now is how stale the events are becoming. Yes there's the quickdraw tournaments. But this year you have to be present at the stage to play. No more "Price is Right" style announcements to the BYOC with a happy gamer running down the aisle. There's the "what would you do for a geforce" or whatever where they are shaving people's heads for video cards. Seen that, didn't think too much of it to begin with. There was more Guitar Hero/Rock Band than Quake featured at the closing ceremony. Todd Hollingshead didn't even know the quakelive player's handles in the finals. ATI's swag shirts were embarrassing. Ventrillo had a corvette they were giving away, but not everyone who attended got a chance to win it. Raffle tickets for the vette were given away as prizes for other shit. Of course I won nothing like every year but if I was to win anything in the world it would be a losing ticket for a vette. Congratulations you didn't actually win anything! Think about how many people could have gone home with a video card and a new love for ventrillo instead of the one guy who now gets raped by taxes on a new car that will cost so much to insure. People shaved their heads, legs, and did all sorts of crazy things just for a chance at that corvette and the person who ended up winning got the very last raffle ticket given away. They threw it in a shirt during the closing ceremony. How's that for randomness? I suppose it's technically no different than any other ticket but you have to think they didn't shuffle very well. And a sinus show by another other name...well i still wouldn't go. What made this year good was that I got to spend quite a bit more time there and seeing my bro and adam and maybe even matt. I'm just surprised that I got so much time off work to be able to go. With '08 done, QC's 3 year deal with the anatole is expired and I hope they renew the deal because it's a nice location. As always, I would like to see more of my friends go next year. I think next year I'll spend a little more time on the suggestions forum too!
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UPDATELan party will be Noon 11/25/07 THATS SUNDAY now due to many more people being able to go on sunday. Now obviously the battlestar galactica theme won't really play a part of the LAN since we won't be watching it. So here's the deal: if you want to come over to watch razor / play the game / download episodes from me you can at 8:00pm saturday and even sleep over if you want.-------------- Battlestar Galactica Razor premieres on Nov. 24th at 9 p.m. That's the saturday after thanksgiving. I propose getting together around 5 or so (maybe earlier if you want a bigger LAN Party which I am all for). Recently I picked up the BSG game that just came out by Sierra. It is by no means a masterpiece of the gaming world, but I think that the multiplayer could be fun for a few hours. We can totally play anything else too. I'll also have all the BSG episodes on a server so if you want them the 24th is your best bet. The BSG game is kinda similar to Asteroids in that you have your little viper or whatever and you zoom around with your inertia and can change directions and shoot. Unlimited guns and missles. The game is rendered in 3d, but you can only move around in 2d which kinda sucks. It is pretty fun to play with a usb gamepad which I recommend, but it can use a joystick or keyboard. Kind of a pointless game but I think the instant action is fun so the multiplayer should be fun and it's easy to get the hang of quickly so being a noob is fine. Multiplayer has deathmatch and team deathmatch and a domination mode. It's also been a while since we played trackmania nations and generic FPS's. Even if you are not a fan of BSG it would be fun to get together, since it will be the last lan I'll be at for a long time. I'll be shipping out of Ohio mid december probably. I'll be pestering a lot of you on IM but leave a comment if I don't and you're interested.
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Didn't really make any posts about Quakecon this year but I went. I find that every quakecon is pretty different for me. I think it's all about the company. In 05 it was out first year and everyone was really excited to do it. It was a huge year for qcon with about 3000 people in the BYOC. Quakecon 06 was the opposite. It was announced at the last minute and so none of my friends could go. Of course, I was already in Dallas so takiing the time to go was not hard at all. I talked to Schultz some but mostly I was lonely.
Now Quakecon 07 was a good year again. Being that it was announced in February, I really thought people would be able to go and it would be awesome, but only Will was awesome. We picked him up on the way and it was good to see him again. Also Alison is in Dallas now! So I get to see her again. It was hard only seeing her on weekends and it's even harder going months between visits now. So I split up my time seeing her and going to the con. So I spent less time at quakecon this year but enjoyed the whole trip a lot more. Alison thought that she was stealing my qcon time and was sad but that wasn't true. I know I could have spent more time at the anatole, but I wanted to see her too. I'm not sad that I spent my qcon time with alison, but maybe I am sad that I didn't have enough time go to quakecon and see her as much as I wanted to. Although, I don't ever really want to leave when I see her so maybe that's impossible. Anyways, back to the con. It was more like 05 in terms of size but not quite as big. Quake 4 was the big game last year which I wasn't in to. So this year is Quakewars! I sure do love that Valley map. 3 days of playing the same damn map over and over again... So I ran around like a noob for a day before really getting into it. It seems exactly like Battlefield 2. Wolf:ET was great because there were a few classes but you could have a really good time with few players. Quakewars is different....there's a hell of a lot of different player options and about 1 billion different ways to kill each other. It's a lot more like Battlefield 2 - it you're not in a vehicle you're pretty much sniped or artillery'ed. And the strogg overpower the humans in every class, so you'll pretty much only have fun if you're strogg. I got to play some instagib and I didn't win this year! I'm slacking... We went to Logans Roadhouse to finish off the trip and it was really good. Just like I remembered! I had a great time down there this year.
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I forgot about it too, but I just signed up and there's still room.
But do it now
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