SteveStreeting.com

I don’t watch a huge number of films, but I do enjoy watching them occasionally and I’ve been using LoveFilm for the last couple of months after a friend recommended it. It’s especially good for catching up on films you didn’t have time to see when they came out. This week we had Super Size Me through the letter box, which another friend had recommended to me a while back.

I like documentaries generally, at least the informative ones anyway, and this one was simultaneously informative, funny and utterly disugusting in equal measure. I have to admire the guy for putting his health horribly at risk in the name of research, although I think everyone involved was surprised at just how much damage he could do in 30 days.

Some of the stats were interesting - I really didn’t realise that in the USA (allegedly) 40% of meals eaten by the average person are bought rather than made at home (that includes restaurants, take-out and fast food). To me that’s an incredible number - in comparison in our house I’d guess over 95% of the food is made at home.

But then, I’ve never really understood fast food. I can count the number of times I’ve eaten at McDonalds on one hand (in the 20ish years I’ve been an adult), and it’s always a very, very last resort - usually in airports at 3am when I’m jetlagged, but in recent years even that bastion has gone really thanks to decent airport restaurants being open 24/7. Our Island must be one of the last places in the world with no McDonalds - we did have a Burger King for a few years, but it shut down and is now a cafe / bistro. And don’t get me started on KFC - quite how you can take something as potentially delicious and healthy as chicken and turn it into a greasy, MSG-laden monstrosity I’ll never know (we don’t have any of those either, thank goodness). Probably the most decent food I’ve had from a fast-food joint is In-N-Out Burger (you were right Eric) - I actually saw them peeling real potatoes and mincing real beef, which is certainly a plus compared to the factory processed garbage most of these places use. Even so, I wouldn’t choose to eat it if I had an alternative.

As a bizarre coincidence, I read today that Activision is setting up a promotional partnership between Guitar Hero and KFC. Ugh.

Anyway, worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Look out for the extras on the DVD, they’re very interesting - they did a decomposition test on ‘real’ food versus McDonalds, and it seems that even bacteria refuse to eat McDonalds french fries because they lasted for 10 weeks in a jar with little to no decomposition. That’s scary.

Now to await the UK follow-up - the health effects of eating nothing but take-out curry for 30 days Or maybe the fish & chip diet; although despite the unhealthy cooking mechanism, at least the ingredients in your local chippie are usually fresh & local, rather than being heavily factory processed like McD/KFC. The curry diet is almost certainly more entertaining though

One of the latest items of news in the music game scene is that Sting is now confimed to be lending his likeness to Guitar Hero : World Tour, along with the already announced / leaked likes of Ted Nugent, Billy Corgan, Jimi Hendrix, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Now, I can imagine marketing men getting excited about being able to include famous characters in a game, in a wonderful brand marketing / halo effect / leveraging synergy moment, but I look at these announcements and really can’t give a rat’s arse. I wondered if it was just me that thought this feature was completely pointless, but it appears I’m not alone.

See, I play music games because ‘playing’ along to tracks you love, particularly with a bunch of friends, is a huge amount of fun. I don’t play them because I want to ‘be’ Slash, or Sting, or Ozzy, or anyone else. I don’t want to be them, I just like to play some of their tracks. If anything, embodying some of these rockers in a game would put me off; let’s face it, some musicians, despite being very talented, are total wankers. There are plenty of bands I can think of that I like, but would never want to socialise with even if I had the opportunity. Personally I don’t hold being a bit of a twat against them if they make great music, but would I want to pretend to be them? No thanks.

Of course the ability to compete against & then play as rock stars arrived in GH3, and not only was I not interested in playing the characters in that game, the way they were introduced was one of the worst mechanics in the entire game - the boss battles. These were so irretrievably awful and painful to play that I can only conclude that either the entire QA team was completely retarded, or that they raised the fact that the boss battles were a rubbish idea but were overruled by those higher up because it was a great bullet-point on the box, even if in practice it was crap. I’m betting it’s the latter, and I’m also betting that these same people are responsible for using precious resources on getting more rock stars faces into the game, resources that presumably could have been spent elsewhere on the core game experience. It makes sense from a marketing point of view, but makes absolutely bugger all difference to the actual game.

