PhatBoyG.com

Well, my first Rock Band guitar has already been replaced by Activision. The exchange was super fast (got the new guitar in three days) and the new one seems to be working much better. The flaw == a broken strummer. And it wasn’t just me!

The lame thing of the day is that I fired up Guitar Hero 3 on the XBOX and was surprised to see that I cannot use my Rock Band controller with GH3. So no multiplayer GH3 without another GH3 controller. That, IMHO, is completely lame. Patch that crap and make it all work together nicely. What a load of crap.

Other than that, the family loves Rock Band. We had some younger family members (under 18) over tonight and they all had a blast with all four parts being represented. I was glad to provide some entertainment while they entertained me (failing on easy? puh-leeez!).

And for what it’s worth, I’m completely screwed trying to finish Vaseline on Hard in Rock Band — yeah, I guess I suck that badly.

After my last post where I mentioned that I got to play Rock Band at the Tulsa InstallFest, I joked about an XBOX 360 being in my near future. Well, I guess I wasn’t joking after all. At first I thought I would have no problem waiting until after Christmas. Most of the places I checked were out of stock and it looked like the must have video game for 2007 was out of reach. Then I called my buddy Jason at GameSpot and was told that they had a couple of them left.

It was a bit sad trading in my only PS2 games for Rock Band. As I laid my games out on the counter, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: 80’s, and Guitar Hero III, I felt a sadness in my heart. I had spent hours upon hours working hard to finish all those songs. Numerous parties where we laughed at each other after failing at an attempt to finish Freebird on Expert. Ah, good times.

Then there was the real issue — I didn’t own an XBOX 360. But I wanted to play the game. Thanks to that good old “no preset spending limit” on the American Express, I ended up taking one of those home as well. I guess I knew the cost going in, but didn’t really think it would go that far. Oh well, such is the life of a video game junkie. Having won a cool new Bluetooth mouse and a 4GB Zune at the InstallFest, I was feeling the need for frugality.

But Rock Band is really that good. Having played Guitar Hero for nearly two years, the guitar parts on Rock Band aren’t too different and don’t seem to hard. But the drums are in another league. I have never been a drummer and I find the added coordination of feet and hands to be intense. It’s going to take some time before I can get past easy on drums. I don’t even want to mention my first attempt at singing vocals but getting an okay on the first song in each (Hey, Ho, Let’s Go) really doesn’t give me much hope of ever being a vocalist.

I had just finished Guitar Hero III on medium this past weekend, so I was a bit bummed that I would have to play all those songs again once I pick it up for the 360. But given the enormous collection of online downloads that are available, I think I’ll get over it. The PS2 was so limited when it came to downloadable content that it didn’t hurt too bad to bid it farewell. When I think about it, it’s probably the oldest piece of technology in my house next to the clock in our microwave oven.

My Gamertag in XBOX Live is ChrisFromTulsa if you want to play online sometime!

Tonight was the Tulsa installment of the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest that is sweeping the cities this month. In a move to get people excited about VS2008, Microsoft handed out 150 trial copies of VS2008 to those that registered. As an encouragement to those that installed VS two-double-oght-eight on site, participants who demonstrated the post-install goodness were given a t-shirt to commemorate the event.

This was by far the biggest turn out we’ve had outside of Tulsa TechFest at OSU Tulsa. Tons of food and drink were provided, including Mazzio’s Pizza, Domino’s Pizza, and Spaghetti Warehouse pasta trays. There was plenty to go around and everyone was talking and discussing anything and everything. Good times.

Once we arrived, we camped out and provided the entertainment for the room. Chris Koenig provided several XBOX 360’s for the event, one with Guitar Hero III and another with my new favorite game Rock Band. Rock Band absolutely kicks ass. We had 3-4 players all the time, and I even uploaded a few videos of people playing the game. The multiplayer on Rock Band makes the battle mode on GH3 look lame. Having a group playing all parts of the song is more fun than you could imagine based on the videos on the web.

These videos were shot on my MacBook Pro and uploaded at the event using iMovie’s YouTube export:

Needless to say, I’ll likely be getting an XBOX 360 and Rock Band sometime in the near future!