There are a lot of people who hate Rock Band and Guitar Hero, for one reason or another. Phrases like "learn to play a real instrument," "stupid plastic instruments," and "when will this fad be over," are constantly thrown around. Some people even complain about their favorite bands "selling out". I'm here to say that, at least for me, Rock Band is not about playing make believe and pretending to be a real rock star.

The first and most common complaint I've seen, especially on YouTube, is deriding people who are good at the games and telling them to learn to play a real instrument. Many of the people who are really good at the game, like YouTube users guitarherophenom and IBitePrettyHard, actually already do play real instruments, and quite well. Other people, like me, don't care about making music. If I wanted to learn to make real music, I would learn how to play the guitar for real. You'd have to be a complete dumbfuck to think that playing Guitar Hero is anything like playing a real guitar (Nobody does. At least I hope nobody does. People's stupidity has surprised me before, though.).

For me, the appeal of Rock Band is in skill progression. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the only games I have ever played where I actually got noticeably better over time. I started out playing Guitar Hero III at a friend's house in the summer of 2008. I played on easy and missed about a third of the notes. I kept going over to play the game (he lived across the street from me), and eventually I was able to play on medium, then hard. Then, at the very beginning of this year, I moved away, getting my own copy of Rock Band 2 with a guitar and drums as a late Christmas present. By the end of this summer I had beaten Green Grass and High Tides and Painkiller on expert guitar, things which I wouldn't have stood a whelk's chance in a supernova of doing a year before.

No other game has ever done that for me. Playing something like Call of Duty 4 on veteran difficulty wasn't really challenging to me. Tedious, but not challenging. I had gained nothing in the way of actual skill by the time I had finished it. My aim was no more accurate, my reflexes no quicker than when I had started the game. The only reward was the ability to say that I beat the game on Veteran. Something I probably could have done when I was ten if I had had a strategy guide. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. It just felt like a complete waste of my time.

With Rock Band, it was really easy to notice how much better I got. My ability to process the notes coming down the screen got better and better with practice, as did my fingers' ability to hit the buttons in time. I learned tricks like anchoring my index finger on the green for songs like Painkiller, Panic Attack, and Get Clean.

I've noticed a lot of people talking very favorably about Demon's Souls' difficulty. Specifically, about how it encourages the player to keep going despite the immense difficulty, how it's always fair, how rewarding it is to advance, and how you actually get better at the game by the time you finish it. Every single one of those perfectly describes Rock Band.

My sense of rhythm improved drastically. I listened to music differently, hearing each instrument track as a separate entity. The game introduced me to Metallica, who I had previously thought to be terrible. Now they're one of my favorite bands. I gained new respect for AC/DC after playing through a few of their songs (they're my second favorite band now, after Pink Floyd). In general, I grew to love music even more than I had before, and the music I listen to is of a much wider variety, directly because of music games. Now, I'm even thinking of getting a real drum set and learning how to play for real.

I guess the point of this post is that, if you're put off by RB/GH because you think it's only about make believe, then there's a different way of looking at it and a completely different appeal. Also, if you like difficulty and feeling rewarded, then there is nothing more rewarding in my experience than finally beating a song like Battery or Green Grass and High Tides on expert difficulty. Nothing.

I recently had to do an assignment for my video game design course where I had to come up with an idea for a vehicle-based game. What follows is the result.

My vehicle game is a sort of arcade mech combat game. Players take control of giant mechanical war mechs in the likenesses of figures from classic literature (i.e. robo-Okonkwo, robo-Huckleberry Finn, robo-Dr. Frankenstein, robo-Lenny, robo-Beowulf, robo-Macbeth, robo-Winston Smith, robo-Odysseus, robo-Jabberwocky, etc.) and fight each other with lasers, rockets, melee, and other weaponry commonly associated with war mechs. The game has no story mode, instead focusing solely on multiplayer and skirmishes. The game also has no real setting, instead having various themed arenas where up to eight characters can fight in team battles or deathmatches. Each arena reflects a major setting of one of the works of literature each character is from, so there’s a level for Of Mice and Men set in a wide open field of wheat with a few farmhouses scattered around, and so on.

The view is in 3D to better display the absurdity of each of the robo-characters. Each character has strengths and weaknesses, except for Robo-Frankenstein, who has no strengths and is in fact a gag character. When players pick up certain pick-ups, they have the ability to activate their character’s super move, which is unique for each character.

For example, Robo-Frankenstein’s super move is to huddle in a corner and mutter to himself. Robo-Okonkwo’s is to hang himself, which does massive damage to all of his opponents. Robo-Odysseus can blind his enemies. I don’t have them all fully worked out yet.

I actually have a sort of working title for it: Hyper Ultra Robot Wars Turbo Classic. The soundtrack is composed mostly of J-pop.

