Stop, drop, and ROCK ‘N’ ROLL!
Playing Rock Band with Nate keeps bringing up all these memories of when my roommates and I would spend hours and hours and hours playing Rock Band back in the house. We took it seriously, yo. Examples of said seriousness:
- Playing for 14 hours straight. This happened a few times.
- Busting through the tour mode as fast as possible to earn tons of money, and then spending all evening customizing the outfits of our band members.
- That time the Xbox red-ringed on us and we spent approximately one hour Xbox-less before we NEEDED to go get a new one to play Rock Band.
- Sean getting drunk and trying to sing Ballroom Blitz in a Scottish accent.
- Lanky singing Metallica’s “Blackened.”
- Sean and I quoting relevant Metalocalypse quotes as we play (“I have musics dyslexkia…you know that…I…don’t likes to talk about it.”).
- Michael getting drunk and falling off the drumming chair.
- Rabbi Jeff, Aaron’s burly, mountain man-esque character who was (obviously) Jewish.
- Aaron making up random lyrics on the fly as he sang.
- Our “cutoff” system. At one point or another, I said that anything less than a 97% on a song was not good enough, so we set 97% to “cutoff.” We had a bunch of other things for other percentages as well. 100% earned a high five, 99% earned a limp fist bump (because you just didn’t try hard enough to get a 100%), 98% was an actual fist bump, 96% was “not even cutoff,” 95% was “not even not even cutoff,” a 69% meant that you had to kiss everyone else in the room (this never happened), and a score of 1% meant you had to have sex with someone in the room (also never happened). There were others, but I can’t remember them.
- Calling the drummer and singer the “drummist” and “singist,” respectively.
- Calling the guitarist and bassist the “guitarer” and “basser,” respectively.
- Lanky wailing “MARYANNE!!!” in an overdrive section of More Than a Feeling and us all subsequently failing out because we were laughing so hard.
- How FREAKING EXCITED we were when my parents got me Rock Band 2.
- Sean rocking out so hard with the guitar that he tipped the couch over (this happened several times).
- Breaking at least three of Michael’s chairs.
- All of us playing Metallica’s “Blackened” on expert and just barely making it through the song. I’d actually failed out three times, but the last time was right before the end, so we still made it.
- All of us giving very serious consideration to making a documentary about our fake band.
- Putting those little plastic bendable glow stick things all over the instruments and then rocking out in the dark.
So much fun.
Rock Band Songs: The Good Ones
Hello.
So Nate and I have been playing Rock Band incessantly (baseball is over, what the hell are we supposed to do with our evenings??) and there are a lot of good songs on Rock Band 4.
Like, more than I was expecting.
Faves:
You Make Loving Fun by Fleetwood Mac
All Over You by LIVE
Mainstream Kid by Brandi Carlile
Light Up the Night by The Protomen
My God is the Sun by Queens of the Stone Age
Milwaukee by The Both
The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
I Will Wait by Mumford & Sons
I am Electric by Heaven’s Basement
(I like to think of this as Emo Jesus’ anthem.
I am the savior, I am the savior, I am the savior, I am the savior!
Watch me rise / on the third day I will blow your mind! Etc.)
Good songs, yo.
Internet rapture
Hahahaha, oh Jesus:
Rock Band + Internet meme = greatest merge ever? I think so. This is another one of those “I don’t know why the hilarity factor is so high, but it is” videos.
1:27 and 1:40, oh my god.
Today’s song: Handle Me by Robyn
Blah blah ah-ah-ahhh, blog-ah, blog-ah-ah! MySpace, ooh la-la! Want your bad blog post!
It’s the Lady GaGa blog! Apologies to her for the title, though, seriously.
POINT ONE
Lady GaGa is coming to Vancouver on August 23 (that’s a Monday). Cheapest balcony tickets appear to be approximately $160-$170, but they’re going fast. So if anyone’s interested, I suggest we make decisions soon.
POINT TWO
The other night I found out that there are many Lady GaGa songs available for download for ROCK BAND!
So here’s a sample to get a look at how it goes for guitar, bass, and vocals. I picked this one because the guy singing is freaking hilarious (and not too bad). The French part…oh god, the French part…
Today’s song: The Loco-Motion by Grand Funk Railroad (yeah, Matt, it had to happen)
Shall I compare thee to a bed of nails?
OH GOD IT’S ANOTHER LIST WHO WOULD HAVE EVER GUESSED
Hi people. Today I shall provide you with (gasp!) a list of my favorite games of all time. I’ve been gaming a lot lately, due to the fact that school has yet to begin up here.
Quake
I grew up on this game, so it has become part of my soul. This is one of those retro early ‘90s FPSs with no story and horrible (read: awesome) graphics. I was so damn good at this game when I was a kid.
Rock Band/Rock Band II
This game is for crazy people like Sean and myself who take it way too seriously. This game is for all college students who, despite having way too much to study for, are able to somehow play in a fake band for 4 hours straight every Monday-Saturday. In other words, this game is awesome.
Fallout 3
The most recent addition to this list, Fallout 3 is half FPS, half RPG, and it is for those reasons that I love it. It’s also got a lot of humor (threesome offers from soda enthusiasts and love letters from people who want to blow up your city, anyone?) and there are a lot of different ways to “make” your character. Awesome.
Oh, and Button.
Button rocks.
Cosmic Osmo
OH GOD RETRO! Another of those early ‘90s/late ‘80s games, Cosmic Osmo is a Mac (Macintosh, back then, I guess, eh?) game that’s entirely in black and white, which allowed for the world to be HUGE, especially for back in those days. Totally a kid’s game, totally awesome. It’s really hard to find now; apparently eBay copies are selling for like $300. It also can’t be played on Macs nowadays, which blows.
The Sims 1 and 2
The Sims is great. I always made my Sims as replicates of people I knew in real life, then I married people that I thought would go well together, and sometimes I would kill my enemies. Then I got a metric ton of mods and my Sims became orange, giant babies, 500-pound fat guys, skeletons, floating torsos, and were able to have ridiculous amounts of children (FOUR HUNDRED BABIES!). Fun times.
Half-Life
Gordon Freeman is like the Chuck Norris of video games. Alternate univerise alien creatures show up, Gordon’s all, “not in MY research facility, bitches!” Then he whips out his crowbar and weilds it in a way only an MIT graduate could. I wonder how bad his PTSD was after this incident? Like, every time someone mentioned the word “rotors,” did he start spazzing and chucking crowbars at fellow scientists?
That would be a great alternate sequel. “Half-Life 2: Mental Breakdown.”
The Neverhood
So have you ever seen a game made entirely out of clay? Well then you’ve obviously never played this. It’s sort of a puzzle game, in which you play Klayman, a clay dude (durh) who has to somehow get the true king Hoborg’s crown back from the evil Klogg. The music is rad, and the little touches this game has make it awesome.
Gears of War
Because “I ON DA COLE TRAIN!” is the best thing to shout in any situation. And because I like shooters.
DAVID BOWIE’S CROTCH
GOD this is the most I’ve laughed in awhile (last time was when Sean was playing Viva Piñata. I’ve never seen him as stressed out as when he’s playing that game). We totally should have recorded the David Bowie’s Crotch song(s) and made and album. And the whole screeching into the mic for overdrive was too much. Loved it. I can’t believe my dad didn’t hear a decibel of that.
Oh wow
Today we played Rock Band for 14 hours straight. This is what life is all about.
You know you have problems when you all start thinking you’re in an actual band.
And when Aaron starts to re-write the lyrics.
I’d type more, but my fingers hurt.
Eigenblogger 