Right under my damn nose

So, you may or may not recall that since I moved last, I was unable to locate my PS2's RCA A/V cable.  I had a perfectly good S-Video A/V cable, but no screen that took S-Video as an input without an adapter of one or another variety.

Yesterday, I had the genius idea to use a four-way system selector to just automatically convert S-Video to RCA video, which would solve my problems.  There so happened to be such a system selector in my dad's entertainment center, uselessly sitting there between the VCR we never use and the TV and audio receiver, with the VCR as the only thing plugged into it.  So, with a little backwards shuffling of the VCR to make cables reach, I hooked it up directly to everything and extracted my prize.

I proceeded to hook up everything, including the PS2.  Excited that I was going to get to play Guitar Hero once again, I opened the controller pocket on the travel case I have for my PS2, which also houses my memory cards.  There, sandwiched between the two controllers, I saw something.  It looked oddly like a set of red, white, and yellow RCA male plugs.

Yeah, so that happened.  The cable was in my damn PS2 travel case the entire fucking time.  Go me.

So, what does this mean?  Well, other than being able to play Guitar Hero again...

• After finishing Chrono Trigger DS, and the Bravely Default SCIENCE!, I can finally get to the last half of Project 'Bout Fuckin' Time and play me some Final Fantasy 4.
• After that, I can finally play through Chrono Cross.  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I played through a significant portion of the first disc, then for whatever reason I set it down and didn't come back to it.  Now that I've completely forgotten where I was and what I was doing, I'm just going to start the story over again.
• And then, who knows what?  I'm hoping I can entice some friends into playing Melty Blood or Fate/Unlimited Codes at some point (or maybe even Garou: Mark of the Wolves or The Rumble Fish).  I'm not particularly amazing at fighting games in general, and usually play troll strategies with no real regard as to whether or not I win.  This works well considering I have friends who, just like me, aren't tourneyfags.  Thus, using mainly strings of basic attacks and the occasional special move or super is quite appropriate.

Nothing posted in ages...

So, I got a job.  A real one this time.  It's sucking away all my free time.  Which means less time to play games and write blog posts.

Here's a quick rundown of what's happened recently:

• Guitar Hero 5: FCed Deadbolt by Thrice
• Rogue Galaxy: All my Dark Emperors are ACE and have all their stats except for health maxed.  Currently feeding them the item that boosts their health until they reach max health or stop gaining boosts from food, before entering Insectron S Rank.
• The Simpsons: Hit and Run: Still haven't started playing it.
• Project 'Bout Fuckin' Time: Still haven't started it.
• Food: I've been making yakisobapan for my lunches for work recently.  Might eventually formulate a recipe post.  It's really not a complex thing to make.
• Winter Anime Season: Finished Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT and Minami-ke Tadaima.  Haganai NEXT had its moments but wasn't quite as good as the first season, and Minami-ke Tadaima was actually pretty decent.  Initial D 5th Stage on hold, basically watching Central-Anime's DVD version.
• Spring Anime Season: Watching Haiyore! Nyaruko-san W, and To aru Kagaku no Railgun S.  Checking out Namiuchigiwa no Muromi-san and a couple others.
• Guild Wars: Retreated from GW2, for a variety of reasons I'll probably dedicate a post to in the near future.  Playing GW1 sporadically.
• Computer stuff: Learning XSLT and Windows PowerShell.
• CAINE: CAINE is attending Sakura Matsuri this weekend.  We wrapped up our scheduled showings recently and by far the best thing we watched this semester was Steins;Gate.  It was up against Now and Then, Here and There, Kino no Tabi, and Megas XLR.  Also, for whatever reason, we had a showing that consisted of both Nanoha movies.  I'm not really into magical girl stuff.

Band Hero

So, other than Guitar Hero 6: Warriors of Rock, Band Hero was the last game I really had to do in the entire series.  Being that I don't have access to a copy of WoR or a console to play it on, it'll probably stay that way.

Anywho, what is there to Band Hero to set it apart from the rest of the series?

It's balls easy, that's what.

In fact, it's earned the distinction of being the game I will recommend to entry-level GH players.

Unlike the other GH games, it doesn't have a "hardest song" or a set of "hardest songs".  Most of the songs are really easy, and the remaining ones are moderate difficulty with the occasional hard spot.  This shows quite plainly in my sightread results, where I almost full game 5-starred both guitar and bass.  On guitar it was a matter of tapping a pattern of slider notes that I hadn't been prepared for on sightread, and on bass it was a matter of using star power in the right spot because the song only had 42 fucking notes.

The soundtrack is what the game lives off of, and this time around they seem to have put in a handful of good songs and then filled in the rest of the 65 song set list with completely meh songs.  The worst of the bunch being Bring Me To Life by Evanescence.  I actually unplugged my speakers when I sightread that song.  On both Guitar and Bass.  Just to give some contrast, there are three Taylor Swift songs and one Hilary Duff song in the game and I didn't unplug my speakers for them.  Just sayin'.

I'll give two overall statements:

1. If you're new to Guitar Hero as a whole, then Band Hero is a very good entry point.  The overall lack of difficulty will let you get used to the mechanics and gameplay without being too overwhelmed.  Then once you've gotten decent you can move on to other games with more challenging songs.
2. If you're already a seasoned Guitar Hero player, the only reason you'd ever want to get Band Hero is the fact that it provides 65 more songs to play.  You probably won't be challenged very much by the songs, but it's still the same game you're used to, and there are good songs in the game, even though they encompass less than half of its soundtrack.

Fun With Extended Sustains in Guitar Hero

Disclaimer: Everything discussed within applies to the PS2 version of all the various Guitar Hero games, and may have been patched on systems that support patching games.  Don't blame me if it doesn't work for you.