I just thought I'd share this with the Destructoid community.

The V8 in front of me roars as I slam into a hunter, the force of the impact killing it instantly. I take a quick glance at the radar screen on my dashboard; another one is behind me. I slam on the handbrake and do a 180 degree turn, before activating the turbo and running over the second hunter. Roughly a hundred yards ahead a strider is making a beeline for the main silo.

I kick in the turbo again, just to hear the engine's magnificent howl, and rush towards the five-story tall tripod. I hop out of my stripped '69 Charger, grab the Magnusson from the rack attached to the rear bumper, punt it at the strider, then pull out my pistol, take aim, and fire at the device, destroying the strider.

A siren wails, signalling that another strider is already close to the silo. I get back in my Charger and drive towards a giant red circle on my radar. By the time I reach the strider, it is charging up its main gun in preparation to destroy the silo. Acting as quickly as possible, I grab another Magnusson device and launch it at the strider, which is now within a second of firing. I pull out my pistol and shoot the device, saving the day with literally less than a second to spare.

Another time, another place, another universe.



Commander Arkhon Shepard, having talked Saren into killing himself, enjoys a well-deserved moment of rest. There is little for him to do now; any moment the Alliance fleet will barrage Sovereign with everything they've got, and the crisis will be averted. Around him fires cast an orange glow throughout the council chamber, and all is at rest.

But what is happening now? The walkway he is standing on collapses into the small garden below. Saren's corpse lights up red. As Shepard looks on, Saren is somehow brought back to life by something.

Bryce thinks to himself, "What the hell? You just killed yourself. This is fucking stupid." He sighs and Commander Shepard proceeds to kill Saren. Again.

There are few things I can think of that ruin my immersion in a game more than having a final boss. There's nothing like a boss to remind you that you're either watching a bad kung-fu movie or playing a video game. Bosses are so incredibly cliche'd by now that I was surprised nobody took this topic for this month's musing.

Don't get me wrong, I love Mass Effect. Its ending is just incredibly stupid. Far too many games have end bosses just because gamers seem to feel a need to have a final entity to kill, usually one that must be hit three times (always three times) in its weak spot, which must be exposed by attacking another thing, which makes no sense at all.



That is of course my second point: end bosses make no sense. In HL2: E2, players see a large Combine force en route to White Forest. At the end of the game, players must defend the base against that force. It makes sense.

Why, in all of the rest of Mass Effect, did Shepard never encounter another indoctrinated person who could magically reanimate? Obviously, if Sovereign can do that to one of his followers, he can do that to many, so why wouldn't he? And how come Saren gets a neat hover board, while nothing else in the entire game does?

Why, in Super Mario 64, does the game completely abandon all the gameplay mechanics that made the rest of the game fun when Mario is fighting Bowser? And what the hell is Bowser doing on a floating platform with spiked bombs attached to the edge? You'd think he'd have those spiked bombs removed after being thrown into them twice before. Furthermore, how can Mario throw Bowser? Why is Bowser just sitting there, waiting for Mario, when he could be sending out groups of his followers to attack the plumber?

Why does the Nihilanth from Half-Life attack in such a predictable pattern? Something as intelligent as it clearly is must surely realize that a better strategy would be to attack randomly. Why does it just float in place, instead of moving around to get a clear shot at Freeman? Why is Freeman even trying to kill it?

Why does the fight with Skorge in Gears of War 2 completely abandon the cover-based gameplay that the rest of the game is based around? For that matter, why does the battle with the giant fish do the exact same thing?



But all of that pales in comparison to the biggest argument against end bosses: they're nowhere near as exciting as that final battle in HL2: E2. Or the final stages of Left 4 Dead, where players must defend an area against huge waves of zombies until they can escape. Large groups of normal enemies are far better for end battles than a single unique enemy.

Throughout the course of Half-Life 2 and its episodes, players get accustomed to how powerful and dangerous striders and hunters are. At the end of Episode 2, players know exactly how fucked they are. The same goes for the ends of Left 4 Dead campaigns. With any end boss battle, there's simply nothing to compare the end boss to. It's the difference between "Yay I just killed some lizard thing by exploiting a weakness" and "Holy shit I just survived being attacked by ten tanks in a row."

When done well, end bosses can be good. When done well, large-scale end battles can be great.

My last video game purchase was the Xbox 360 version of The Orange Box in February/March of this year (I can't quite remember which) , based largely on the fact that it was twenty dollars and I had immensely enjoyed Portal when I had played through it on my dad's computer, so I figured Portal alone was worth the money. Before this, I had known nothing of Half Life, its canon, or really Valve Software even.

