Bytica

Today was a big day for World of Warcraft, as the much awaited 3.3 patch was released. The centerpiece of the patch is a new dungeon called Icecrown Citadel, and there’d been a bit of hype over a quest chain to pick up an epic weapon called Quel’Derar — the sibling of the Quel’Serrar that was THE tanking weapon to have in the early days of WoW.

Sure enough, as we were running the new dungeons tonight, the quest item dropped, I won it, and — to my surprise — I was able to pound out the entire quest chain in just a few hours (and it would have been quicker if it weren’t for patch day server meltdowns).

So my death knight has a shiny new boxcutter to raid with, and it looks pretty nifty.

Fargo and Crystal swung by tonight for some Beatles Rock Band action, which marked my first attempts at the game’s vocals. Crystal and I attempted a bunch of songs with the new harmony support, and ended up with top-10 scores all over the place, including a few 1st-places:

I’m definitely enjoying the vocal bits more than the guitar, which, honestly, I’ve found pretty boring. Why? That’ll be another post, coming shortly.

I’m not entirely sure what triggered it, but I have now “completed” Guitar Hero 5 on Expert Guitar, which means I’ve: seen a end cutscene; played through a final song as the credits roll; gotten the associated Achievements (200 / 1000 points total so far). I think it was completing all the songs in the next-to-last tier, which included Jeff Beck’s “Scatterbrain” and Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio” (which is a live version, but not a bad one).

But really, I feel like I’ve played about 1% of the game so far. I’ve only played 40/85 songs on one instrument, I haven’t played as part of a band or gone online, and I haven’t touched the studio or done much customization. Really, this is when the game STARTS for me: I’ll play through all the other songs, chase down 100%’s, and try to work my way into the career top 25 on the XBL leaderboards and ScoreHero.com.

And so no matter how much people whine about Activision milking the franchise dry — which they’re certainly doing — I can’t get upset over it. If there weren’t 5 other games coming out in the next few months, I could play GH5 from now until Christmas and still not feel like I’d “completed” the game. And so now I head off to play the rest of the setlist on guitar, after which I’ll make one more post with my initial stats and rankings before moving on to other instruments Thursday.

It’s a little easy to get sidetracked when you’re playing a Guitar Hero game and forget you also want to post impressions. That’s exactly what I did with GH5 today, letting three hours go by without realizing it. But I’m here now!

The traditional gameplay hasn’t really been touched much — it’s all the surrounding stuff that’s been tweaked. Everything’s been reorganized, although it’s debatable if it’s much more efficient: the reality is that there’s so much STUFF in Guitar Hero 5 that there might not be an easy way to organize it all — there are little goodies are hidden in various menus that you might or might not ever see, and you’ll just have to spend some time exploring if you want to see it all.  

As far as I can tell, there’s now just one career mode now, instead of four or five for different instruments plus a band. Like recent GH games, the career is organized so you can zip through it: once you acquire X amount of stars in the first tier, you open the next. The addition of bonus challenges and the ability to get up to 9 stars on every song means that you can blow through the career at record pace.

Which is what I’m doing now. I’ve played 25/85 songs so far, which may not sound like a lot, but the reality is that I probably only need to play 10-15 more songs to finish unlocking all the venues and complete the career, which would be less than half the setlist. This is OK by me: in recent years, the Career mode has become a starting point, a way to ease into the game quickly without having to slog through songs you don’t like or can’t beat.

So I’m off to complete the Expert Guitar Career, and then I need to do a little research on some features, particularly the GHWT song import as well as this GH Van Halen deal where you can “get the unreleased game for free” within 6 weeks of today. Between GH5, Rock Band Beatles, GH Van Halen, LEGO Rock Band (which will be importable into Rock Band 2) and Band Hero, it’s going to be an epic few months for rhythm games.

This morning, I finally started up Guitar Hero 5, and over the next two or three days, I’ll be chronicling my playthrough along with various impressions of the game. So far, I’ve only played two songs on Expert guitar – “Song 2″ by Blur and “In My Place” by Coldplay (100% on both, of course), but I’ve already noticed a few interesting things:

-          As is becoming the norm for rhythm games, the entire 85-song setlist is unlocked from the get-go in Quickplay, so you don’t have to slog through Career mode or find some weird cheat code if you just want to party with your friends.

