Logbook: Console Gaming
Games: Guitar ____, Rock_____ (insert random word in blank space)
First guitar hero… that wasn’t so bad. Than rock band… Now Rock revolution, And so it begins.. the Rock____(fill in blank with something Cool sounding) Wars.
Whats next Rock Philharmonic, *You need 45 Controllers to play, a small loan , your first born and a contract for 3 years. it maybe just me but i have no damn interest in a simulator simulator (your simulating someone simulating playing a song). I just cant stand games that you do not truly play – It would be like playing Unreal Tournament by playing the player that controls the character thats boring as hell. After all doesn’t violate some sort of paradox rule? Just imagine playing Mario brothers by the Guitar hero method .. red red green green and you screaming the whole time GO RIGHT DAMNIT.
Sure its *new* to gaming … NOT SO MUCH, Cue: NES power pad(wait thats more fun).. Dance Dance revolution, Or for that matter any sports game where you Can only play by simulating the seasons. Sure Maybe the first time around its fun but after that i’d see it getting boring as hell.
But what i find Is the silliest fucking thing to this is with the DLC + Need to buy 74 Plastic toy instruments its getting ridiculous. This is all falling into the horrible black hole of your typical EA game.. Rather than improve on the game structure and make it better, Redo the whole came and complicate the fuck out of the Interface and controls, Guitar Hero has your guitar, Rockband has Drums + 2 guitars, Rock Revolution has a Even more complicated 7 button drum set plus who the hell knows what.. Perhaps the Special Kazoo controller, guitar Hero IV not to be outdone will have also a six button drum Annoying taping banging sound kit.
If you have ever walked into a big box store you can normally hear the rock band drum set from across the store and normally you want to kill the person on the drums because they pound away at the things like a Drunken steroid Infused gorilla. Honestly I cant stand this type of game because its a horrid step backwards, Now if the companies making these games would let you plug in a REAL Instrument to the game and actually play the song, I’d likely not have to say a word about this crap. But, Since this crap is turning into a monster its going to be horrid.
This game type is mutating at such a fast rate its getting scary. Rockband I think will have the most room for mutation since its evil EA overlords will probably whip there slaves into making some awful brain feasting zombie game, where in order to run it you must buy the all the options.. Wait there already doing that, Rock band wants you to bend over and take it a little harder with the Light and smoke Stage kit for 99$
Whats next, The Rock Band bender washout years kit, Complete with 9 tons of blow and acid with optional hookers, (Groupies sold separately).
I know these companies want to make a buck, but hell come up with something innovative will ya?
like, why not add some actual gaming to these games, add a part where you have to manage your band, A TRUE career mode. manage the band , or hire a manager that could quite possibly rip you off, fend off fights in the venue? Add some Extreme personalization by having your own true “rock band” by each player that plays has there gamertag(xbox) to each part of the band creating a true (even tho simulated simulated) band – with the possibility of offline gaming where all people don’t have to be there at once. One guy does the guitar part, you get a notification that your “bandmember” has attempted a song and You have to do your part. that would lead to better online multiplayer gaming. with this setup You could have Bands that play against each other and Have a Fame rating or something to that effect. If your “rock band” breaks up you also get a penalty or a bonus depending on how that player was.
(note: Rock Band has a mode like this but it seems more linear, see wiki Entry)
It just gets to me on how a game with such a lack of depth is so popular. Drives me completely nuts when i hear people that say “OH YEAH I CAN PLAY THAT SONG” and you finish the sentence with “on your Console….”. but these games need more depth more options than *Red green yellow yellow etc etc*
with the idea I have… you could have battle of the bands …. rather than single ratings or how many “fans” you have..
Hopefully in the future, these games will not be the clusterfuck they are coming out to be right now by adding all the craptastic accessories and needing them all to “play” the game, and game that requires you to buy stuff thats twice the cost of the game is kind of ridiculous in my opinion. I am sure some people enjoy these games but… till they come up with a saner method, instead of flooding the market with 90 tons of crap your going to forget about after you get bored and Have a load of plastic instruments floating around, I think I’ll stay away from these genre….
Just a side note… Strangely interesting that the publisher is listed as MTV GAMES for most versions of Rock Band at Gamestop.com ..

Makes me wonder if they are trying to hide there name in order to stop people that go “EA SUCKS ASS” which they do in 99% of cases.
101st post =p.
