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I suspect I'm getting given a new game in the very near future. Perhaps for father's day.
I say this as I came home yesterday and Kate was asleep on the sofa and there was a gamestation bag on the floor and a roll of wrapping paper on the table. I didn't mention it and woke her up asking if she wanted a cup of tea, and when I got back from making the tea these things had disappeared.
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Why's that? I think it looks pretty good. Written by the original writers and stuff. All the ingredients are there. I suppose it's not about some future soldier wearing improbable power-armour so it maybe doesn't appeal to xboxers.
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To be honest it's because I've not really looked into it at all. I just assumed that as it was a game based on a film it was going to be shit and so didn't read anything about it at all.
quote:Originally posted by Cherry In Hove: I suspect I'm getting given a new game in the very near future. Perhaps for father's day.
I reckon my father's day gift will be a shirt that I already own, with some sick on it. It's my own fault I suppose. I cut off her allowanace for shitting on the living room table.
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It would be pretty funny. I was thinking about buying Rock Band on the way home today, but now I feel I can't actually buy a computer game because it might be the one that she has bought me, and so I won't buy one and I'll find out it was actually a present for her dad or something and I've had to fill my weekend with trips to pornhub instead of doing something constructive like playing a plastic guitar.
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I can't play my guitar at the moment thanks to a knife related mishap at the weekend rendering my left indext finger largely unusable.
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I managed to slice the corner off my thumb on Wednesday night! That was pretty foolish. I probably could play guitar but I won't.
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Bass is really hard. I find guitar much easier to play than bass. I realise that bass has less strings and so it sounds like it should be easier, but I find that it is harder to make it sound good.
Although, if you get good at bass, it's much easier to find a band than if you get good at guitar because everyone plays guitar.
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Well I'm basing this mostly on the fact I find it pretty difficult to effectively hit anything more complex than a basic power chord with any kind of speed. Mostly down to a lack of dexterity in my little finger. But anything involving picking individual strings I seem ok with. I realize both guitar and bass take a long time to actually get 'good' at, but y'know, no harm in thinking about both maybe.
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Actually Bass probably isn't harder than Guitar, it's just that I find it harder. I would guess people with stronger thumbs and the ability to slap and pop well would find it easier, but I find it really tough and so I think it is harder. So, it is harder for me, but probably is easier for some people.
And, I would guess there is no harm in learning both.
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Bass is great fun, but being good at it is fucking unrewarding when it comes to showing off at parties (and let's be honest, that's a big element of learning any instrument). Not only does no-one ever, ever recognise a bass riff, even if it's exactly the same as the guitar riff and/or the instrument that plays for the most of the song, but also if you dedicate your time to learning something bitch-hard like the bass solo in Naked in the Rain no-one ever cares or is impressed because they assume bass is easy so *feh*. Conversely, chuck out a few bars of Louie Loiue on a guitar and everyone who doesn't already play an instrument thinks you're Joe Satriani and YES I AM BITTER.
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I kinda feel like a lot of rock music, especially stuff made in the past 15 years or so, is not actually that great to play. The majority of catchy riffs can be broken down to the same few power chords played in varying orders with a few supporting solo parts down near the 12th fret. Playing something like Buck Rogers doesn't even seem like proper guitar playing. But then you have the flipside of 70s and 80s bands whose music is dominated by these almost unimaginably complex multi-layered solos all the way up and down the neck and it's hard to know what kind of direction you should be aiming if you want to improve.
Maybe what I need is some actual structured lessons or something.
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Yeah, it's always a bad moment when you hear a "brilliant new single" and it goes
8 x power chord on the open e string 4 x power chord on the third fret 4 x power chord on the fifth fret
and the second time around the middle one is
4 x power chord on the 7th fret.
Repeat.
And then you start trying to explain to people that it's actually stupidly, unbelievably simple and they look at you like you're some kind of idiot fucking nerd.
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I forgot to update this. I realise a lot of you are probably waiting for closure to find out if I did get anything for father's day, and the answer is Yes, I got Guitar Hero: Metallica.