-          The menu system has been overhauled, with mixed results. There are a LOT of menus to sort through, and while it’s certainly an improvement over Guitar Hero World Tour, it might not be obvious where certain things are located now. On the plus side, I was happy to see that Hyperspeed is no longer a “cheat” to be unlocked, but a standard option that can be toggled on and off at the song start screen.

-          In addition to the classic characters like Axel Steel and Pandora, and the ability to create your own rock star, there’s a new option to use your Xbox Live avatar as your rocker. Will it look out of place alongside the GH5 graphics? Maybe. But it’s cool that the option is there, as there will undoubtedly be players thrilled to see their XBL avatar rocking out.

-          Maybe the best new feature we’ve seen in rhythm games in a while are GH5’s Bonus Challenges. As usual, you can get 5 “stars” on a song for playing well, with a 6th star for getting 100%. In addition, you can earn three more stars by performing certain tasks. On “Song 2,” it’s a band challenge: get 500,000, 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 points. On “In My Place,” it’s a guitar challenge: Whammy notes for 30, 40 or 80 seconds total through the entire song (it’s got a lot of sustain notes). If balanced properly, these challenges will offer lots more replayability to songs instead of playing them once and forgetting about them.

So off I go to plow through the Expert guitar campaign. My prediction is that I’ll 100% about 20 of the 85 songs on my first pass; we’ll see how that goes. I’ll be posting every 15 songs or so with updates and more impressions, and maybe even a few videos if I can get some all-star band sessions together.

In the past two weeks since E3, I’ve had a lot of people ask me what I thought of the show. I’ve generally told everyone the same story, but one I think is much more succinctly illustrated by the E3 Game Critics Awards nominees, announced this week.

Just look at “Best of Show:” — four sequels (Modern Warfare, Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Mass Effect) and one new franchise that doesn’t seem overly impressive (Brutal Legend). That pretty sums up what this E3 was about: it may have been at least a partial return to the Big Show feel of previous E3s, but in terms of the actual games, it was more about big publishers milking existing franchises like Halo or God of War or Rock Band rather than anything really new to get hot and bothered over.

Of course, not everything at E3 was a sequel or spin-off, but even many of the E3 panel’s “original” games, like Alan Wake and Heavy Rain, were titles we’ve seen many times before.  Raven’s Singularity looks cool, but the show demo was a bit underwhelming. Splash Damage’s Brink was locked away upstairs at the Bethesda booth, and I doubt many people even knew it was there. Activision made a lot of noise with DJ Hero, but it was hard to tell exactly how the game worked unless you had a back-room demo. It’s almost like publishers have gotten so comfy with the routine of marketing existing franchises that they’re not sure what to do with anything really new.

And so that’s what E3 2009 was about: a lot of stuff you’ve seen before. Which isn’t a bad thing, as the games I most want to play are titles like Modern Warfare 2 or The Beatles: Rock Band. But if you’re wondering what was new and cool this year, the easiest answer is: “the same stuff that was cool last year.”

(P.S. No, I have no idea why this text is showing up so small. Time for some WordPress investigation this weekend. )

Ten notes from the Expert guitar campaign of GH: Smash Hits:

1.      “I Wanna Rock,” which appeared in GH80s as a master track — but the lower-pitched album version — has the familiar single version included in Smash Hits.

2.      Kiss’s “Rock and Roll All Nite” has no solo. Where did it go?  

3.      “Monkey Wrench” has been toughened up a bit with some tricky rhythm parts.

4.      The live version of Pantera’s “Cowboys From Hell” is pretty decent.

5.      The live version of Helmet’s “Unsung” is not. It sounds like a bland bar band. 

6.      The master track of “Freya” is considerably less annoying than the GH2 cover version. 

7.      “Beast and the Harlot” has been made just sliiiiightly easier, so you could actually hit the first solo.

8.      The new version of “Play With Me” has an INSANE rhythm part.

9.      If it were possible, “Psychobilly Freakout” is now twice as hard as the GH2 version.

10.  The intro madness to “Raining Blood” is harder than GH3’s version, but the “Flood” section at the end is much easier. And the final chord is pretty comical.

You could hardly blame anyone for pigeonholing Guitar Hero: Smash Hits as a lame attempt by Activision to cash in on the popular rhythm-game franchise.  48 songs that have already appeared in previous Guitar Hero games? Why should anyone buy that?

A bunch of reasons, as it turns out.