Wow.. 101 Posts. thats a bit crazy by my standards, and no i did not feel like saying 100th post.. its way too overdone.
Today brought wii out with the original cable thinking I’d have a nightmare setting the thing back up for my monitor. I got home and was pleasantly surprised by the ease that 480P stayed on.
After looking through my games collection i started thinking what the future games I’d be interested in.. And the problem i see with the Wii is the amount of Game Vomit. Game Vomit is what i call it when developers just toss anything they can at a system and call it a game. Unfortunately the Wii has Enough Game Vomit to warrant surgery to reduce the amount of crap that the system intakes. Personally I think it makes the *Nintendo seal of Quality*
Look Horrible.
GTA Moronity part II
Went out to pick up a shelf today with bluesteel, We decided to stop at gamestop. so we poked around the Gamecube games and picked up a few. but in the time we saw at least 4 parents picking up GTA 4 for there kids. With the news going crazier than britney spears on a normal day about GTA it seems like parents dont give a shit about GTA/NEWs reports. so basically its a few crazy fucks going off on fictional material in the game that doesn’t exist. but Over all it was pretty entertaining to see that.
VD-W2 Wii VGA cable part III.
Over the weekend i picked up a few GameCube games, Metroid Prime , F-zero GX, Killer7and Need for speed Hot pursuit 2. Now i previously wrote about the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable, This is the first time I’ve had a problem with the cable. The first game i tried was NFS:HS the game starts up and the display on the monitor goes nuts. Typical, EA and more crap they put out, You would figure as the one of the “top” gaming manufactures, it would support 480p. The gamecube supports 480p , but theres a catch. in order to get the game in 480p you need to hold down the B button on the gamecube controller when starting the game.
this is a small problem in my opinion since i don’t play too many GC games. But, if you intend to play Game Cube games using the VGA cable There is a list too help you out at Mobygames.com .
Overall the cable in my opinion is worth it with the one minor downfall of not supporting GC in 480i , but Most of the good games are supported in 480p for the game cube.
overall i’d say the cable too me is a 9/10 with that small drawback (to me)
Wii: Mario Kart impressions.
Well its another month and Another Good wii game comes out. As a big fan of Mario Kart for the SNES, I’ve not really played any mario Karts till i purchased the Wii, I had downloaded Mario Kart 64 for the wii and my reception to that was pretty blah..
Usually when it comes down to games I have an interest in , I tend to stay away from prerelease reviews and anything to do with the guts of the games. I have 2 reasons for doing that, I’d Rather figure out things for myself and I want an unbiased opinion of the game in my mind. Anyways…
Continue reading →Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)
I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching
I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.

After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…
After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.
the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv
The Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here, because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.
As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.
it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.
Console gaming and movie watching… When you dont have a TV.. Wait what?
When I got my Wii, it was a thought to exactly how i’d play the console since i don’t have a TV so to speak. Eventually I just ended up going to most efficient route for myself. I connect the Wii to my PC via an analog TV Card, it works fine for me. but there are little things you do notice between having the Wii connected to a TV vs connected to a PC through a TV card.
Personally i use my PC as my center for media, Watching movies, playing games(PC), and playing the Wii. I don’t need a super huge screen, having one would be nice but eh… what can you do. I don’t watch enough TV to validate the idea of getting cable or anything, the way channels are these days its just all rehash of programs anyways… what are we on now “survivor 923 – Night with the power out” edition? About the only thing I tend to watch is mythbusters.
The only thing about having the wii through an analog tv card though is that the screen looks a bit fuzzy and lagged a bit. I’ve tried out many digital Tuner cards with no luck whatsoever, Either I have some sort of weird problem or perhaps my pc is getting a bit aged.
I have tried –
- WinTV-HVR-1600 – This card is ok, If you have an Via Chipset/Nvidia Video card you will run into an overlay problem, easily fixed but …. the Crashes are not, generally HD channels look spectacular but on occasion the software would crash on channels with a low signal or format difference. Using it to play a console through was worthless, Trying to play the wii on this was like trying to play the Wii underwater , You would move the cursor, and the screen would always be half a second behind becoming extremely annoying fast.
- Pinnacle PCTV HD Card – out of the box the card was purely annoying… the install software DEMANDED to have WinXP Service pack 2 installed, Nothing would progress unless you did that. as far as channels it did not have the problems that the HVR1600 had, but there was a noticeable unsynchronized Audio, For having the Wii hooked up , Again Display lag issues made this card useless.
