GRANDIZER

Name: GRANDIZER
Joined On: Jun 13, 2007
Maintag: GRANDIZER
Age: 31
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Location: Massachusetts
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Last seen: 11/20/08

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03/07/08

Rock Band - The End, or just the Beginning?

I completed Rock Band on Hard. YES!! That's right, I finally completed the guitar solo career on Hard. Now I can die a happy man. . . or can I? The expert difficulty is calling to me and I KNOW that it will serve to KICK MY ASS all over again. Why put myself through such torture? No really. . . WHY? I can't really come up with a good explanation for that one, but what I CAN say is that I will be completing the solo Drum career on Hard before I do anything else in the game. I think there are like 45 career songs you have to complete and I am stuck right now on Vasoline. I have completed like 26 songs in the Drum solo career. The drums are. . . tough.

The thing about the drums is that I feel that they are actually easier to play on Expert than on Hard. What I mean is, I am always finding myself playing extra beats to try and mimic what I am hearing rather than actually playing what is on screen. This is easier to avoid in the guitar career, for me personally, because I don't actually know how to play the guitar. I don't play the drums either, but drumming is more of an instinctual type of thing anyhow. I mean, your limbs just naturally want to do certain things when you start drumming. This is why, if you are right handed, you cannot play the ride symbol with your left hand. Your right foot and left hand just naturally want to hit the same beat at the same time.

Anyway, I have to say I actually pumped my arms and fists when I finished Green Grass and High Times. . . er, I mean " Tides". (heh heh ) I had to practice those solos for a good hour before I could play through them. And I should mention that I can only play through them without dying. They don't sound any good, I can just make it through the song now. I did get 4 stars somehow though. It was like I was playing every other note.

I haven't felt a greater sense of accomplishment in a game other than making this achievement. (which is really quite sad. . but, moving on) It just took me so long to train my fingers to do all the button presses. It is interesting to me how much control you need in order to make your limbs respond a certain way. Like playing the drums for example. It takes me a ridiculous amount of concentration in order to play syncopated rhythms, hit the base pedal multiple times in a row and so on. When you are looking at the screen though you are thinking to yourself, "How hard could it be." Then you realize your body just DOES NOT want to do that. UGgghhhhh. . . the struggle continues.

I guess the bright side though is that playing the drum career can actually carry over (somewhat) to the real world. Not that I am going to run out and buy a drum set, but it is nice to know that I would be able to mess around if the opportunity ever did present itself.

In closing - It doesn't matter to me that I have wasted hours upon hours playing this damn game. What does matter is that I viewed an animation of my character choreographing a pyrotechnics event.

Posted by GRANDIZER @ 9:07 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

03/05/08

Rock Band - "Ohhh, I've wasted my life. . ."

So, IF you play Rock Band, do you ever have those moments when you are stuck on a song and end up practicing it? While you are practicing, do you think to yourself, "Man, what the $%#@! am I doing!?!?!?"

Heh. . . Well, I do.

I love ROck Band. I think it is a great game. So much so that I decided to "bite the bullet" and up the difficulty level to Hard and or Expert. Now, I will just preface the following with the explanation that I was never an expert at Guitar Hero 1 or 2. I have never been able to play any of these games on Hard at all, so suffice to say my skill level is really poor.

Anyway, I have been playing Rock Band Solo Tours with the Drum Set and the Guitar on Hard and Expert sort of off and on. The game gets sooo hard it becomes frustrating. (Yes I realize that Guitar Hero III is way harder and I shouldn't be whining, but hey. . . what can I say? I like whining.) So now I am at the point where I (think) all I have to do is playthrough the last 4 songs in the guitar solo tour on Hard. The Drums solo tour. . . .well, we just won't talk about that.

So last night I am sitting there and trying to play through the guitar solo on "Flirting With DIsaster" and for the 10th song in a row I find myself in the "practice room" practicing the song, and I sort of stop and think to myself, "WTF am I DOING?!!" I mean really! Here I am practicing the correct combination of button presses over and over again, when I could actually be learning HOW TO PLAY A REAL GUITAR!! Never before have I been so conflicted. (well there was that time when I went out to eat and the waitress gave me a choice of cole slaw or fries. . . but we are talking GAMES here.) I mean, on one hand I just CANNOT admit defeat, and onthe other I could be actually learning a real skill that is far better in EVERY way than completing some challenge in a video game in order to collect "digital nothing".

So, "what did I do?" Like any good gamer I hunkered down and I practiced the damn song.

@#%$! ! !

Posted by GRANDIZER @ 11:28 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

12/05/07

Jeff Gerstmann - Let Go !!?!?

I'm not sure if anyone cares about this, or even knows, but Jeff Gershman (<--sp?) a Senior Editor of GameSpot.com was "let go" the other day. He has worked for the site for like 10 years.

Anywho, the part to this story that concerns us (or well...me that is) is that it is widely considered a fact at this point that he was let go due to his latest review of Kane and Lynch, which he gave a rather lousy review of. So this brings Gamespot's "unbiased editorial" reputation into question. In other words, everyone now thinks that Gamespot has been functioning as a shill for game developers.