Extended sustains were one of the new features added to the game since Guitar Hero: World Tour.  Like 'em or not, they've been in every game since then.  They've always been interesting to me, since while they're relatively intuitive to hit, they break a pattern that GH players were used to up until World Tour came out: You could hold down buttons below a single-note sustain, but not above it.

Extended sustains are intended to better emulate the multi-stringed nature of the guitar on the vastly simplified one-string, five-fret guitar controller, but it can get a bit cramped and awkward feeling sometimes depending on which frets the game is asking you to keep held.  Also, depending on the game and song you're playing, they can also be used for pitch bends, which I've never liked.

There are glitches involved with extended sustains as well, suggesting that not even the developers fully understood the new capabilites they provided.  These glitches are both of the graphical and functional varieties:

• In some of the GH games, when there's one or more sustains above a lower one, releasing the lower ones can result in an inexplicably higher score.
• Occasionally you can get the flame to keep burning past the end of an extended sustain.  This corrects itself the next time you hit a note of that color.
• Occasionally also, after dropping a sustain low down in the extended sustain's structure, if you hold the fret that was dropped and strum a note that appears above it, the line for the dropped fret will re-appear.  If you're whammying a star power sustain, it will reappear blue and pulse with your whammy just like any other sustain.
• If you press a button during an extended sustain that does not appear during that extended sustain, you will drop the sustain.  This in all honesty is probably the intended behavior, but it feels weird.

The one I found today however involves chords above extended sustains, and essentially another broken pattern in the game.  With chords, the pattern up until extended sustains were added was that you couldn't hold any buttons other than the ones in the chord.  Extended sustains mess with that by having you already hold a button not involved with the chord when you hit the chord.

So, with you now already holding a button when the chord comes along, how does that affect processing of the chord when you hit it?

So long as you stick to fret colors that exist above the extended sustain, it turns out you can hold whatever you want above the extended sustain and still hit chords above it.  You can even hold buttons above the chord.

The best place to exploit this that I've found is where I discovered it: the extended sustains on the song Jump in Guitar Hero: Van Halen.  The sustain is green, and the other four frets appear above it, in chords.  The result is that you can strum the green sustain, then hold down all five frets and strum as necessary to hit the chord pattern.  You'll have to shift back for the chords between them (and the rest of the song, where this won't work), but you can do this on all of the extended sustains in the song that have only chords above them.

Adventures in Guitar Hero Lag Calibration

So all this time, I've been playing Guitar Hero on an old Commodore 1702 CRT monitor.  I've basically sworn by CRTs for rhythm games for one crucial reason: no lag.  Every LCD, plasma, etc. ever has lag that makes the game unplayable.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are two of surprisingly few games that include a lag calibration utility.  However, I've never had much luck with it.  Up until last night.

At our usual game night we have on Fridays, I was trying to get GH Van Halen going on a friend's LCD monitor.  I calibrated the lag, it came up with 52ms for video and 0ms for audio.  I go and play a song, and it's still lagged.  Such has generally been the situation for quite a while, that no matter what the video lag calibration setting is set to, it makes no god damn difference.

On a hunch, I set the audio lag calibration setting to 52ms and reset the video to 0ms.  Played a song, and bam, perfect calibration.

Basically, how I think it works, is the video lag calibration setting uselessly adjusts the length of the timing windows to let you hit the notes later.  This is because the audio and the video aren't desynced, they're just shifted so that the notes aren't where they should be relative to the audio.  Setting your calibration this way lets you strum when you hear the note, but the physical representation of the note onscreen will have gone by the line at the bottom by the time this happens.  This is massively disconcerting to me, because I'm used to strumming when the note hits the line.  The other alternative is to strum when the note hits the line.  This places you on the very leading edge of the timing window, essentially, making it very easy to drop notes that you thought you had hit.  It also doesn't feel right, because you strum the note and then you hear it played.

So to summarize that paragraph: video lag calibration is useless.

The audio lag calibration works by shifting the audio so that it's essentially ahead of the note track, so that with the video lag induced by the screen the notes will play when you're supposed to strum them.  This makes a fuckload more sense than simply tacking extra time onto the tail end of the timing windows.

So basically, any GH game without audio lag calibration is unplayable on anything other than a CRT.  This would be GH1, GH2, GH80s, GH3, and possibly GH:A, at least on PS2.  For the internet-supported consoles (360, etc.) the earlier games have the audio lag calibration patched in...

What I'd love to see is a console with a global lag calibration utility that it applies to all games.  Because the lag isn't only there for just rhythm games.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen

Since I snagged a free promo copy of it at MAGFest X and have finished sightreading Guitar, it's time for some thoughts.

Very little, if anything engine-wise has changed, so there really isn't much to talk about other than critiquing the choice of songs and their charts.  And for the most part, the charts are fine, though there are some bits that are rather awkward to play.  Generally whenever there's chords and HOPO patterns combined with extended sustains.

Apparently the engine supports extended sustains involving slider notes, because extended sustains involving slider notes are all over the place.  This comes off as being incredibly weird to me, because when the controller's receiver is plugged into a computer, the touch strip maps as an analog axis.  But whatever, if it works, it works.  It's not like I use the touch strip anyway.

The cheats menu had me a bit confused.  One of the first things I did after firing the game up was go to ScoreHero's wiki page that has the button inputs for all the cheats and unlock all of them.  Yet, after that, one of them was still locked, and the only one that remained is Black Highway, which for some retarded reason doesn't work on PS2.  I did some poking around with various GH data structure viewing tools and found the missing cheat, which unlocks extra Van Halen costumes that can be toggled in the cheats menu, much like the extra Metallica costumes in GH:M.  For what little it matters, the sequence to unlock it is RGBRGBYY.