Suits: 1 Game players: 0

I’m still reserving judgement on GH:WT until I get to play it, but focussing on stuff like this when they haven’t even confirmed the setlist yet seems like an odd set of priorities, and after GH3’s many rough edges they still have everything to prove to me. A lot of people concentrate on Red Octane’s hardware (which is looking good) as GH:WT’s advantage, but since instruments will now be interchangeable I don’t buy this so much; the experience delivered by the software is paramount. We’ll see.

Oho, I haven’t been rocking out that long to the original yet, but Harmonix unleashed the worst kept secret in music gaming today by confirming Rock Band 2.

What they’ve announced isn’t that surprising, but it’s good to have official confirmation that:

1. The instruments from RB1 will work
2. DLC from both titles will be interchangeable

Now, really Harmonix would be off their rocker if they didn’t hit these 2 feature points, but it’s worth noting that in particular the cross-title DLC is actually a first, and Harmonix had to liaise with Microsoft and Sony to make sure it happened. It seems odd but the Guitar Hero franchise has never supported this - you can’t use GH2 DLC with GH3, and you can’t even use GH3 DLC with the recently released GH:Aerosmith - even though they’re from the same developer. So something that would seem so obvious is in fact an advancement here.

Harmonix have also said they’re improving the instruments - since RB1 instruments will work that suggests some incremental changes, perhaps softer drums and a stronger bass pedal, and I would guess some changes to the guitar, although on balance I actually prefer the Stratocaster now to the GH3 Les Paul (which I bought so we could play 4-player) - I know that’s fairly unusual but I like the non-clicky, firmer strum bar for fast up & down strumming, and I like the terminator ridges at the top/bottom of the fret buttons for fast orientation. My drums are great now they’re modded but better out-of-the-box drums would be very welcome I’m sure. Wireless will be a given too, certainly for the guitar, not sure about the drums but I really don’t see the benefit of wireless drums anyway, since they’re sat in one place all the time - a pointless way to burn batteries if you ask me. They’re also allowing 3rd parties to create instruments, like Mad Catz. Overall their attitude to openness and player freedom seems a lot better than Activision’s.

No word on songs yet but unofficial reports suggest that AC/DC is in, something fans have clamoured for for a while (I’m not a big AC/DC fan but I can see the appeal of playing Back in Black and Highway to Hell), and the total set list is rumoured to be a massive 120 songs, which is just ridiculous if it’s true. I currently have about 90 songs to play including DLC, and we won’t play some tracks for days - talk about being spoiled. It sounds like the list will be revealed at E3.

Obviously I’m rather keen on Rock Band and really can’t wait to see what the sequel contains. September is the release date (pipping GHWT to the post I see), although this may just be a US release - I do hope that they at least release the Solus version in Europe even if they can’t get the hardware logistics sorted out [Edit: yay, Europe will get it in September too][Edit2: ugh maybe not]. It’ll be a timed 360 exclusive again; once again I thank my stars I picked the right horse for Rock Band!

Edit: And we’re finally getting 12 more tracks from The Who in 2 weeks! So missing master tracks really were the reason for the delay on Whos Next. Good times - fingers crossed that Baba O’Riley made it in.

Following on from my previous post, it’s now clear the name is Guitar Hero World Tour - avoiding the word ‘Rock’ but keeping the slightly misleading Guitar lead, and patching on the name for a play mode in Rock Band. There’s a trailer up, the only thing about it that interests me is that it features Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’, which has always been on all of my major wish-lists for Guitar Hero. Dang, here’s hoping they DLC it for Rock Band eventually. Here’s the trailer:

To be honest, I think it’s a crap trailer, it takes itself a tad too seriously (which is a vibe I got from GH3 too) and kinda just makes me think the band and the crowd are either stupid or ridiculously pretentious. Compare this to the Rock Band ads which are very toungue-in-cheek, slightly self-deprecating and a perfect fit for the game - ie lots of fun, a little fantasy trip but let’s not pretend we’re cool while playing it, ok? It’s just meant to be a bit of fun.

