I haven't even warmed up yet.

I'm no stranger to music games. I played a little Parappa back in my day, but I really got
hooked on the genre when I discovered DDR.

I would play the game, quite literally, dozens of hours each week. I got extremely good at
the game (not to brag, but there wasn't a song I couldn't beat), and then I broke my foot.
It wasn't the game that broke my foot, but a stupid stunt my friend and I were doing for a
short film.

When I recovered, I had lost a lot of the stamina I had built up playing DDR, and I
eventually fell out of the game altogether.

I had been playing other Bemani games (like DrumMania and Beatmania IIDX), and I
began to focus on these games instead of DDR. I got decent at IIDX, but I got very good at
DrumMania.

Unfortunately for me, the arcade scene in Las Vegas is in the "decomposition" stages of
death, so there isn't a DrumMania machine anywhere near me.

Enter Rock Band, developed by Harmonix (creators of a couple of my other favorite music
games, "FreQuency" and "Amplitude"). I and many others have already lamented the
quality of the hardware that accompanies the game, but this story isn't about that.

This story is about all my previous work paying off. I sank a lot of quarters into DrumMania
when it was around and I had my chances to play it. I became, debatably, the best player
in the state.

Now on Rock Band, I had no problem at all jumping right into Expert mode on the drums,
and I finished the entire game within a week of purchasing it. I checked my score on the
leaderboards, and it was in a pretty respectable spot.

I decided to go back and try to actually score well on some of the songs, and to make a
long story short I am now ranked in the top 50 on the leaderboard for drums. This doesn't
include the Black Sabbath pack, the Bowie pack, the Punk pack, or a lot of the other
singles.

I know it isn't much, I mean whoop-dee-doo, I'm ranked high on a video game. But
dammit, I'm good at this game and it's nice to finally have something, no matter how small,
to show for it.