Van Halen has a great mixture of songs ranging from fairly simple to quite difficult.  Overall, I'm pleased with the difficulty of this game.  After World Tour, Smash Hits, and GH5 having maybe three difficult tracks apiece (notice I didn't mention Metallica, which was actually difficult...), it's nice to have some challenge.

The non-Van Halen songs are pretty good overall.  For a lot of them I had the reaction of "Hey, they included that!  Awesome!".  We're talking songs like Space Truckin' by Deep Purple, Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, Master Exploder by Tenacious D, and Best of You by Foo Fighters (ever see the "THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST" meme anywhere on the internet?  This song is what that's referencing).

It's interesting that they included Hot For Teacher, being that it's also in World Tour.  The chart is entirely different, and thus it counts as an entirely new sightread.  The difference of the chart actually caught me off-guard and I had to retry the song to get through the intro.  Whatever.

This time around, the hardest song, without a doubt, is Eruption.  It's one of Van Halen's solos they play at concerts and was a quite popular custom-charted song up until it was included in this game.  It took me 12 tries to pass it, because it took me 12 tries to hit two star power phrases.  Simple as that.  Also apparently the bass part is charted and it has all of 4 notes, with a max score of just over 1300. Too bad the usual method of selecting songs that aren't normally selectable doesn't seem to work on PS2...

Poking around the other menus, the game has mode where it will play each song and let you scroll through the lyrics, and a soundboard mode.  The soundboard mode lets you dial up various sound bytes of Van Halen songs with quick two-button sequences.  It's kind of neat, but mostly overlookable.

The one thing the game does that I don't like is that it has this effect to make it sound like the crowd is singing along with the song as you're playing it.  It sounds incredibly fake, and I'd rather just hear the track I'm playing.  I turned down the Effects volume in the options, but haven't gotten a chance to test it and see if it killed the stupid effect once and for all.

At any rate, if you're into GH/RB, Guitar Hero: Van Halen is worth picking up.  Being that GH is dead, you should be able to find a copy for rather cheap.

Guitar Hero 5

Now that I'm done with Expert Guitar Career, it's time to sit down and discuss my thoughts on the game.

There are some graphical improvements over previous games, as always.  The venues look great.  But that doesn't really matter when you're only going to be looking at the fretboard the entire time.  The best graphical improvement is thus the fretboard itself.  Gone are the busy, distracting designs.  It's simply black.  It has a design, but it's black.  Contrasts well with the notes and doesn't get in the way.  For-fucking-finally.  Though honestly we had the "Black Highway" option in Guitar Hero: Metallica, it was strangely gone from Smash Hits.

Gone is battle mode.  At least in the PS2 version.  I do know that the PS2 version is tremendously stripped down from the versions for current-generation consoles, and to a certain degree that can be expected.  Party mode ships without its ability to make a playlist and the drop-in, drop-out play that was touted in all the promotions.  Also, the "play with any instrument combination" bit of hype is "play with 2 guitarists or 2 bassists" on the PS2.  The game will only let you use two guitars.  And by the way, that's actually exclusive or.  Once you have two guitar controllers joined into the band, the game won't allow any more.

The controller itself is great.  The only problem I've had with it so far is the location of the star power button.  I can activate with it, but I can never get my front-end activations right.  It just feels awkward.  I'd love to have it where the GH3 Kramer had it.  Also, despite their effort to prevent you from hitting one of the two start buttons accidentally, I still find myself doing it.  The controller is actually the very same controller that ships with the PS3 version of the game, and has a USB receiver.  The receiver also has a two port USB hub in it, which is important for connecting a microphone for vocals, since the PS2 only has two USB ports.

Also, now that I have a controller with a touch strip, I've had the opportunity to try it out.  All I can say is: it's pointless.  Beginners don't use it because slider notes come up with no warning and it's difficult to shift up there and back down to the fret buttons, and advanced players don't use it because it's inaccurate, it's impossible to tell where you are on it, and the "tap it to strum" feature interferes with tapping fret buttons in solos.  So just turn it off in the options and forget it even exists.

Even though the controller still has a detachable neck, it looks like they learned their lesson from the GH3 ones and actually have proper male/female connectors for it now.  The connections are solid and the neck doesn't wiggle.  I can't really complain.

Just like with the GH3 controllers for PS2, the receivers are keyed to the guitar they came with.  Also, just like the older controllers, you can press the sync button on the receiver to force it to look for any guitar.

Back to the game.

In addition to the standard modes (Career, Quickplay, Head to Head, Training) and Party mode, there's also Free Play.  It's basically equivalent to the Party mode, except you get to choose your song instead of it just being on shuffle with an option to skip in the pause menu.  Both Party mode and Free Play turn on no-fail and remove star power and scoring points, but the difference is that Free Play lets you make six-song playlists.

Actually, that's one of the best features that the current generation console versions of Guitar Hero have had for a while that the PS2 never got until now: making a six-song playlist in Quickplay (and in Free Play lol).  You scroll through the list selecting songs with the green button, and when you're satisfied, you hit start to play.

In terms of other new features, we have hammer-on/pull-off chords now.  Which can be confusing when they're really close together.  Overall they're pretty fun when you can hit them.  Check out the intro to Judith by A Perfect Circle, which has some pretty fun HOPO chord sequences.

There are some new cheats this time around as well: with the HOPO chords comes the Always HOPO cheat that turns any note it possibly can into a HOPO.  It disables your ability to get high scores, but it's fun nonetheless.  Try it with Always Slide on and you'll only ever need to strum repeated chords.  There's also Free Drum.  I don't have a drum controller, so I haven't tried it out, but since it disables high scores, I can pretty much infer what it does.  It most likely turns the drum part for any given track into a freestyle part where you can just play whatever the fuck you want.

