I’ve finally gotten around to playing Rockband2, and I’m surprised by how much I like it. I haven’t played drums or bass yet and have only played with two people so far (I’m waiting on the guitar hero band kit).

Song Selection
In every set there’s been at least on song that excited me. I can proudly say that one of them was Livin’ on a Prayer, because that’s karaoke GOLD. Equally, there have been a couple that I hated, but that’s good diversity, I imagine.

World Tour Mode
This is all I’ve done so far, and I like the way it’s organized. It’s not at linear as guitar Hero (I never played the first rock band, so I don’t know how it compares). I like the option to jump all over the continent playing different shows, but I suppose that’s a little unrealistic. You seem to have more options regarding your tour: who to hire (which reminds me of the crew in Need For Speed Carbon) whether or not to play 4x or nothing shows or to play benefit shows.

Gameplay
My favorite feature of the game play is the stars filling up on screen while you play. In Guitar Hero it was a bit of a crap shoot; you didn’t know your star rating until you finished. I also like the separated solo sections within songs and the solo rating. The ability to save a band member is also nice, and better than the star power option in Guitar Hero. Again, these might be features from the first Rockband which I didn’t play.

Details
The character options aren’t stellar, but they are present. Making a rocker that looks like you, or the rock star you wish to be is better than picking one of Guitar Hero’s generics. As I continue to play, it seems that more customization options will become available through clothing and accessories.

I’ll keep doing the tour mode before investigating anything else, but you can color me impressed so far. The plan for tonight is to download some songs, which I believe I can incorporate into my tour set lists.

First Impressions take place in the first hour of playing a game. These list the excitement (or disappointments) felt initially. It’s like unboxing, but with gameplay instead. Ungaming? That doesn’t sound right…

Ok, you may think that it’s a very easy game that’s impossible to suck at. This post is not for you. If you’ve played and keep getting insulted by the King of All Cosmos as he abuses you, here are a couple of tips.

1. Non-stop Rolling.
Try to never stop moving. even if you are rolling up little things, it’s better than rolling up nothing. Aim for always hearing the pluck of new items on your Katamari.

2. Find a Path.
If you do a Prince Look, you will often see that the level is laid out in a pattern or path. Once you understand the paths, you don’t need to prince look to find them every time.

3. Stay in Your League
Try to stay around things you can pick up. Don’t wander too far away where everything knocks you around. You’ll loose a lot of time, and possibly shrink your Katamari in the meantime.

4. Look for Hidden Spaces.
Often there are doors that open to reveal a hidden space filled with things to roll. (In Beautiful Katamari, there’s a room filled with gold bars or Xboxes.) When rolling outside, look for shops or restaurants you can enter. Usually they are packed with easy to roll items. These places make the difference in growing your Katamari and completing your collection.

5. If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try Again
Familiarity with the level is a huge bonus in Katamari. Once you are familiar, you know what you can roll up and when, so you can have a mental game plan about which areas to tackle first. For example, in indoor levels, I try to stay on tables or shelves as long as possible, because items are often bigger and closer together than on the wide open floor. And, once on the floor it’s hard to tell where you are and what’s around you without taking the time to Prince Look.

If you’ve been playing Kingdom Hearts since 2003 this post is not for you. If you picked up Birth By Sleep on a whim for your PSP and you’re finding it tough, here are a few tips:

1. Meld. Meld again. And then meld again.
It may not seem important as you play, but when it comes to boss time, you’ll be sorry if you didn’t. The meld list is very long too. You may want to buy a strategy guide or looks online, like here so you know what makes what. That way you won’t waste a bunch of leveled up spells.

2. Backtrack.
If you seem stuck at a certain point, backtrack to the places you’ve already been. It can feel like a waste of time, but you will find things you missed and level up as you go.

3. Command board.
It’s weird. There’s no reason to have a board game in the middle of an rpg. They could have made everything easier to get in the main game and not had a command board, but they didn’t. So use it. It’s an alright distraction from the regular game play and can help you level up.

4. Stay in touch with the story.
You can mostly go where you want and do what you want in this game. For this reason, it can be hard to keep up with what is happening. Notice the battle levels on the different worlds as they open. You don’t have to do them in difficulty order, but it’s not a bad idea. The fights will gradually get harder, and the storyline will more logically progress.

5. Take notes.

There’s enough spells, abilities, and items to keep up with that you may want to take notes. I had a group of pages for each character as I played, and my organization got a little better with each play-through. I used a steno notebook because it’s already formatted for columns. Some may feel that taking notes for a game is too much like work, but its quicker, in my opinion, than having to constantly refer to the guide book or in-game menus.

The inherent flaw/advantage in Birth by Sleep is that you will play the game three times. Each time you play, it’s gets a bit easier, but also a little more boring.

