Emptyeye

Well, no I’m not. Indeed, according to Score Hero’s Rock Band Section, I seem to be only the 350th best (As of this writing) fake cover band singer ever. But really, I’m writing because last night, I score my first “legitimate” 100% on Expert vocals. What does “legitimate” mean? Does it mean I’ve gotten previous 100%s by cheating? Well no, but let me explain. In the original Rock Band, there were two types of phrases–singing phrases, and what have come to be known as “talkies”. The singing phrases are self-explanatory: The game detects your pitch (It doesn’t care about pronunciation) and compares it to the correct pitch, and awards you points accordingly. Talkies are essentially the opposite: The game it looking to see how well you pronounce the words, and doesn’t care what pitch you’re pronouncing them at. You see a lot of these in rap songs, and some of the metal tracks that aren’t “sung” so much as “growled” or “shrieked” or what have you.

Thing was, the talkie pronunciation system was pretty much broken on certain phrases–it became impossible, even on easier difficulties, to figure out just what in the heck kind of diction the game wanted on certain phrases. So for Rock Band 2, Harmonix tried to compensate for this…and went way too far in the other direction, to the point where the talkies no longer care about pitch or pronunciation. As long as you’re doing anything at all with your voice during talkie sections, you’ll get credit for it, even on Expert. This is best illustrated by this video of someone getting a full combo on the Beastie Boys’s “So Whatcha Want”….via reciting the Declaration of Independence. So I had gotten a couple 100%s on songs like this, but last night I actually sang my way to a Full Combo on Nirvana’s “Drain You”. It’s a pretty easy song to sing, but it still felt good to exhibit something resembling actual skill in the game, as opposed to just reciting stuff and getting rewarded for it.

How did the US get to this point?

I don’t mean this in a bad way by any means. But consider that twelve months ago, Barack Obama had no shot in hell at the presidency. For that matter, he had no shot at all at the Democratic nomination–Hillary Clinton in the blue corner was supposed to be all but inevitable; various media reports stated that even the Republicans had all but conceded the White House to Clinton for 2008 (Whether sincerely or as a sneaky way of mobilizing their own base in a reverse-psychology ploy, we’ll never know).

But sometime between then and now, something happened. Barack Obama played a different game than anyone before him, both in terms of fundraising, and in terms of how he handled the process of the nomination. Whereas Senator Clinton tried to get things over with early, Obama settled in for the long haul, maximizing his wins, minimizing his losses, and pulling off what we’ve forgotten mere months later was a monumental upset.

All of a sudden, everything changed on both sides. The Republicans had spent their resources preparing for a bout with Clinton; suddenly, here was this new challenger that they knew nothing about–maybe his biggest strength. People tout “experience” in politics, but what did experience get us these last eight years? Well, primarily, it took all our international good will, threw it in the toilet, and flushed it–something that should have been impossible after September 11th, 2001. Apparently no one told the Bush Administration that, unlike when I completed The Impossible Bass Challenge in Rock Band 2, you don’t get any XBOX Gamerpoints for completing “The Impossible Waste of Our Reputation Challenge”.

In any event, where there was a long list of things to use against Clinton in an attempt to drive people to vote for McCain–some legitimate, some even more questionable than what they ultimately tried to use against Obama–Obama was effectively a clean slate, and a very charismatic one at that. As Hulk Hogan can tell you, charisma is often an excellent substitute for ability. Whereas John Kerry utterly failed to make any sort of impression beyond “I’m not Bush, so uh, vote for me, okay?”, Obama took his ostensible inexperience and ran with it, all the way up to Election Night. In the end, what was really the worse that could be said about him? Well, he doesn’t know his Batman, and he was never a Jeopardy! champion like McCain was (Somehow, this was not a deal-breaker for me).

Or, put another way, Obama actually got me to vote for a major-party candidate. To this point, I have generally voted Nader, because I despise and just refuse to support our current two-party system. And I actually voted within said system this time.

Now, will Obama be the magic cure for everything that I have sarcastically anointed John Kerry as in the past? Of course not. But he will be something different–as my mom said, “You always loved different”–than the typical “Dubya’s successor in party vs. Dubya’s successor in spirit” that everyone was expecting one year ago. And that’s something I can get behind.

I had written this at the Official MAGFest site, but it somehow got gobbled up (Or I never actually hit “post”), so here they are again, in a slightly modified form.

We’re exactly two months away from MAGFest (The official title for this year seems to be MAGFest: The 7th Fest) now, and I’ve been doing a bit of practicing on the challenges in hoping to better my third-place finish from last year. My basic thoughts to this point:

• Maybe it’s because I haven’t spent as much time with them, or maybe it’s because they’re on games I’ve never played before, but so far, it seems like a lot of the Normal challenges are actually harder than the Hard/Expert ones, even moreso than last year (Where there was some overlap between the extremes of the difficulties, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily).
• I have the feeling that what was supposed to be one of the pseudo-impossible challenges (You can probably guess which one) was not tested as thoroughly as it should have been.
• I can’t make the Athena save state work. I had this problem last year too. Odd. Apparently, Athena is bored, so she decided to foil any attempts to start at any point in her game that isn’t the beginning.
• Unrelated to this year in particular, I should tell Metal Dream that I want a Dr. Mario rematch, preferably when I’m running on more than four hours sleep. It won’t change anything about last year, but it may make me feel better about my thoughts that I essentially handed it to him rather than him taking it from me (Again, not that how he won it matters).

Two months left! Woo!