The most useful of all of the cheats, however, is Focus Mode.  It disables the venue in the background, so there's less stuff to distract you from the notes.

Playing through the game, you'll notice that something isn't there.  Something that all previous Guitar Hero games have had up until now.  What could it be?  Money.  You no longer get money for playing a track, and unlockable things no longer cost money.  This is a good thing, it means that all the clothing options that are available are unlocked, and whenever the game says "You've unlocked more stuff!", you don't have to pay money for it.  It's just there, ready to be used.  The whole "infinite money" system from World Tour and its derivatives was a step in the right direction, and this was the ultimate solution.

Soundtrack-wise, the game is fairly varied.  It's a combination of oldfag music, 90s music, new stuff, metal, and weird stuff.  Also, why did it seriously take them until Guitar Hero 5 to put Smells Like Teen Spirit in a GH game?  Also, for some reason, there's a rap song.  Yeah, it's got Zakk Wylde on guitar, I don't care.  Rap in Guitar Hero?  Seriously?

In terms of overall difficulty, it's a pretty good game for newcomers.  There's only three truly difficult tracks.  Some of the rest have complex bits in them, but overall they're way less difficult.

Overall, other than the fact that the game lacks the features that were stripped out of it for the PS2, I can't really complain.  It's a decent addition to the franchise, and it's exactly what any fan of the franchise wants: more levels.

More Guitar Hero Woes

After I got the two functional guitar controllers from a friend and hardwired the GH3 Kramer, I went about my merry way playing the game.  I'm still nowhere near the level I was at previously, but I've managed to knock a few 5*s and FCs off of the list of stuff I was close to, including a 5* of B.Y.O.B. Expert Bass for my second Full Game 5*, and in the process accomplishing my goal of FG5*-ing Guitar Hero World Tour on Expert Bass with at least 50% FCs.

Just recently, that Kramer has started having its fret buttons flicker.  I've been trying to narrow down the cause, but every time I think I'm close to figuring it out, it happens in some other circumstance entirely.  It seems to be related to when I strum and whammy near-simultaneously, as I normally do on long notes within star power phrases.  The result of this is that the long note in question gets hit and then instantly dropped.

But that's not entirely it.  For a while it seemed like it only did it whenever Blue or Orange were involved.  But then it started happening on Red, Yellow, and Green.  I opened it up and checked my hardwiring job.  Everything still looked good, though I adjusted the blue wire a bit (it was looser than the others) and repositioned the electrical tape.  It still flickers and insta-drops long notes, though.

At one point, it seemed like it would happen consistently if I twisted the neck in a weird way, but that went away as quickly as it came.

Regardless of anything, what I'm left with is an unreliable GH3 Kramer and a GH2 SG whose strum bar bounces back up and causes an overstrum.

This is all relevant because I was with CAINE last night wandering around our local Wal-Mart after midnight and happened upon three copies of Guitar Hero 5 for PS2 with the guitar in the games section for $20.  Unfortunately, I only had about $14, so I put it back, but I was forgetting about my check card which has the money for what was once the New Case Fundraiser that I had the progress bar over on the right for a while back.  I've kind of been spending that money ($20 or so of it bought me a TracFone card recently), so...  I think I'll go back there and nab one of those copies of GH5.  Hell, I could grab two of them, sell the extra copy of GH5 to Gamestop, and have two completely untouched guitar controllers. (and a game full of tracks to sightread)

I have confidence it'll still be there, they had multiple copies and who the hell else is buying shit for the PlayStation 2 these days?

Much later edit: Picked up one GH5+guitar bundle.  A friend wants to go halfsies on another, where I get the guitar and he gets the game and pays me $10, so I'll be doing that.

I'd Tap That

Tapping is an advanced technique in Guitar Hero that involves the player moving their strumming hand up to the fret buttons to press them.  It's adapted from a technique of the same name for playing real guitar.  What makes this possible is the fact that not every note in a chart needs to be strummed.  For those who have never tried to use them before (and never played the friggin' tutorials), any note in GH3 and newer that's glowing on top doesn't need to be strummed so long as you don't break combo.  They exist in the earlier games too, but they're harder to see, and in GH1 they're almost impossible to use.  The reason a player would want to tap is simple: It makes the section of the song easier.  You only have but so much dexterity in your fretting hand, so breaking a section down into what you hit with your fretting hand and what you tap with your strumming hand allows you to get around that.  The technique is perfectly legal for both ScoreHero and Guinness World Records.

If it sounds difficult to do, well, it is.  I've been trying to learn how to do it for a while now.  I've been doing it all over the place in World Tour, Metallica, and Smash Hits thanks to the slider notes which never need to be strummed even if you break combo, but that doesn't really learn you how to tap the complex stuff since you can just start your combo back up without having to change what you're doing.

The section I've been tapping is in Guitar Hero 3.  The song Impulse has a section called Funkiest Riff In History, which ends with a fast zigzag on red, yellow, and orange that I can't hit with just my left hand.  I'm terrible at zigzags in general.  I've had a fair amount of luck learning how to tap this zigzag, to the point that I've played the entire section, started tapping, and gone back to the strum a mere two notes after the last tap several times now without dropping combo.

Some people share their fingerings for song sections and just imply that "this is THE way to do it", when in reality, different methods will work for different people.  When reading anything suggesting a fingering for a specific section, it should be regarded as "this is what works for me".

So, this is what works for me.  This image is from the chart on SlowHero.

The tricky part about this zigzag is that it speeds up.  When it gets to the last red note in measure 63, I anchor red. This slower part is easy to one-hand while I move into tapping position.  When it begins to speed up I switch over to tapping the orange notes that I circled in red.  Note the chord two notes after the last circled orange note, that has to be strummed.  Speed in moving your strumming arm is everything to tapping.  The major barrier for me is to do it without really thinking about it, which in my case will result in moving my arm faster.  I tend to think about it too much and end up dropping right when I would otherwise begin tapping.  But I just did it without even really thinking about it at all.