I should also mention that this is just a rumor and that it is not confirmed. It is just widely believed, and based on the circumstances I have to say that the whole idea really seems quite logical and therefore believable. Gamespot.com put the video review of Kane and Lynch on the site originally and then took it down some time after it was online. They have since re-posted it, but after Gershman was let go. They also stated that it was taken down due to poor quality. The sound WAS bad in the video and the there was not a lot of game play footage, but still - seems a little "fishy" to me. After all, if this video was bad enough to fire Gershman, why would they re-post the original version of it and not "fix" the problems with it? To prove a point that it was worth firing an employee of 10 years over? Wow, those guys have some stones on them huh.

So, I thought this was note worthy seeing as how I mainly use Gamespot com for a lot of game reviews and info. I don't solely depend on them, but I definitely rely heavily on them. This whole thing makes me think twice about trusting them at all now.

I mean, I trust Jeff's review of Kane and Lynch, but the other guys that work for the site have got to be shaking in their boots now because they must know that the same thing can happen to them. So, if the reviews on the site suddenly take a rather large jump in the numbers (like instead of seeing a lot of 7.0's you start seeing 8.0's and 9.0's) then we know something is up. Quite frankly, I believe that something is up and has been up for a while in light of this. I am let down. I considered Gamespot to be a good site because they were generally harder on games, review wise, than other sites. I came to trust their judgment. Now I wonder if they were just pushing what they were told to push. Of course, I should also mention that the games that have received high ratings on their site I have enjoyed a lot, soooo I guess there is an argument either way. We don't know the REAL reason why he was fired as the company has not released any type of information on it. All we know is what we can speculate on based on what has already happened.

In any event I think it is an interesting topic for discussion.

Here is a link to the official company line. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6183666.html

Posted by GRANDIZER @ 4:12 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

11/24/07

In the middle of a Crysis here!

So Cysis is finally working on my system now. All it took was for NVidia to own up to the fact that their hardware drivers don't work al that well with 3D games. Now that they posted an updated Forceware driver all is right with the world once again.

Well, maybe not completely "right". What I mean is, the game's video doesn't skip anymore and remains a playable frame rate. BUT I have to turn down the settings still in order to get a playable frame rate. I run Crysis at 1260 x 960 (Or something like that) I only have Anti-Aliasing turned up to 2x and all the advanced graphical settings are at High, except for textures which is at Very High. I have a couple of things turned down to medium like shadows and sound, but that is not a big deal.

All in all, the game is really good but it is in desperate need of a patch. I encountered a number of bugs so far. For Example:

During the game there are certain areas where the textures just disappear and you are looking through the object in question. This also goes for AI characters and your gun model etc. Suddenly I found myself looking across the map at an enemy but I had a building and a bunch of other stuff in my way. Other times I couldn't find the stairs leading up to a building because I just couldn't see them. That is a real pain let me tell you. I dies a couple times because I couldn't see the barrel that was blocking my retreat. Y'know, a bunch of crap like that.

Let's see what else.. . . Oh yeah, I couldn't launch the 64 bit version of the game from the crysis64.exe in the 64bit bin folder. The game just hangs up. There was also the problem of the game freezing (or almost freezing) while I was playing. In some random spots the game just decides that it has had enough and just stops.

I looked around on the Crysis forums and found that there are a number of people that have a similar configuration of PC that I do and are having the exact same issues. So, hopefully the game will be patched soon. I haven't even attempted to play this bad boy online yet, anticipating that the number of problems would make the whole experience just way too frustrating.

Anyways - Here's hoping that the rest of you that are playing Crysis are having a better go of it than I. Even with all it's problems I still think it is a great game. They just need to fix the bugs in it. I really hope that it comes out on the 360. That would be awesome.

Posted by GRANDIZER @ 7:34 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

11/15/07

Crysis - What Does it Take to Run This Game!!

I picked up Crysis last night and played it for like 15 minutes, and most of that time was spent tweaking the settings trying to figure out what resolution I could play it at and still have a reasonable framerate.

Even with all the hardware I have in my system I think I need to get more RAM. HA!

I have a Vista Ultimate 64 Bit OS with an NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTX Video card that sports 768 MB of RAM. An Intel Core 2 Duo 2.67Ghz CPU and 4 GB of system RAM. Needless to say, I should be able to run this MoFo at it's highest resolution with all the settings maxed.

Well, I can run the game there is no question about that; I can even run it at it's highest resolution with all the settings maxed out, but I can not do so and actually play the game, which leads me to the question; What system were they designing the game for in the first place? I mean, if I can't run it with the settings maxed on my system then who can? Did the developers ever try it out with the settings maxed?

Anyways, maybe the problem is that the game was designed for the 32 bit version of Vista and not for the 64 bit version. I would think a patch or a retail version for the 64 bit version of Vista would be on the way if that were the case.

In any event, I can run the game fine at lower resolutions, I just mention it because I am in awe at how much hardware processing power the game needs in order to function. Sheesh! What a hog. I could always pump my system up to 8 GB of RAM but still, what does it take? I have above and beyond the "Recommended" hardware specs for the game.

This is just more fodder for the "Console over PC game" argument. PC games are just nothing but hassles, great though they maybe. I will have to turn off a bunch of services on Vista like Windows Media Center and Aero Desktop in order to verify that the CPU isn't being hogged by the game. Of course that means that I can't record or watch TV while I play Crysis. (not such a big deal) BUT I will have to turn on/off these services all the time which is just annoying. Oh well...what can you do.

Posted by GRANDIZER @ 10:58 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

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