July 23, 2006

Guitar Hero: The impulse buy

Those sneaky buggers at Best Buy have had the best of me once again. They put out a 60" lcd tv, two rocker gaming chairs, two guitar hero controllers, and a ps2 with Guitar Hero all loaded up and ready to play. A specially designed Jordan trap...

Katie and I were walking through Best Buy last night, after being scolded out of Target for playing with baseball gloves we were testing out for purchase, when we saw the guitar hero controls sitting there, all lonely. Katie gave me the "look", which to a person unfamiliar with "the look" may look like an ordinary glance. However, I know this to actually mean "I challenge you to a video game duel."

We sat down and played two songs, much to the dismay of the little kids who claimed they "had next" after our first song ended. I have to say that we were both hooked. We'd both played the game before and we both liked what we'd seen, but the ability to play against each other was too tempting. Katie beat me the first time, which will always be brought up when we compete. However, the second time I came back with a score slash himself would've been proud of and made Katie ashamed to call herself a video game player. Needless to say, my mind went into buy mode.

So, I devised a plan to buy the ps2 and guitar hero game, with extra controller, play them until we get sick of it then sell them all on ebay for a short loss. Basically, the ebay rental program (AKA the e-bay rental for things you can't rent program). You use the item until you can't stand to look at it anymore, then you sell it on e-bay for a 20% ($45 bucks or so in this case) loss or so.

We bought the game late last night, played until almost 12 (with only one controller though) and managed to pry ourselves away from it so we could sleep.

For those of you who may not have heard of guitar hero, it's a rhythm game much like donkey konga. IGN describes it better than I can:

Guitar Hero works similar to other music-based games in that a track of notes scrolls down the screen. Like playing a real guitar, you need to hold the correct fret and then strum at the right time. You can hold the note before it needs to be played, because the strumming part is what actually registers the note, which again, is exactly like a real guitar. The whammy bar lets you modify the pitch of notes, which any bad-ass axeman will consistently shake to please the gods. (via ign.com)
guitarhero.jpg

The songs really make the game... I like almost all of them. Here's a list of the most popular, though I hear there are somewhere near 30 after unlocking some of the other ones.

  • Red Hot Chili Peppers- Higher Ground
  • Boston- More than a Feeling
  • Megadeth- Symphony of Destruction
  • The Donnas- Take it Off
  • Jimi Hendrix- Spanish Castle Magic
  • ZZ Top- Sharp Dressed Man
  • Black Sabbath- Iron Man
  • White Zombie- Thunderkiss 65
  • Queens of the Stone Age- No One Knows
  • David Bowie- Ziggy Stardust
  • The Ramones- I Wanna Be Sedated
  • Franz Ferdinand- Take Me Out
  • Deep Purple- Smoke on the Water
  • Cream- Crossroads
  • Sum 41- Fat Lip

So far I'm happy with the purchase and extremely happy with the game itself, but a good deal of that happiness depends on whether I'll be able to resell this game for an acceptable loss (i.e. acceptable rental/time played cost). I'm off to wake Katie up with a medium difficulty, expert rendition of Thunder Kiss 65.

I'm listening to:
Howlin' Wolf - Killing floor
Posted by Jordan at July 23, 2006 8:40 AM | TrackBack


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