So if I were posting about this on ScoreHero, I'd probably just post the zigzag (well, everything starting from the green note in measure 63, and all of measure 64) using their fret icons, with number notation for fingering.  But here, with the black background, the fret icons that I'd have used otherwise won't show up properly, and just putting a random mass of numbers would be confusing.  So even though I really want to post the numbers, I won't.

Rather, I'll explain what the numbers would represent.  I slide my index finger from green to red, then use my index finger on red, middle finger on yellow, and pinky on orange.  As mentioned, when I get to the first red of the zigzag (the last one in measure 63), I hold it down for the rest of the zigzag (anchoring).  Beginning from the third orange note, I tap with my strumming hand.  This is usually my middle finger just because it's longer, but really, anything works as long as it's intuitive.  Hitting the zigzag basically becomes a matter of developing a rhythm between pressing yellow, tapping orange, and releasing yellow.  Then, after the fifth orange, waste no time in getting my strumming hand back down to strum the chord.

I just hit it again in practice mode while verifying that there is indeed no red note at the end of the zigzag.  Sometimes I fail to notice the strangest things about certain charts.  For instance, there's an orange note in Generation Rock that I didn't even know was there, even after FCing the song several times.  I thought it was blue, because it's blue when that pattern comes up earlier in the song.

My Best Effort Yet

81% is just before the SP phrase at the end of Twin Solo. I was so close.

Certainly better than failing in the intro at 1-5%...

Let the FCs resume.

I started up World Tour yesterday and re-FCed three songs (Guitar: Beautiful Disaster, Vinternoll2; Bass: No Sleep Till Brooklyn), only getting a higher score on No Sleep Till Brooklyn.  Then after entering that higher score in on ScoreHero, I was looking at my scores and noticed that I still hadn't gotten the FC of Feel The Pain on Bass.

Since it'd been a while, I played it through once to reacquaint myself.  I noticed that my drops were entirely stupid (overstrummed on a sustain at one point, and understrummed due to a brain fart).  Went through again, got an overstrum 100%.  Went back in a third time and finally got the FC.  It ended up being 4th place on PS2.  Can't really complain.

I guess I'll stay in World Tour for a while trying to get as many Bass FCs as I can.  I doubt I can get all 84, but I'll be happy with at least half.  I'm actually kind of near that right now (I'm at 38 of 84), so I might have to adjust that to 60% or so.  Even if it means playing the Tool songs again.  I don't know if I'll ever FC B.Y.O.B, but getting it 5-starred is just a matter of hitting more SP phrases.  Sweet Home Alabama is fairly easy (and fun), but is extremely chokable and has a long string of altstrumming at the end.

So I guess my ultimate goal in GH:WT Expert Bass is to have a sizable portion of the setlist FCed and the rest 5-starred.  Also if I can get Pull Me Under unlocked, I could sightread that.  I haven't bothered with career mode in a while and certain songs make career mode crash when the game is run off the hard drive...

Working Guitar Controllers GET!

As I mentioned previously, a friend had some PS2 guitar controllers he wasn't using, having switched over to RB2 on the Wii.  He dropped them off yesterday after we played some Alien Swarm (damn, that game is fun) and then I proceeded to distract myself from 7 PM to midnight reacquainting myself.

What he gave me: a GH2 Gibson SG, and a GH3 Kramer Striker.

The Kramer, as previously noted, needs hardwiring, and already has a paper shim.  If you look carefully along the left side of the neck you'll see his paper shim sticking out of it, I'll be replacing that with an entirely internal one when I hardwire it.

I did the reacquainting with the SG, since newer controllers have a select button that's over there. While I've almost gotten used to activating with the side of my hand, I still vastly prefer just using my ring finger on the Kramer.

The SG does have one issue: the strum bar can bounce back up and cause an overstrum.  This generally only occurs when I whack the strum bar and don't leave my hand on it to move it back slowly, which does affect my gameplay.  I found that I have a really hard time strumming and then whammying SP sustains with it, because I'd usually get an overstrum.  I don't really know what can be done to fix that, but at least the SG has regular phillips head screws instead of the annoying torx ones on the Kramer.

If I can't get the SG working to my liking, I can always just open it up and gank the rubber bit beneath the fret buttons to put it in my other Kramer...  assuming it's the same size of course.  It looks like it should be though, just from external inspection.

I also like the body of the Kramer a lot more.  The SG's just feels uncomfortable where my right arm rests on it, whereas I never noticed anything with the Kramer.  I'll have to see if this Kramer has the half-dead-from-factory whammy bar that my original one did.

I can play Guitar Hero again.  Yay.

Edit (2:25 AM): Hardwired the Kramer and replaced the external paper shim with an internal one.  Just for shits and giggles I tested it out in GH3's cheats menu before hardwiring, it was indeed in need of it as four of the five frets would flicker if the neck was moved even slightly.  Well, that's all taken care of now, works like a charm and the whammy bar is better than my original Kramer's.

Plastic Possibilities

Being engineering-minded, I think I've come up with a possible solution to reanimate my guitar controller.  I probably won't do it, due to lack of materials and funds to obtain said materials, but I've gone over it in my head a few times and it seems like it'd work.

The problem is that rubber piece.  The spots that get the most wear are the thinnest.  So, we remove it entirely.  Pull each of the pads off of it and throw it away.

Then, carefully superglue each pad to the middle of each button.  There isn't a lot of plastic to work with, but super glue bonds pretty easily to just about anything, so it shouldn't matter.  I could superglue some paper to the bottom side of each button to give a better surface.  Preferably cardstock, so it's sturdy.

