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How can anyone not love the Tiny Titans?

http://rss.warnerbros.com/watchmen/2008/03/one_year_to_go_1.html

Tags: Comic Books, Movies, Watchmen

For my own reference:

Bully: Scholarship Edition - Mar. 9th

Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Mar. 9th

Grand Theft Auto IV - April 29th

Definitely more. I will update it as I think of them.

The lady friend left for Florida a few hours ago to visit her grandparents until Friday. Most of the day was trying to help her pack and then rushing to the airport before her plane left. Of course, after all that rushing, it turns out the airline had some problems and her flight left about 15 minutes past schedule (and somehow managed to get to Florida safely still curiously enough).

After that, I went home and did what I always do when she’s not around: played drums on Rock Band! The other day I had the brilliant idea of playing the drums on lefty mode to work on my left hand drumming. After boring myself to tears with playing the songs on easy, I switched to medium difficulty songs, but then found them too difficult. I said “screw this!” and went back to normal mode and proceeded to kick a bunch of songs’ asses.

My favorite part about Rock Band is seeing how I’ve progressed since I bought the game. I used to have trouble with Medium difficulty, but now I’m able to jump into any song and beat them easily. One song in particular vexed me on Medium for the longest time: Green Grass and High Tides by The Outlaws (hereinafter “GGHT”). I’ve never heard this song or this band before Rock Band so if you’re wondering what it’s like, check out this YouTube video of someone playing it on Medium. If you fast-forward to the 5:00 mark, you’ll see the part that ruined my Rock Band experience for weeks. I could not hit the drums and the kick pedal fast enough and keep the beat going.

The most annoying thing about failing that song is that I had to beat that song in order to progress to the next set of songs in the Medium difficulty Rock Band solo tour. There were songs I was dying to play on the tour and rack high points on (I could have played them without doing the tour, but I wanted to beat the damn tour). I went weeks without beating that song and felt like I hit a wall in my Rock Band drumming skills.

Sometime in January, I started playing Rock Band with friends (for the ultimate Rock Band experience). The good thing about playing with friends is that you generally play non-stop for multiple hours whereas my solo sessions were limited to an hour or two in the past. I did a lot of drumming and made significant improvements from playing with my friends. My lady friend even played with me once where she sang and kicked butt.

With my newfound drumming abilities, I again attempted to beat GGHT. No luck. I decided to skip the rest of the Medium tour completely and started playing the Hard tour. I did this for a while and my drumming improved even more.

Sometime during this phase, I tried to beat GGHT again. After a few more tries, I finally beat it, but I cheated a bit. If you haven’t played Guitar Hero or Rock Band, there’s a way to get extra points by using something called “Star Power” or “Overdrive.” You build up your overdrive by hitting specific notes in a row without screwing up. For the drums, you can then activate your overdrive during breaks in the song, which are called “drum fill” sections. The drum fill sections let you hit whatever you want regardless of the what song sounds like. Once you use your overdrive, you no longer get those drum fill sections until you build up enough overdrive again. If you let a drum fill section go without hitting a specific pad at the end of the drum fill, your overdrive doesn’t activate and you save it for the next drum fill section.

I basically cheated on GGHT by building up overdrive and never using it after the 5:00 mark. This gave me lots of breaks during the song where I could catch my breath and try to get the beat going again. In the end, I beat the damn song and went on to beat the rest of the Medium tour with relatively less problems.

That was about a month ago. I’ve since progressed further on the Hard tour and today I went back to GGHT on Medium. My new goal was to get five stars (out of five) on the song without cheating. I got really close, but only beat it with four stars

That’s my Rock Band post. I love the game so much and I feel almost like a real drummer now. Fuck GGHT, though.

Tags: Rock Band, Video Games, What I Did Today

I’m back! Anyone miss me? No? Oh, well, I moved the site to a new webhost and I’m considering bringing the updates back. We’ll see if that feeling sticks.

Tags: oh god this won't last, Site News, what am I doing?