Defective Junk Hero

No, this isn't some kind of Viagra spam post. I picked up Shitty Cover Band III (AKA Guitar Hero III) this past weekend. Twice. On Friday I pick the game up after work, head home, get my wireless network shit set back up, and fire up the game. I start playing "Slow Ride." I'm a bit rusty since I haven't been practicing my fake plastic guitar skills in awhile, but I'm doing OK. Not stellar though, as I realize my timing sucks because I just cannot hit a red+green combination.

After awhile I realized the issue wasn't me (for once), but the shiny new wireless guitar. You know, the one us 360 owners get jacked an extra ten bucks for thanks to Microsoft's proprietary wireless interface (at least, I'm guessing that's why it's $10 more than the PS or Wii versions). Upon further investigation I found out that it actually worked when I would strum up, but not down. I was about to call ETP and ask him if this was some new dumbass feature they'd added to make the game more challenging.

Playing some more I further realized that doing a red+green+down worked, if you consider red+green+down registering as yellow to be working. At this point I'm like, probably not a new feature. Oh, it's a feature all right, the kind that plenty of other people are having. It didn't take much searching through forums to see that I was not alone in my wireless guitar woes. Yay for quality control and product testing.

I started to take the guitar apart but got to a point where I felt like a circuit board wasn't gonna move without me breaking it so I was like, fuck it. Back to the store for an exchange.

My second one seems to be working just fine. I haven't put in a ton of time on the game yet (and you know there's the looming spectre of my video game ADHD), but it's not bad. It's Guitar Hero. It looks a bit different but pretty much plays the same. My biggest complaint is the extra shit it puts up on screen while you're playing, like when you hit a note streak. That always fucks me up because I think it's telling me I have Star Power when of course I don't. I'm busy paying attention to shit at the bottom middle of the screen assholes, and it used to be useful for the game to tell me up top about Star Power. I'm not actually gonna read it douchebags, but when it popped up I knew what it was without looking away from what I was supposed to be playing.

As an aside, dontcha love how when you've been playing for awhile and then you finally look away from the screen, everything around you seems to be moving upwards? That was rather unsettling the first time it ever happened to me. And now it's just normal.

The only new feature I've come across is the whole boss battle thing, which I found rather annoying. Partly because it took me a buncha tries to beat Tom Morello since I'm retarded. Then there was the time I was trying to attack and I tilted the guitar up so quickly and violently that i hit myself in the head, also because I'm retarded. And now more so. But in the end I beat Morello, and afterwards we had a nice discussion on geopolitics and he pointed me in the direction of a communist bookstore for references to support his dumbass opinions.

I was under the impression that a good deal of songs were the actual songs by the original artists, but no, most (so far for me at least, and I'm too lazy to go look it up right now) are just performed by shitty cover bands. Hence my nickname for the game still stands. And yes, I'm full well aware that Shitty Cover Band would be a better nickname for the impending Rock Band, but I started referring to GH as such a ways back and it's too late to change now. Maybe I'll just refer to Rock Band as Shitty Rock Band.

So while the track list is pretty badass, I'm rather disappointed in all the crap ass cover bands. I was especially pissed when I heard "Barracuda," one of the first songs I can ever recall listening to and enjoying (can't fuckin' believe that song is actually two years older than me). I was looking forward to playing that song, and while fun, the whole shitty cover band experience kinda took off some of the lustre.

Speaking of Shitty Rock Band, I can't say I'm all that enthused for the game. It's like, I can already be mediocre at playing the fake plastic guitar. Am I really that stoked to learn to play the fake plastic drums? Because I sure as hell will not be doing any singing. I have a good voice and all, but singing? Fuck that shit.