Next, I'd need some high rebound foam.  I think I have my terminology right here.  I want the foam to push the buttons back quickly after I release them.  Very quickly.  Instantly, if possible.  Cut the foam down to suitably small pieces, and situate them on the fret PCB with more superglue.

Then screw the whole thing back together and hope.

This could quiet down the fret buttons as well.  Honestly I'm not sure why they're so loud.

What I'll do instead: someone I know has a GH3 wireless Kramer that he's willing to part with, I'll just get that from him and fix it up.  It needs hardwiring and a paper shim.

What would be even better: get a job, save some money, buy Xbox 360 slim and 360 versions of GH/RB games, as well as various DLC.  Then get some Ions with cymbals, a double bass pedal set, and a real bass trigger with a Roadie Kick Box RB.  Basically just send a bunch of money over to Ryan at RockBandParts.com and have him ship me the best drum controller setup possible, that turns into real electronic drums by simply using a different brain.

GH Controller Autopsy

I decided to see what exactly the issue was, so I opened it up.  See if you can see what's wrong from this photo.

If you don't see it, here it is again, this time cropped to show what's actually relevant.

See that one pad that's separated from the rubber piece?  That's it.  That pad was beneath the blue button.  When I removed the rubber piece and touched that pad, it fell out.  To make things worse, the ones that correspond to red and yellow are about to do the same.  I don't think this is easily fixable.  My initial instinct was to try and tape it back on, but due to the design of the rubber piece it would be very difficult and would still lead to errantly registering button presses.

Long story short: I need a new controller.  Only problem: No money.  Other circumstance: At this point if I do get another controller it won't be until after I obtain an Xbox 360, and I will obtain said controller with the 360 full band version of one or another GH game.  I need a console from this generation, and even though PSN is free, Xbox Live does it better.  I'll have to get used to a different star power button location and feel, but...  I'm reasonably used to the open notes and extended sustains, so I can adapt.

So, yeah.  Guitar Hero withdrawal is a bitch.  I want to play so many songs...

I need a new guitar controller.

It's official, my blue button has finally sunk far enough into the controller to register on its own.  I had an extraordinarily good run on Enter Sandman where I almost FCed the solo, and then went to play Frantic and started dropping in the intro, which I never drop in.  Restarted, then noticed that blue was held down even though I wasn't pressing it.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

I got through Frantic by tilting the guitar forwards in sections that had blue in them (yay gravity), but I shouldn't have to do that.

It's been a few years since I got this controller, so some wear and tear is naturally to be expected.  Unfortunately, I don't know if I can fix this problem like I did the detachable neck and the whammy bar.

GH/RB check-in

If you haven't already seen it, I now have a Blogger page specifically for summarizing my progress/accomplishments. The contents of this post are things I consider to be too specific to include there.

Things I've done recently (as in, January/February 2010) in Guitar Hero: (unless otherwise specified: difficulty = Expert, instrument = Guitar)

GH3:
Rock You Like A Hurricane - Intro FC (completely randomly, too)
Impulse - Successfully tapped the Funkiest Riff In History zigzag and went back to strumming immediately after without breaking combo
Mississippi Queen - FC (128,989)
The Way It Ends - New personal best: 298,676 (should have been higher, I didn't get my usual last activation), hit the first burst SP phrase despite not actually burst strumming (these two accomplishments were in two separate runs)
Knights of Cydonia - New personal best: 408,401 (almost FCed Ammending Chorus->end, messed up in A Free Man's Laurels)
Raining Blood - Made it past Mosh 1 only to fail soon thereafter

GHWT:
Hot For Teacher - passed (If you can pass the intro, you can pass the song)
Satch Boogie - passed (Solo F is just a matter of finger speed and your ability to keep playing a pattern that goes on for five years)
Everlong - FC (466,408)

GHM:
Career Mode - Finally finished playing through career mode. Ended up with 251 of 260 possible stars. Four of the nine missing stars are due to two songs I could only 3-star and the other five are 4-starred songs.  One of the 3-starred songs I've 4-starred in Quickplay, so...  yeah.

GHSH:
More Than A Feeling - FC (303,827)

GHSH: (instrument = Bass)
Hey You - ReFC, upping my PS2 1st place by almost 250 points (woohoo?), moved up from overall 21st to overall 18th. Maybe it's time I looked at some SP paths for this song. ScoreHero needs more PS2 players with overall first place on a song...
Full Game 5 Star - hell fucking yeah, and this actually means something with complex bass parts like YYZ's, which is just as hard as the guitar part (because Rush's bassist actually plays the instrument instead of just strumming one note twice per beat and changing notes every few measures)

RB1:
Orange Crush - FC (86,481)
When You Were Young - FC (125,406) (I now have this FC'd in both GH3 and RB1, lol)

Random stuff

It's one of those posts again.

MAGFest is right around the corner. And just in time, ScrewAttack announced that Angry Video Game Nerd DVD volume 3 is out. I'll probably pick it up there.

I haven't been playing Guitar Hero much lately, but I did finally FC Lay Down in GH3. After that I fired up GH:SH to repeat that only to realize how much I hate the chart in Smash Hits.

I haven't mentioned Guild Wars in a while, let's see... Oh yeah, I now have a level 20 Assassin and a level 20 Paragon. The only class I haven't gotten to level 20 now is Ritualist.

I've decided that enough was enough and I'm marathonning my anime backlog. I started with Grenadier. Yeah, it's the series I have tagged "spare bullets kept in cleavage" on MyAnimeList, but it has an actual plot and story to go with the fanservice and "innovative" fighting style. It kinda feels like there's more to it, but all we get to see is a quick 12 episode plot.

