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| january 2006 |
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this newsletter is in english only. hope you'll like it anyway! the term has started already. there is lots of homework, much to learn. introducing: GUITAR KARAOKE |
how does it work? you strap on a fake guitar and strum along as the notes on the screen flow towards you. using the right timing, you press one or several of the colored buttons on the fretboard which corresponds to the note that you see on the screen. instead of a plec, you press a bar on the body of the guitar. if you hit the note, you can hear yourself playing. otherwise it's just as if you weren't playing. the bar which is pressed as a replacement for the plec can be pressed down for downstroke and pulled up as upstroke. pull-offs and hammer-ons also seem to be possible but i haven't seen any so far. the guitar even comes with a whammy bar. best of all, you don't have to worry about the guitar getting out of tune if you work the whammy bar too hard. finally! check out the screenshot: as long as you play correctly, the crowd cheers, the rock-o-meter and the score go up. if you hit enough notes, the final verdict will be "you rock" and you are able to continue to more difficult songs. |
| the game has several modes: career, quick song and others. in the career mode you start with easy songs which you have to complete in order to unlock advanced songs. in quick song mode you can select whatever song at whatever difficulty level. |
| the selection of songs contains works by jimi hendrix, megadeth, panthera, queen, ziggy stardust, judas priest and many more. naturally the selection is of harder musical nature due to the amount of guitar contained in it. here's an official review by gamespot: http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/puzzle/guitarhero/review.html |
check out some players: (evan, kuma, sai) and finally, after months of practice and beer: |
| i was a bit sceptical at first (being able to play a real guitar and all) but after trying, it turned out to be quite entertaining (and challenging too). pieces like "cowboys in hell" by panthera and "bark at the moon" by ozzy osbourne / zakk wylde are really quite difficult to play, even on medium level. well, zakk wylde's always been been a bitch in that aspect. one of the difficulties for me was that in the lower difficulty levels, you don't have to play all the notes you hear e.g. during the solo of jimi hendrix's "spanish castle magic", you only have to play about every third note. this is feasible but e.g. the "bark at the moon" intro is a really fast one so i was trying to reproduce every note i heard instead of playing the notes that actually appeared on screen. the amount of notes do differ but not too much. just enough to throw you off. |
other activities at that party included the following activities: extreme teeth baring by alain, evil grinning by amu, hiding behind cards by kuma and playing uno - the force behind which is ryo. |
| apart from that, i bought a pair of rollerblades because i need to do sports. i really dislike jogging to start with, and jogging on asphalt is reeeaally bad for your knees so i went for the rollerblades. よろしくお願いいたします、ね。 |
i've been asked a few times why there are so few pictures of myself. the reason is actually quite simple. i'm taking pictures and often only i have a camera with me whereas others do not. also, others don't seem to be interested in taking pictures that much. well, that's it for newsletter # 13. hope you liked it. stay tuned!
chris |
the money issue |
