IMO
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Shake It Out - Manchester Orchestra
‘cause i’m done being done with the funerals at least for now
are you tired of being alone, are you tired of...
If you’ve ever played the arcade classic Space Invaders, you must have noticed those pesky aliens coming at you notably faster as the game goes on. This wasn’t an intentional part of the game at first, but actually became a core piece of its design. According to an interview with creator Toshihiro Nishikado, the hardware only allowed him to move one Invader every 1/60 second. Functionally, this meant that the set speed of the aliens would get faster as less of them appeared on screen. What audiences perceived as the game speeding up to make it more challenging was actually the game’s inherent slowdown fading as fewer enemies were eating up the game’s hardware restrictions. Now it’s an iconic part of gaming history.
(via 1UP)
This is absolutely amazing to me. It is crazy to think of something so integral to the gameplay of this and future games was a prouct of a hardware limitation. Although I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Games live firmly within the hardware they are written for and played on.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band owe some of their difficulty the their hardware. No, I’m not talking about the parade of shoddy peripherals, I’m actually referring to the fabled strum limit allegedly introduced as an artifact of the NTSC encoding scheme common to US released games and game consoles. NTSC has a lower input per second limit than the European PAL system and this can get in the way when you are attempting to strum Trogdor, at over 17 notes per second.
What about when you attempt to take a game across not just regions but across generations? Recently there has been an uproar about how poorly the Silent Hill franchise (originally released on Sony’s Playstation 2) was updated for the 2012 release of Silent Hill HD Collection. As the forefather of the survival horror genre, Silent Hill lead with atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is poorly recrated on the HD “update”. Check out the series of links on this detailed review, specifically the fog wall.
Like the radio, the fog is iconic to Silent Hill and it helps define the game’s aesthetic, but in Collection the fog has been downgraded to an afterthought. Originally the fog served a dual purpose: to establish atmosphere and hide imperfections in the rendering of the game environment. But now it does neither. The fog line is incredibly stark as you are traveling outdoors and at times it looked like a large white wall of fog was racing away from James. It didn’t look natural. In fact, one of the scariest elements of the game has been turned into a cartoonish caricature. To be fair: the mechanics of the fog may act the same way in the original but, unlike Collection, there’s a whole lot of fog in that game to mask the wall. Fog completely fills the screen in the original game, making it extremely difficult to see buildings, monsters and objects not directly in front of you – but now the fog is only a minor inconvenience.
High def upgrades isn’t just for games. Blu-ray is home to hundreds of cleaned up classics. Remastering can reduce grain, improve contrast, and sharpen audio tracks. But is that something we should always want? Many great directors embraced their limitations to provide a rich experience. Would Texas Chainsaw Massacre have the same effect if rendered in full HD?
What about 3D remakes? Or color? Or even sound? The Artist just won the Oscar for best picture without any of these things. I think Ian Malcom put it best when he said “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
The fictional Jurassic Park character is right. And that was just hours before “remakes” tore his new friends into little pieces.
I Want It All 100% FC (GH:VH) My first Guitar Hero FC in about 8 months. Number 336/670.
Mercyful Fate 918K
My highest of high scores. I decided to record a random run and got my new high score for any song. This is my only score over 900K. I made no attempt to path it and it was only my second run of the day. The global high score on this song is at least 1065193, so I still have plenty work to do.
This song is over 11 minutes long so I was not able post the entire run. I cut together all of the toughest parts to show you what it took for me to get 918K on this song. I had a handful of misses outside of these solo sections but only three or four and only one of them was star power related.
The video was filmed with my iphone so please forgive the quality. I don’t think its half bad actually. Finally, this is also my first go at any type of video editing so that explains the crude transitions.
I just reached my (very) long time Guitar Hero goal of 100% full combo-ing at least one half of all available on-disc songs on expert guitar. Welcome to the Jungle was my 335th out of a possible 670 spread across 11 different games. Welcome to the Jungle was a very satisfying last song too. I missed just one note on that song almost two years ago (May 2009).
Click through to check out my newly created Flikr photo set that contains photo proofs for 200 of my 335 include my first (January 2008) and My 335th (today).
The downfall of Guitar Hero has motivated me to get back to my quest to 100% FC one half of all on-disc songs (on expert guitar of course). I spent a good amount of time reformatting my spread sheet and photo album.
