On Saturday, I met up with Alan, Hoover, and some of Alan’s friends to celebrate Alan’s birthday. We hit up Sushi Tomo, which is always delicious, but I will say that I’ve now met two types of fish that I really don’t enjoy as sashimi – mackerel, and albacore. The mackerel was simply nasty and fishy, and the albacore was, well, blah in every way. It was Hoover’s first time at Tomo, and I think he was pretty pleased. Of course, eating sushi brought up conversation of Raw, and the typical overwhelming sense of sadness took over…but it was short-lived, as the night was very young.

We rolled over to Fox & Hound for some brews and shuffleboard, and while it was fun hanging out with the guys, I was totally annoyed with the Fox & Hound. First of all, the playoff game between the Jags & Patriots was getting no love. It was relegated to the crappy TVs, while the mid-season Pens game was on all of the main screens. Now, I really like the Penguins, but this is the NFL playoffs we’re talking about.

On top of the that, Fox & Hound just comes off as a pretentious hangout for those guys who have never left the area and sit around reliving their high school glory days while hitting on women that are far too young to star in their own version of a Viva Viagra commercial.

I won’t even get started on Allegheny County’s new 10% drink tax…at least not in this post. Ugh. That adds up when you’re downing Magic Hats for a few hours.

After we left the North Hills high school reunion bar, all of us rolled over to Alan’s place to keep drinking and play some Xbox. Yep, we haven’t grown up as much as we’d like to think. If I hadn’t been drinking, it would’ve felt like I was in high school or college again, sitting around playing Gran Turismo, Stuntman, or Tony Hawk all night at Mundis’ place.

We started with some Guitar Hero III, then moved on to Halo 3 (which I still hate), and finished with a marathon of Rock Band…with yours truly rocking the drum kit. Ha. Only one of Alan’s friends had played Rock Band before, but the whole group quickly took a liking to it. I’m pretty sure we played for about 5 hours, and at the end of the night/early morning, my theory that Rock Band would be the ultimate get together game was affirmed. Alan was planning on picking it up that day, so I guess we’ll be teaming up on Xbox Live soon enough.

It was awesome to hang out with old friends and finally meet some new ones. Hopefully it doesn’t take another year to see some of those guys.

My hand hurts. Why? Well, because I can’t seem to beat “Green Grass and High Tides” by The Outlaws on expert guitar…no matter how many times I try.

Last week, I went to our local Game Stop and picked up the long-awaited Rock Band video game. At first I was overly annoyed at the whole process of putting the instruments together and getting everything to work (the microphone, in particular, since Davis and I are morons). The drums are a little non-responsive at times (a replacement is coming), but other than that the equipment is holding up better than expected. When I had played the guitar at the Best Buy demo booth, I was far from excited, but after playing the Stratocaster controller for the last week, I’ve really grown comfortable with it. Moving between the chords is a little easier since you can actually slide your fingers over the flush buttons as opposed to the Guitar Hero controller, where the buttons aren’t flush at all. The microphone seems pretty sturdy, and guitar is holding up well, but we take good care of our stuff so I don’t expect any malfunctions until Evans comes over and touches something. Ha ha.

The game is actually a lot of fun. Davis and I have taken turns on every instrument (drums, bass, guitar, vocals). The biggest challenge is probably the vocals. I don’t think they would be so challenging if I knew all of the words, but if you don’t know all of the songs, at least from a melodic and pitch perspective, you’re going to struggle a quite a bit…especially while playing guitar and singing. Of course, unfamiliarity is at the heart of most of the struggles for Scott and I. We can actually play our respective instruments pretty well (Me = vocals, guitar, Scott = drums), so that really helps us get through some of the unknowns, but when some of the later, higher difficulty songs come up, it becomes a little too difficult to wing it on expert.

Overall, the game scores big for me on the fun factor. Does it get tiring playing the same songs over and over? Of course, but now you’ll know how real bands feel. If you get tired of playing in the world tour modes, you can always play tug of war, which is an different approach to a head-to-head challenge, or you can challenge friends or online opponents/bands in a traditional head-to-head challenge. My only advice would be to listen and learn all of the songs before you play it because it’ll be much easier.

My only, non-game play complaint is that the character personalization is pretty weak, but for a first release Rock Band is a great game.

My only experience with the Guitar Hero franchise was at a Best Buy about 6 months ago. I tried to play Danzig’s “Mother” for about a minute and promptly decided that it wasn’t worth the effort.

I guess my time and effort has taken a price cut because on Sunday Davis and I spent around 7 hours playing Guitar Hero III. I have to admit that it was a lot more fun that I had expected. We managed to beat the game on medium, which isn’t a really a great accomplishment. At least not in a society overrun with lazy children with amazing hand-eye coordination who never leaving the house thanks to games like this. I digress. It felt like a decent accomplishment for us, especially after the annoyingly difficult final battle between me and Lucifer (Lou) on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”.

I should also add that the songs that were chosen for the most part are really good, and it’s funny how this game forced me to appreciate the guitar parts of songs that I never really paid much attention to. I guess that happens when you’re forced to listen to the same song 20 times or more. Ha ha.

Anyway, I always thought that I would hate the game because I can play guitar at a relatively high level, and despite the shape of the controller – in this case a Les Paul – it’s pretty far from really playing guitar. In some ways I’m completely on-point. Naturally, I hate the fact that you don’t really strum the way that you would on a guitar. The game forces you to ignore a lot of strokes which is really difficult on songs that I actually know well, since I would be strumming the notes when they were actually being sounded and not when the little indicators were telling me to. It’s just unnatural at this point for songs that I know.

The other thing that I’m not totally sold on is the controller. Guitar is really easy for me because I can slide my hand up and down on the strings quickly and I don’t find myself lost too often, but the GH controller has 5 buttons and I really have trouble maneuvering between the two positions that I’ve sort of defined for myself (index finger on green to pinkie on blue, and index finger on red to pinkie on orange). I often find myself in between two buttons and unable to recover once I lose my place on the tiny “fretboard”.

Anyway, all complaints of my inability to adapt to the silly controller are basically moot since endless amounts of people, guitar players and non-guitar players, have mastered this game. We’ve started going through the hard level, so hopefully things get better quickly. Sadly, I’ll probably master this game while my guitars gather dust in the next room. I can’t wait until Rock Band comes out and Davis and I decide that we can sell all of our real music equipment because our virtual band just takes up less room and we don’t have to leave the house for gigs!