I haven't played it properly yet. I got drunk yesterday and a friend and I did a few songs and it seems very good, but I can't report properly yet. Maybe I'll have a go today, although I'm quite into Overlord at the moment as it gives you the option to be evil which is fun.
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quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: ^^^ I like this
Being a 'good' guitarist is not always about technical accomplishment, though. Is it? Like Yngwie Malmsteen or those wankers from Dragonforce, or whatever the fuck they're called. They suck. Keef Richards is and was regularly shown up by his co-guitarists, skills-wise, but that fucker could pull riffs out of his nose, and he could... grrrrrroooooooove them. Wilco Johnson. Fucking mouth-breather. Ace guitarist.
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Well, I got the chance to play a bit yesterday of GH:M. So far seems fun. Seems a bit easy though. Not quite as easy as GH:Aerosmith but still got 5 stars on every song I've tried so far first go. Admittedly I've only done about the first 8 so it should get harder when i get to stuff like Battery.
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quote:Originally posted by Black Mask: Being a 'good' guitarist is not always about technical accomplishment, though. Is it? Like Yngwie Malmsteen or those wankers from Dragonforce, or whatever the fuck they're called. They suck. Keef Richards is and was regularly shown up by his co-guitarists, skills-wise, but that fucker could pull riffs out of his nose, and he could... grrrrrroooooooove them. Wilco Johnson. Fucking mouth-breather. Ace guitarist.
It's not so much about technical skill, as it is about doing something really obvious.
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Yeah you can tell with a lot of these modern bands that their songwriting process boils down to little more than trying various combinations of power chords on the E string until they find a pleasing riff. Literally anyone who picks up a guitar, regardless their level of ability, would be able to play/compose music like that.
Which is a shame because I used to really like bands like Feeder, but now I'm kinda torn because although their songs sound great, they're so rudimentary in composition that I feel almost cheated by it.
I suppose it's an interesting question - is the value of music measured by how good it sounds and how effectively it conveys the feeling of the song, or is it measured by the level of technical sophistication and the level of accomplishment it takes to be able to play.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Yeah you can tell with a lot of these modern bands that their songwriting process boils down to little more than trying various combinations of power chords on the E string until they find a pleasing riff. Literally anyone who picks up a guitar, regardless their level of ability, would be able to play/compose music like that.
Which is a shame because I used to really like bands like Feeder, but now I'm kinda torn because although their songs sound great, they're so rudimentary in composition that I feel almost cheated by it.
I suppose it's an interesting question - is the value of music measured by how good it sounds and how effectively it conveys the feeling of the song, or is it measured by the level of technical sophistication and the level of accomplishment it takes to be able to play.
Again, I think assuming it has to be difficult to play is something of a red herring. It's also worth remembering that there's more to a song than simply the guitar part, and that it can become something completely different depending on how it interacts with the rest of the instruments - a band like Rancid mostly exists in three chord punk songs, but turn the songs into something pretty special by nailing that structure to crazy-awesome bass lines.
As with any art it's possible to produce something pleasing by following certain pre-established rules and formulas. You can put-together a page-turner of a novel if you've got a storyboarding chart that breaks down the three-act structure into bite size chunks. That's how I tend to think of 'catchy' pop-rock stuff like Feeder - well put together but sort of... by the book and formulaic. I'm not really slagging this kind of simple stuff off - I've got loads of records that I like that play like that. But it's like the movie Iron Man - it kind of does what it needs to slickly enough, but at the end of it it hasn't really set your brain buzzing. It just happened and was pleasant enough.
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I might have to check that out. Apparently Ikaruga is also on XBLA which is an insanely hard game but hard in a good way.
I recently completed the story on Mirror's Edge, which was pretty good. I'm not sure I care enough to do all the timetrials and speedruns though.
I've completed GH:M on Guitar and started playing through on Bass which seems to flick from being mind numbingly easy and dull to ridiculously hard (Try Fight fire with fire on expert and cry).
Currently playing through Tales of Vesperia which is pretty good for an RPG
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It also looks like I'm going to overtake Dr Benway on gamer points very soon which I'm sure would upset him were he still alive.
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