As of this morning’s hard fought FC of Metallica’s Orion, I have 324 out of 670 songs (195 with photo proof).
The remaining 11 songs will be tough but it is somewhat comforting to know that the total number of available songs will not change. I am no longer racing the developers as they pump out game after game. That is what it had felt like prior to this week. Activition was quite the sprinter. But they burned out. As a fan, I am in this for the long haul.
Wish me luck!
As fate would have it, I am wearing this shirt today.
Much much more on this later.
Ever wonder what the text is in the body of the newspaper behind all of your Guitar Hero 2 scores? No? Well I am going to tell you anyways.
A bunch of Guitar Hero fans with way too much time on their hands got together on this ScoreHero.com thread and made out a best guess based on magnified versions of screen captures such as the one above.
Then three years later some random guy found the thread while googling for part of a real newspaper article found the March 13th, 2004 edition of the Palos Verdes Penninsula News found here.
Read the second paragraph in the second column starting with “Fleming says it was by coincidence…” Epic win.
And yes, I did use this opportunity to post my Jordan high score. Toot Toot!
Just beat “This Day We Fight!”. Turns out I was strumming WAY too fast.
[update: FotS, TDWF!, IYWP(PFW) 4*’s and SD 5* —> 93/93 songs 4 or 5 -starred]
some songs are just not meant to be FCed
the prolific UKOGmonkey (ggaht, cm, thrasher (bass), ttfaf, soothsayer fc’s) playing Nihilanth (XBL)
Quest Mode is in the bag. I unlocked the two remaining characters, played the three Megadeth songs, and let the credits roll. Having the ability to use multiple character powers at once made the Megadeth songs a lot easier. Even still they were very difficult. I found myself flailing a lot more than I would have liked. After I had unlocked all the songs in Quest mode it was off to the familiar realm of Quickplay. Over the weekend I beat 55/93 songs in Quickplay, FCing 20 of them in the process, the best being Jet City Woman. I predict I will have somewhere around 35-40 FCs in about a month, leaving me woefully short of my goal of 47. As usual, my best scores can be found at scorehero.com.
When I cracked open this game I expected trouble from Fury of the Storm, Black Widow of La Porte, and Sudden Death. I beat all of those this weekend. However, I am still having trouble with Speeding (Vault Edition), This Day We Fight!, and If You Want Peace… Prepare for War. I don’t expect any of these to be long term problems, but they are owning me at the moment.
What do you want to see? I know that a handful of my followers are familiar with these games. Send me a question or challenge and I will see what I can do. I am not amazing at this stuff, but I do have a lot of fun working towards new goals, both personal and game defined. I will respond to any questions/challenges and if I think it is worthy enough, I may even make a video.
Requests?
I cracked it open last night and started my blitzkrieg of Quest Mode. My Dad is visiting today and I wanted to be able to show him Black Widow of La Porte, Fury of the Storm, Sudden Death, Chemical Warfare and others. That means I have to unlock the top tier ASAP.
Quest Mode’s star ratings are blown out of proportion and inconsistent (because you have a different character power in each venue). For this reason I can’t really speak to how many songs I five-starred on sightread but I would guess I only missed one or two if any at all.
The most fun song to play was definitely the Alter Bridge song “Ties That Bind”. All the chord fests were disappointing, most notably AFI - “Dancing Through Sunday”. That riff could have been a blast to play and the solo could have been clean but fast and challenging. Instead you spend the whole song plodding your way through chord alt-strumming with strange hammerons mixed in. And the solo is a bit of a random strum clusterf**k.
When all was said and done I played through 5 characters and Rush’s 2112 set. I FCed 6 songs 3 of which were Rush 2112 parts, the most impressive of which was 2112: Sanctuary.
Heading home right after the market closes to clean up the apartment and make a run at the final tier before my Dad arrives. Wish me luck.
Just got my UPS tracking number. I didn’t think it was going to get here until Friday. Currently Amazon and UPS have an estimated delivery date of tomorrow! ZOMG I hope that is true.
Guitar Hero Warriors Of Rock - Holy Wars… The Punishment Due 100% FC
Why is it that all of the pros seem to be able to get games early. Damn them. Also, this game looks incredible. I am prepared for this to be the best Guitar Hero game yet. Too bad Amazon does not have release day delivery. I’ll be getting this a week from today. Overall Expert guitar goals 1) 5-star all songs 2) FC half of the songs. I’ll keep Tumblr updated.