Maybe it’s because there are a lot of songs from the original Guitar Hero, which was only released for the now-archaic PS2. Maybe it’s because this version includes full band support, so you can play drums or vocals and get your friends in the mix.  Maybe it’s because all 48 songs are master tracks, instead of the often-lacking cover versions that appeared before. Or maybe you just want to revisit these songs with all the engine tweaks that have been added to the series over the years (working hammer-ons!). So while Smash Hits doesn’t push the series forward much, it still ends up being a worthy pickup.

Smash Hits pulls its set list from five previous games: Guitar Hero (14 songs), Guitar Hero II (19), Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s (6), Guitar Hero III (8), and Guitar Hero Aerosmith (1). In a nice touch, the entire setlist is unlocked in Quickplay mode from the start, so while there’s a Career mode with the traditional progression, you can just skip to whatever songs you want to play right out of the box. Which is exactly what I did, going straight to master tracks of “Beast and the Harlot” and “Bark at the Moon” before starting career mode.

At first glance, the career appears to be set up similarly to Guitar Hero: Metallica: there are a handful of songs in each tier, unlocking the next one after earning a set number of stars. However, before you unlock the final group of songs, you have to complete every song before it (at least on Expert), so you can’t skip songs if you’re chasing Expert career achievements. Like GH3, World Tour and GH Metallica, the game contains similar animated cutscenes detailing familiar GH characters getting together for a reunion tour.

On guitar, the biggest in-game changes are the little tweaks added to the GH engine over the years. Obviously, functional hammer-ons and hi-def support were the first big additions after the initial Guitar Hero, and then there are later innovations like three-note chords and “slide” notes that support the GHWT guitar’s touch strip. While developer Beenox has maintained the general feel of the original charts, the switch to masters means the charts aren’t quite identical, and so most of the pack feels somewhat fresh: it’s only on the GH3 and Aerosmith tracks that the experience feels like a rehash.

And, since the entire concept behind this feature being “the first 360 minutes,” that’s about as far as I’ve gotten: completing all 48 songs on Expert, with the final Career song predictably being Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames.” (It’s the only song I didn’t 5-star.) Drums and vocals will have to come later this week, as will head-to-head multiplayer or band play, with Xbox Live being down for maintenance today. So while 48 songs might seem a little skimpy considering we’ve played them all before, there’s still tons of gameplay in Smash Hits, which I’m looking forward to digging into further.

This is the first of what I’m planning as a regular feature here: not quite a review, but impressions based off my first few hours with a game. As a reviewer, there was always a balancing act where you wanted to review a game thoroughly but you didn’t want to wait a week to post impressions, hence the title: “360 minutes.”

A lot of the time, 80% of what you need to know about a game comes in the first few hours of gameplay, so while these aren’t official “reviews,” so to speak, I’m looking at this as a way to present fairly in-depth impressions of games without having to wait a week … or pretend that I’ve actually finished the game and tested every last feature (which, sadly, most publications do). You can see the first one, for Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, above this post.

For the last few months, I’ve played a LOT of Tiger Woods 09, as I’ve been engaged in a rigorous exercise/training program where I do a lot of stationary biking, and a non-twitchy game like Tiger Woods is a great way to kill that time. So the release of Tiger Woods 10  this week was just what I needed, as I was rapidly approaching my third full season in the previous game.

One of my small gripes with Tiger 09 was the fact that the camera that follows each shot would occasionally show some lame side angle where you couldn’t even see the ball. It happened maybe 1 out of 20 times, so it wasn’t a big deal. But for my first six hours with Tiger 10, the game has taken this to an absurd degree, where almost EVERY shot is followed from some bizarre side angle. Not only is this not a terrible way to show the game from a presentation standpoint, but it also makes it impossible to judge what kind of spin you should put on a shot to keep it from rolling into a sand trap. The camera angles effectively render an entire feature of the game unusable.

So I’d like to congratulate the makers of Tiger Woods 10. For years, you’ve had a great game, but in your ever-continuing struggle to make the game look different from last year’s version, you’ve taken a part of your game that worked perfectly and broken it. Way to go!

Otherwise, Tiger 10 isn’t that different from earlier games. There’s still a PGA tour, the Tiger Challenge has been replaced with “Tournament Challenges,” and there’s a new putting system which takes a little figuring out but actually makes putting easier. More thoughts on the new Tiger later in the week as I whip through the game.