- Visiontek TV wonder 600 – based off the ATI TV wonder 600, installation was painless, Installation of software was relatively painless, Operation was terrible. Trying to pull in any sort of digital channels was totally out of the question no matter the position of the antenna NO channels were received. I even Put the antenna outside the window in hopes of seeing some sort of life from the tuner itself, For the Input part of the card for the Wii, This card got the Worst of the ratings – Display lag was far greater than the other cards, Up to 1.5 seconds of display lag which made any sort of console gaming Completely out of the question.
These card were all tried through about a years time, and Likely in the future possibly there will be a Digital HD TV card that will serve my purposes for both a TV Card and a Console hookup. but I have discovered theres a 4th option that would remove the PC completely from the math , which hopefully will remove all my percieved points that i dont like about running my Wii to Tv Card to PC output. while its the cheapest of the options I’ve only heard and seen very limited reviews on this I’ve ordered the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable . This will skip having the PC as an intermediary and plug directly into my monitor , which thankfully has 2 VGA inputs and 1 DVI input.
My hope is this will solve all my complaints about having the setup i do and having a more direct setup which eliminates a device which the console Passes through
Super Smash Brothers Brawl, post Solo Subspace.
had a short post up yesterday but got rid of it in order to put up a better post.
I’ve so far played out the subspace emissary through to the end, To be honest the way the story is told is kinda of amazing in one respect since not one word of dialog is used. that mode alone takes about 8 to 10 hours to complete and for the ability of having a second player join you is really a nice add-on. Also as far as the subspace emisary the stages age agravating but the good agravating where you dont want to eat your controller
So far my online experience with brawl is limited to a few sessions but they are rather enjoyable. Missing from that is chat but thats a double edged sword right there. If you have played any “on-line” game dealing with the never ending stupidity of certain types of people wear on you after awhile. you are limited to a few different statements you can put in while your playing but nothing huge. as for the lack of a full chat – i don’t mind it since its a console. Sure the Wii has keyboard support but it is very limited at this time.
Plus a full chat client would be worse than a cell phone text conversation. “how r u” “am gd” ect ect text shorthand has its places but it gets annoying after awhile.
Until i play out smash brothers brawl online I’m not inclined to make a total decision on how good this game is. really from a single player point of view i find that Nintendo made a really good effort to appeal to many different players in this game.
As far as the hype that brawl had when it was announce for the Wii I intentionally mostly stayed away from sites hyping it up so i could have an as unbiased opinion as possible with brawl, too which in the end i am in glad I took that road. What really surprised me was the use of the Havok physics engine thats used in half life 2. Playing through you can see the physics at work with items and knocking things around which made me quite happy.
As far as this post is concerned though its relatively a beginning post because later.
My Wii has ED … wait.. what?
Around Feb 2’nd my Wii started acting Strangely with vertical bars up the screen with green pixels, So my wii had ED (electronic dysfunction) .

I sent it off to nintendo that week and amazingly the repair took next to no time at all, It was back at my house as of Feb 15th. after i had sent it out around the 8th or so . it amazes me how fast the system was returned to me, they replaced the entire system with a new system and new serial number. As far as getting everything re-setup all i had to do was redownload my Virtual console games and resync the controllers.
whao. i think i need to update a bit more often .
its been quiet and thankfully good , for the most part capital one issue has been solved but still ongoing. in the end my own bank ended up refunding me all the fees , but capital one 4 days later screwed up and refunded me twice more, my main objective is to get that crap payed off and get rid of credit cards… who needs em.. they suck.
Picked up madden 08 for the Wii, although when it comes to games from EA i am extremely wary of EA due to there quality , 9 times out of 10 they have some stupid “Show stopping” bug that either pisses you off to no end or you have to do some thing to get passed that part. the last game i suffered through like that was Command and conquer III, every time you got to the 3rd of 4th level of that game you were greeted with a HARD lock of your PC, i had tried it out on my other PC and same thing happened. Anyways getting to the Madden thing.. about the 3rd game in if you “sim” the games leading up to the game your about to play from the Team scedule it locks the wii in a hard lock which you have to shut it down and restart , If you go from the menu that shows all games every team is playing schedule, it does not lock up. plus if you haven’t saved your screwed. you loose all progress till the last time you saved (did you remember to save)