Which reminds me, the Negima! Magic World OAV is progressing at way too slow of a pace to actually get more than a little bit into the arc. I really wonder what they're thinking by making random short OAVs instead of full seasons. While I like Negima! a lot, these short OAVs just plain suck. They're just not long enough to cover any of the truly awesome stuff.

I really want to set up ArchLinux in a more desktop-oriented configuration. I'm trying to do so using VirtualBox, but it just isn't cooperating with me. ArchLinux installs just fine. So I reboot into the new install, update pacman, install powerpill (a frontend for pacman that accelerates package downloads), then run powerpill -Syu to update my base install just like normal. Then I reboot and VirtualBox crashes during the boot process. Every time. It's definitely a VirtualBox issue and not an ArchLinux issue, as my server boots and reboots without issue.

I've broken down and started work on the web-based wallpaper system I've had in mind for a while. By "started work on" I mean "am designing the database for". I'm torn about how to implement some features, but I suspect it'll all work out once I get going on the code. This largely warrants a post all to itself, which won't happen until after MAGFest.

I've been experimenting with making bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast burritos and I think I'm near the best recipe. I'll post about it once I've got making them down to a science, but the research has been delicious thus far. My goal is to make them big enough that they're satisfying, yet small enough that you can eat them alongside the rest of your breakfast. The major barrier right now is finding tortillas that won't tear when I roll the thing up.

Ending this randomness now. My next post will hopefully be another Classic DOS Game post.

so yeah, guitar hero

I've been posting about other things and actually trying to avoid talking about it too much. I still play the game though, and I'm still racking up the FCs. Here's a summary of FCs I haven't mentioned and other notable stuff.

GH1: I fired this up after playing Bark At The Moon in Smash Hits a bunch, and holy crap Bark At The Moon is severely undercharted (just like everything else) in GH1. I cleared it on my first try. No reason to play this game ever.

GH2: Nothing since the FC of Mr. Fix-It.

I don't have GH Encore Rock the 80's.

GH3: No FCs since Bulls On Parade, however, I'm getting better at The Way It Ends, to the point that I've 4-starred it a second time with a lower score. Still haven't cleared Raining Blood in Expert career yet. I have a lot less of a hard time with Before I Forget's octave chord bridge now and can usually pass the song.

GHWT: Bought all the clothing and guitar/bass parts that I have available to buy. Whee.

Guitar: Obstacle 1 and Rooftops (A Liberation Broadcast) FCs. Stupid chokes on The One I Love and Some Might Say. I suck, I know. Passed Hot For Teacher and Satch Boogie on Hard, still can't pass either on Expert.

Bass: A bunch of FCs. I forget where I left off. Looking back through posts tagged "Guitar Hero" I see the last WT Bass FC I mentioned was Livin' On A Prayer, so... Escuela De Calor, Toy Boy, You're Gonna Say Yeah!, Rebel Yell, Mountain Song, American Woman, Go Your Own Way, and Do It Again.

GHM:

Guitar: For Whom The Bell Tolls. I use this one as warmup, similar to GHWT's Beautiful Disaster and GH3's Generation Rock. I'd probably try for Turn The Page - Live, but the song's note chart cramps my left hand about 1/4th of the way through. Other than that, it's an easy song.

Bass: For Whom The Bell Tolls, Turn The Page - Live, and The Unforgiven.

GHSH: Staggeringly close to both Guitar and Bass FCs of YYZ. The Bass part is every bit as hard as the Guitar part on this one.

Guitar: I Love Rock 'N Roll (the easiest song in all of Guitar Hero), Killer Queen (75% of the chart is piano), Heart-Shaped Box, and Hey You (I still think the end of the solo is overcharted, but I haven't slowed it down in practice to listen for notes), 327k Through The Fire and Flames.

Bass: Hey You (1st place sightread FC! It's still 1st even, my 1st on Enter Sandman is now a 5th), Hit Me With Your Best Shot 100% overstrum (Pat Benatar's bassist loves strummy outros it seems), I Love Rock 'N Roll (sightread FC), Take Me Out (sightread FC), Killer Queen, Nothin' But A Good Time (sightread FC)

I don't have GH5 or GH Van Halen.

So yeah, that's about it. Mostly bass FCs, but a decent amount of guitar mixed in.

Just because I can...

I created the main five characters from K-On! in Guitar Hero: World Tour. Complete with their instruments. I would post pictures but... I'm too lazy. (or am I crazy?)

When I say "created", I mean approximated. Since there's nothing remotely similar to their school uniform available as clothing, I just winged it. But that's ok too, since they dress up on stage, and that's the only place you'll see them in-game anyway other than the character select screen. All I really had to do was make the hair look similar enough and select the right eye color. The hair was annoying to do since there isn't really anything similar to most of their hairstyles to choose from. The eyes don't really matter since while you're playing you can't really see them (and because you're looking at the notes lol). I would have chosen the Anime eyes but you can't change their color, you're stuck with blue.

I was able to get the instruments looking almost exactly like the ones in the anime. Since you can't make a keyboard, Mugi doesn't have one, but I assigned the other characters' instruments to her Guitar, Bass, and Drums. I guess you could use her as a vocalist.

Being able to assign each character an instrument to use when chosen for a specific part is pretty neat. I made full use of this. Everyone has everyone else's instruments for their other instrument slots. So if Mio's on guitar, she's playing Yui's guitar. If Azusa's on drums, she's got Ritsu's drum kit. You get the idea. I saved all the instruments so it's really easy to swap them in and out. I also made Sawako's guitar, just so all the instruments you see in the anime are usable (minus the keyboards, of course). It's not assigned to anyone but that's easily changeable.

