Free Candy For Everyone

Guitar Hero III came out today. I wasn’t really that excited for it, since it wasn’t made by Harmonix, the fine studio that crafted the first two games. Plus the song list wasn’t that impressive to me. The GH games have been trending towards super hardcore. Each title, the difficulty ratchets up a few notches. The song selection has been becoming a bit too metal for me too. But there’s still something about Guitar Hero.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but nothing compares to my excitement over Rock Band, the next music game out of Harmonix. It’s not just guitars, it’s also singing and drums! It just looks so awesome and it comes out in less than a month. But until then, we have GHIII. My boyfriend is much more of a die-hard GH fan than I am, so we headed over to Best Buy this morning to pick up a copy.

To our surprise, they had a demo of Rock Band! OMG! It was so fantastic! We played two songs in the store, the first was “Wanted Dead or Alive”, with me on vocals and my guy on the drums. It was just super fun. He’s a drummer for real, and he rocked out on the hardest difficulty level. He said it was pretty close to really drumming. We switched after that for Faith No More’s “Epic”, he played guitar and I tried out the drums (on easy! I’m no drummer!). It was so much fun! I was just grinning like a maniac. Rock Band is awesome, yes yes.

We considered staying there and playing all day but figured they might kick us out of the store eventually. And we had some GHIII to play. I have to say that Neversoft did a good job on GHIII. They had to write the game from scratch, they didn’t actually have the GH1/2 codebase. But it felt like Guitar Hero. There are some major complaints - the difficulty is a mess. The songs don’t get evenly harder as you play through them. They have a co-op career mode, which is quite cool. You can play through and unlock songs together. But the order of songs in co-op mode is completely different than it is in solo career mode and it really makes no sense. In either one, there are songs in much later brackets that are tons easier than the earlier ones. Very uneven. And overall, the game is much harder than GHII. I’d say that it’s as hard on Hard as GHII was on Expert, the next difficulty level up. I wouldn’t even want to begin to try this game on Expert. Hard was quite hard enough.

We played all the way through co-op career mode on Medium, then got about halfway through solo career mode on Hard (trading off songs). We tried out the multiplayer battle mode in between. The idea is that instead of trying to score points, you’re just trying to get the other player to fail. You get attack powerups at certain points in the song and can attack your opponent. Some of them are just a minor annoyance, like the “broken string” that makes you repeatedly tap a button until you “fix” the string. Some are just brutal, especially in combination. One attack temporarily increases the song’s difficulty level for a while. One makes the note indicators blink out, which can be really confusing if you’re not sure what notes you need to play. One turns on lefty flip so when it shows you hitting the right most button on the screen you really need to be hitting the left most button. That one really confused me.

If no one fails out of the song you go into sudden death overtime. The song starts over and the first person to miss any note loses. I don’t think either of us have ever played as perfectly as during those overtimes (and we got into them pretty much every time, we’re evenly matched, I guess!). In this mode, the only attack is this evil “drain” that is a floating icon that gets closer and closer to the bottom of the screen, eventually obscuring the notes you need to press and just making you fail. The battle mode was cool and creative. I remember reading about it ahead of time and not really thinking it was all that important, but we had a blast with it.

Overall, GHIII was a surprise to me. The gameplay felt solid and there was a lot of nice tweaks to the standard GH gameplay to make things better. The difficulty is a shame, and I wish they’d arranged the songs in a better order. But it was good enough to tide me over until Rock Band. But when that comes up, goodbye Guitar Hero! I will have a new gaming love.

I just hit 70 with my first character in World of Warcraft. I know it’s hard to believe it took me this long, but I sort of stopped playing my main character months ago, and then stopped playing entirely shortly after that. But the Halloween events - excuse me, Hallow’s End events going on lured my old original Crazy Cattle crew back together to kill us some Headless Horsemen (or the same one over and over).

I was at level 69 and a quarter, or something like that. And I decided it was about time to hit 70, so this week I’ve been questing in Shadowmoon Valley and tonight I finally hit 70.

Here’s the moment of the ding:

Now I just need to buy my flying mount and start saving up for my epic flying mount! Though that’s a lot of grinding, we’ll see if I maintain interest in the game long enough to do that. I didn’t get my epic land mount until after the expansion came out, it might just be after Wrath of the Lich King comes out that I get that next mount up.

I should have enough cash on me to buy the normal flying mount, and if not, I have enough gold on some other characters to type the balance. Tomorrow I go soaring around Outland just because I can!

I know it’s been quite some time since my last post, but I’ve actually been experimenting with web layouts for my site. There’s a whole new look coming to Free Candy, and this one is going to be a custom theme that I created (with a little help from my friends). Should be just a few more days now and then I’ll be able to stop mucking around in CSS and start talking to all you folks out there again.

And welcome Snooty Sims readers! I don’t actually have more information about Sims 3 then that one talk I saw several months ago, but feel free to ask for any questions or clarifications, I’m happy to provide more info where possible.

Tonight I watched the premiere of Pushing Daisies. Go check out the official site for some extra info. This show is so great. The colors are vivid, the characters are interesting, there’s an awesome narrator, it’s a fairy tale full of quirkiness and it’s just awesome.

It’s created by Bryan Fuller, who co-created my favorite quirky, canceled, undiscovered show, Wonderfalls. Wonderfalls was only on the air for four episodes, but they were glorious and delightful. When it came out on DVD, I promptly went out and bought it for the full 14 episodes of awesome. Highly recommended!

But back to the show that is currently on the air right now. Pushing Daisies stars Lee Pace, who was also in Wonderfalls. The cast includes Chi McBride, Swoosie Kurtz, and the woman who played Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors! It is full of goodness.

Please please watch this show! I can’t bear to see another quirky, wonderful, offbeat, unusual show canceled before it’s given a chance.

Hope no one minds, I’m trying out some ads. I added some Google Ad Sense ads to the sidebar. They’re rather small and unobtrusive. I figure I’ll see how they work out. And while I was at it, I made a little Amazon Store. Check out the Candy Shop to see some books and things that I like. There are some bugs that I need to work out right now, it doesn’t fit quite right on the page at the moment, but I’m also hoping to upgrade my Wordpress install imminently and re-work the look of the site, at which point I’ll fix that up too.