In any case, if GHWT requires me to buy new peripherals even Kravitz isn’t likely to tempt me, especially as I have little faith in Neversoft’s implementation of co-op / party play after GH3 tore it to ribbons.

My wife and I were discussing last night what we thought Activision might call the increasingly inaccurately named ‘Guitar Hero IV’, given that it’s really not just about guitars anymore; ‘Rock Hero’ maybe? Rock Clone? Clone Band? Or perhaps they’ll just keep the GH4 name just in the interests of branding, and give it a lame subtitle to explain the inconsistency, probably slipping the word ‘Rock’ in there discretely somewhere. You probably saw the announcement recently of the drum kit, which has all the hallmarks of being required to ‘take it to the next level’ by replacing one drumpad with two dedicated cymbal pads. I can see a besuited marketing man ‘putting up the horns’ right now and high-fiving people rather awkwardly in front of a powerpoint presentation. Who knows if it will work, but what it definitely means is lack of compatibility between the peripherals for Rock Band and GH4. Which immediately excludes it from my house.

If they were thinking of renaming GH4, one option has now gone since Konami have announced ‘Rock Revolution‘, which again sounds like it’s going to have its own peripherals, although details are sketchy. Incompatibility with GH4 / RB would seem like suicide in this case, even if it was on a par with Rock Band, which it really doesn’t appear to be, but hey, what do I know. The bandwagon for guitar/drum/vocal music games is certainly getting kinda crowded now…

Personally, I got burned by GH3 (which proved itself a game for hardcore soloists, and utterly failed to deliver decent party play) and will hitherto trust Harmonix to know how these things are done. Anything that’s not compatible with my incoming RB peripherals (one week until release!) is wasting its time.

This is a week old now but I only just spotted it - Activision have taken the unusual step of releasing an official Guitar Hero Flash game , which is embedded below.

It doesn’t play particularly well (but then neither did Guitar Hero 3 - zing!) but I guess when you consider the limitations of the medium what’s there is an achievement, and even so it’s fun that they did it. I’m trying to figure out who it’s aimed at though; anyone who digs Guitar Hero probably has it by now - hopefully they experienced GH1 & 2 rather than just the inferior GH3 - and I don’t think this effort is going to convince anyone who hasn’t tried the real thing by now, given that it feels rather imprecise, and the keyboard is unnatural. Anyone who’s played GH will know that even though it’s just a bit of plastic, the guitar controller makes all the difference - if it didn’t, we’d all be playing Frets on Fire instead.

Maybe it’s just a gimmick to get the GH brand a little extra publicity in advance of the European release of Rock Band. To be honest I find it hard to determine which direction the GH franchise is going in now, given that they’re now planning on ‘doing a Rock Band’ and releasing other instruments. This seems like an empty ‘me too’ gesture - really GH3’s only saving grace was that it appealed to hardcore guitar specialists who have evolved an extra knuckle on each finger, most other people felt it was an inferior experience to GH2, particularly if you’re into co-op / party play. So if they’re stepping away from that specialism, they’d better get their act together because I’m betting Harmonix will hang them out to dry on a level playing field.

In any case, Rock Band is finally out over here in just over 2 weeks so I probably won’t care what Activision does with GH for a while. Everyone in the press refers to GTAIV as ‘the‘ game of 2008, but not in my house The price still hurts, and I see some people are taking that frustration out on the Amazon review system, but damn, given the amount of pleasure co-op GH2 has given us in the last year and that Rock Band looks even better, I’m confident it’s going to be worth it.