All in all I made:
Instruments:
A random microphone and mic stand that I saved just so I could synchronize it across them

Yui's guitar (Gibson Les Paul) - I couldn't have both the white pinstripe and the dark red fade out (both are under "detail" and you can only use one of the options there), but I got the right texture and pick guard in there. The knobs are random but they're the only one I could select that had four. I went with the pinstripe even though the dark red fade out would be more noticeable because it's impossible to get a dark red with the stupid color wheel they give you to select colors with.

Azu-nyan's guitar (Fender Starcaster) - Approximated on her pickguard and bridge. You can't specify a red that's dark enough, sadly. The body looks fine but the headstock, despite being the same red, looks a lot brighter. The bridge isn't right, but either the correct one isn't in the game or I don't have it unlocked. I chose one that fit with the guitar. Her pickups aren't completely correct either, but they work with the guitar.

Sawa-chan's guitar (Epiphone Flying V, not Gibson)- I couldn't get the pickups or bridge colored like hers. The pickguard is also a little off. Other than that, it's her guitar.

Mio's bass (Fender '62 Jazz Bass, lefty) - At first I couldn't get anywhere near it (I made Mio first, a long time ago). Then today after making Azu-nyan's guitar I went back through the bass bodies and found one that looked a lot more like hers and recreated it. Now it has the right pickguard, even with the silver area around the knobs and brown textured area. I also have the black/red/orange tricolor deal going on. This one looks the best of them all in my opinion. The only flaw is that I couldn't make the left-handed version.

Ritsu's drums (Yamaha) - Really just going into the drum editor and making them yellow. Harder than it seems because there isn't really a "solid color" setting (wtf were they thinking), but there's one with a design that's really hard to see when you set the color to yellow, so it looks solid.

Characters:
Yui - She's dressed in a denim vest over a white shirt, slightly torn denim jeans, and black OMG NOT REALLY Converse All-Stars. Seriously, they look just like Converse All-Stars but without the logo.

Azusa - Dressed in the purple frilly stuff. Had a hard time finding good shoes for her that didn't cover up parts of her pants, but when I found the Cat Bells shoes and discovered that they matched (and had cat bells) it was complete. There are no real twin-pigtail hairstyles but there is one that has two braids coming out the back. It was either that or Midori's hairstyle colored black. Neither looks correct at all, to be honest.

Mio - The hair I used actually has two different color sections, but I just made both of them black. Other than that, she's dressed in a french maid outfit.

Tsumugi - Dressed as a nurse. Hair approximated somewhat, but it's not like there's a wide variety of regular normal hairstyles to choose from. If you want something crazy, chances are you'll find it, but if you want a normal one, there's about two or three to work with.

Ritsu - I chose her hair solely on its name, which was something about being spunky. This one had two color sections as well, but set both to brown and nobody can tell. She's wearing a denim vest over a bikini top, denim pants, and flip flops. It's basically like she just came from the beach.

I didn't have enough character space left to make Sawako, but the game doesn't have the right glasses anyway. It's pathetic that you're limited to 8 custom characters on PS2. Fuck the premade ones that can't be customized nearly as much. I could delete "Narutard", which is the full ninja outfit colored orange/blue and bright yellow hair, that could become Goku with a hair change, but... yeah. If you haven't been counting, there's two characters remaining; they would be Chris (which is... me) and Yomi.

Now I just need to get off my ass and finish that custom of Don't say "lazy". It's still just the drum intro and the bass part.

stuff (and things)

King Nothing Expert Bass FC finally. 259754 points, 3rd on PS2.

Broke 800k on Mercyful Fate (Expert Guitar) with a completely random 809739 a few days ago, and then today out of nowhere I got 857662. Maybe 900k is a little closer than I thought? On my 857k run I only missed 3 SP phrases, and they were all stupid drops.

I finally found a plugin for foobar2000 that can slow down music, so now it'll be a lot easier for me to chart the last part of Alsatia's solo. This plugin also does pitch shifting and a couple other things. Playing Through The Fire and Flames at -33.33% tempo with a -6.00 semitone pitch shift is lulz. If you want to get it and play around with it, it's foo_dsp_soundtouch. You may or may not need some Visual C++ runtimes and/or one or another version of .NET installed to use it.

So it's a new semester for all the students, which means more fun at UVa's anime club. The activities fair went well, though due to the layout we ended up not being able to have more than one or two people at the table at once. There went my super special awesome plan to bring chairs to sit on. Fortunately this gave those of us not at the table a chance to catch up. I know, we have the internet and all, but who the hell posts every aspect of their life on the internet?

This also means that CAINE House is in full swing, and with it plenty of video gaming and parties are to come. After the activities fair, we spent a while playing Geometry Wars on the 360, during which time we instituted a game modifying rule for evening play: every few minutes someone opens the front door of the house. Since our screen was a wall (projector lol) and the sun was in the right spot, this made it really hard to see until the door was closed. After that there was some Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2, BlazBlue (I killed my thumb on yet another dpad, I don't have a PS3 stick because I don't have a PS3), Virtual-On, and Tales of Vesperia (co-op RPGs ftw). I'm having trouble putting most of that into a chronologic sequence of events at the moment, but I do remember that BlazBlue was at the end of the night. Jin is so broken. Bread and butter = combo into air, end combo with freeze, land, relaunch and repeat.

CAINE House needs more co-op games. We'll probably end up with a GH/RB setup, but some non-music/rhythm/roleplaying genres would be nice too. I'm thinking racing games with co-op would be neat, but the only one I can think of at the moment is *ahem* Rumble Racing. I know the simulation racers have vs. modes, but what about team play? Teams are a big part of every racing series ever, so it'd be neat to be able to do that in a game. Maybe have a four player splitscreen with two teams vs. each other. Who knows.