Delays, new games, and a new plan

You may have noticed that there was a huge gap recently. A couple of reasons; real life intruded with a couple of weeks of overtime, health stuff, and a little too much time spent on my Pen and Paper RPG. A lot of my snap Judgment reviews came from free rentals of video games, which has been one of the nifty perks from working for Blockbuster. Movies before they hit street, and free game rentals.

However some dunderheads screwed it up. They would get games right when they came out, and kept free renting for weeks, so the customers couldn't get access to games. So the new rules – only 1 game rental at a time, and only after the game is out 8 weeks. So my Snap Judgment reviews are going to slow way down... i was doing 3 or 4 game rentals at a time, but I never kept them more than a week.

So leaving that behind, I have a game I must crow about.

Frets on Fire.

Info here.

This is a Guitar Hero clone, that is a free game (Sourceforge) for the PC and Mac. There isn't any stage or characters, just the notes/neck and a few basic graphics on the side.. but the gameplay is there. There are editors out there that allow you to make the note track for the game, so you can take any song you have, and make a gameplayable song out of it. These are up for download in different places (Torrents or FoF fan sites and such). The game can import the songs from any GH song for the PS2. So you have access to all the GH games, plus fan created stuff. Lots and lots of good stuff.

The basic gameplay is that you use your keyboard for your guitar – the F1 thorugh F5 keys are your fret buttons, and the return key is your strum bar. So if you don't want to spend the money on Guitar Hero and guitar, you can play for free.

You can use your Guitar Hero (or as I understand it your Rock Band) controller with it. And yeah, it makes gameplay that much more fun. So I have a guitar borrowed from a co-worker and been playing the game. So now I can say I am a Guitar Hero nut. We are planning on getting our own Guitar Hero guitar (the wife enjoys the game and plays too), and we are going to save up for Rock Band.

One of my projects I decided on. Because I won't be doing as many snap judgement reviews (they will be down to once a month or so), and I want something to post at least weekly, I am going to choose games for each platform I have, and play games through, and post progress on said games. This also will help me focus on playing through and finishing games, rather than my normal butterfly like approach of lighting here and there for a few moments on each game. The tentative list:


NES – Legend of Zelda 2: Link
SNES – Act Raiser
Genesis – Sonic the Hedgehog
Saturn – Radiant Silvergun
PS 1 – Spyro the Dragon
PS2 – Gauntlet Dark Legacy
Xbox – Battlestar Galactica
Xbox 3600 – Bioshock.

I'll try and play at least a level or two on at least half these games each week and report.

I'm going to start each of them over, and play all the way through with the exceptions of Link and Gauntlet – I'm a bit into each of those (Link is about halfway) so I don't want to start over.

And now back to games - strappin' on the Axe and playing for the crowd.