Half Life 2 and its associated episodes are now some of my favorite games of all time, and certainly the best PC-type shooters I've ever played. So I decided to play through the original Half Life and the Gearbox expansion packs Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and I really have to say that I'm really underwhelmed.

The environments made me sick of corridors. The entire game takes place underground in a series of corridors, with a few levels on the surface and some genuinely interesting alien environments at the very end. I was so happy when I got to the chapter "Surface Tension" that I almost cried from joy at not being in yet another dark hallway.

The game has no characters apart from the un-named government guy, who is actually quite interesting. Every other person the player meets is nothing more than an extra. This was one of my biggest disappointments with the game, especially after all the likeable characters from Half Life 2.

The game also has basically no story. Essentially, you play as a scientist by the name of Dr. Gordon Freeman working in a stereotypical top-secret underground research facility, when some experiment goes stereotypically wrong and aliens start to appear out of nowhere, and then the story pretty much disappears altogether as players can spend really long periods of time in between major plot points, so much so that I often could not remember what my objective was, and the game provides no reminders either.

The weapons are nowhere near as cool or useful as the ones in HL2, with the possible exception of snarks, which are awesome and should be included in every shooter ever made. The SMG is less satisfying than its HL2 counterpart. The crossbow is much less satisfying than the HL2 crossbow; superheated steel rebar is much cooler than poison darts (that can somehow render automated turrets completely inoperable in one shot).

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out the fact that WASD was made for typing, not platforming. If I wanted to jump from moving platform to moving platform, I would be playing a platformer. On a console.

Opposing Force, an official expansion made by Gearbox, was much better. After growing to hate the HECU soldiers over the course of the first game, it was interesting to play a game from the enemy's perspective. The night vision goggles were a very welcome replacement for the piss-poor excuse for a flashlight that Gordon Freeman had. The weapon design was much more interesting, with the barnacle easily the coolest among many very cool organic alien weaponry. The portal gun was very inventive and is now one of my favorite video game weapons of all time.

I remember starting it up and immediately noticing how much better it was than the base game. The first such revelation was at the very beginning in the Osprey, when I remember thinking, "Holy shit, some actual exposition!" There were actual characters who appeared more than once! There were plenty of outside levels! There was a simple, overarching goal that I never lost track of! The game had some substance!

The levels were designed better, the firefights were more fun, the jumping puzzles were less dreadful, other puzzles were much better; in short, the game was more fun and had more substance, despite being shorter.

Blue Shift, another Gearbox expansion, was also better than the original game. It made players weaker with the loss of batteries and HEV stations to regain protection, the lack of really good weapons, and the return of the worthless flashlight, which was an interesting design decision and one I really liked.

What's more, it introduced an actual named NPC, Dr. Rosenberg. It was also nice to not have a traditional final boss fight like in Half Life and Opposing Force.

I am actually very glad that Half Life existed, and sold as well as it did, because without its success there would be no Half Life 2, and I love Half Life 2. That said, playing it was the most dreadful gaming experience I have ever had, and I don't think I will ever be able to bring myself to play through it again.

I have many character flaws. After all, I'm not perfect. Nobody is. But as I was playing Gears of War 2 recently, a friend pointed one out to me that had me actually spooked.

I'm a lazy person; I can be infuriatingly laid-back. My laziness annoys me, and yet I can't seem to do anything about it. I'm incredibly scatter-brained and can never focus on anything unless I am really interested in it, and then I bypass "focus" and go into full-blown obsession over whatever it is, be it coding or playing video games or reading a book or whatever.

I hate people. I think of almost everybody else as idiots, amazed at how they just can't seem to see the answer to a problem or the general picture of things. I know in my head that the average person is axiomatically average in terms of mental capability. I know in my head that people aren't dumb, I'm just smart. Everyone from my parents to my psychiatrist to my therapist (yes, I have a psychiatrist and a therapist, for depression and ADHD issues) to every single teacher I've ever had has told me I'm borderline genius, to the point where I actually feel irrational disgust towards anyone who calls me "smart". And yet, I still somehow end up labeling people less intelligent than me as idiots in my head. I can't seem to stop, and I've tried.

But most disturbing of all, I find extreme gore funny, which scares me. I mentioned in the intro above that I was playing Gears of War 2 when my friend pointed this out to me; I was actually literally laughing out loud while chainsawing somebody to death. Most people find the gore awesome, I find it hilarious. Maybe it's because of how over-the-top it is, because I don't have the same reaction when playing less gorey games like Halo or Call of Duty. At least I hope that's what it is.

Anybody else think over-the-top gore is funny? Please say yes.

Pretty much speaks for itself. I don't really like the sting at the end, it feels like it's a bit too much, but otherwise very funny. Credit goes to Youtube user chaopolis. The actual Youtube page can be found here.