As my previous (or next, depending on how you read these) post indicated, I’ve got a lot of things planned for this year. Some of them involve gaming and my gaming lounge, some don’t. Because it is mostly for my benefit, the list can be found after the jump.

MINIMALIST GAME COVERS
A super classy, meticulously edited collection of minimalist covers for my entire gaming collection.

WALL ART FOR MY HOME
I know I want a roller coaster theme in my bedroom, because we went to Cedar Point for our honeymoon. I’d like to create something for the gaming loft too but I dunno what, and then I need to hang all the stuff I already have.

DESIGN T-SHIRTS
Something I’ve always wanted to do, and with the help of CafePress it might just be possible.

PHOTO ALBUM of GREETING CARDS
I want to make an archive of all the cards I have, some from childhood still but mostly from my wedding. I’d like to take a photo of the outside and inside of all of them, and then… throw them away! but keep the memories safe in some gigantic digital folder of cards.

SLIPCOVERS FOR SECTIONAL
I’d like to make individual slip covers for each segment of my new white sectional couch, because I fear if I don’t, it won’t be white for long. But that’s hella fabric, so we’ll see.

VIDEO GAME BLANKET
In all caps it seems kinda lame, but I have plenty of video game t-shirts I’ve acquired over two years at GameStop, and because they are all too large to wear, I intend to make a “big one” sized blanket out of them to go with my “big one” sized lovesac (a foam filled bean bag the size of a three seat couch).

SKYLINE WALL CURTAIN
Even though I want to make new covers for my cases to make them more appealing, my old plan to deal with this was a full length curtain on a track. For the fabric, I’m actually using a shower curtain…. it’s a really nice looking shower curtain, I promise. It’s going to take three of them, and I sill have to add fabric to it to make it long enough. But! the shower curtains were only 15 each for essentially 2 yards of fabric, which is rather affordable for the type of print they are.

FINISH PAINTING MY HOME
Just a two story living room and a loft left. Can’t decide whether to rent scaffolding or just pay someone to do it for me. I’ll probably go with scaffolding, even though the thought of it makes me very tired.

BUILD A STAND FOR MY FRIDGE
It leans forward.

BUILD A TOP FOR GRANDMA’S TRASHCAN
It’s broken and a replacement trashcan costs $250!

FINALLY FINISH CLEANING OUT CLOSETS
My father dropped of the entire material contents of my life one random day shortly after I got married. Filtering through the last 24 years has be daunting.

ENJOY MY HOUSE THEN SELL IT.
Shortly after I get all this together, it’ll be time to sell and move on to the next house. Hopefully all the hard work will amount to extra money!

also, in terms of less tangible things:
LEARN JAPANESE ALREADY
There are two alphabets and thousands of Kanji… something that can’t be mastered as casually as I pretend. I have the resources, but I need the time and dedication.

LEARN GUITAR ALREADY
I mean, I can play guitar, but at a very mediocre level. I’d like to practice more and start learning tabs again. I once knew how to tab “Tears in Heaven,” some of “Layla” and snippets of other popular things.

 YOU KNOW, GET A JOB
Given my list, I would prefer to not have a job and work on all these creative things but I’d like a million dollars too, and I don’t think I’m getting that either. Maybe one of these endeavors will get me a job, but I’ve got to keep looking just in case.

I believe it was Pablo Picasso that said ” good artists copy; great artists steal.” I am but a good artist, because I will only be copying an idea of this guy. He (she? I don’t really know) has created a fun series of minimalist images to go with some popular movies and games. Because a lot of current cover art tries to throw the kitchen sink in, these simple, iconic versions gave me an idea. The visual clutter that is my gaming shelf has always been a problem. Even when it’s clean, it looks sort of messy because of all the random colors. If I were to use covers like lbo’s, I could get a nice uniform look, and swap mine so I could see the originals when I open the cases. The only problem? That is easily 100 cases that need iconic designs and a lot of ink to print them…

I have a bad habit of creating too many projects at once. And they all feel necessary.

Rather, I like it, as I have yet to beat it. It is another fun and upbeat game, predictably on Nintendo Wii, but made by THQ and soon arriving with a sequel that will be on a few different systems. It’s sort of a cheesy re-hashing of a classic plot, but there’s something catchy about it.

The use of sound in the game may be the reason I enjoy it so much. It starts silent, then as you add color, the music goes from simple beats to a crazy jamming party. I haven’t heard much about deBlob 2 but I’m interested to see if the game has the same feel when played with an average controller. And by the way, blob is green on the 360 cover, red on the PS3 cover and blue on the Wii cover. Colors are fun!

Its seems like once a game gets popular enough, they hand it over to a team of 13 year old boys. This was the case with great franchises such as Tony Hawk, SSX, and Guitar Hero.Why don’t these games grow and age with the people playing them, instead of getting stuck in a teenage wasteland? Some parallels can be made to various companies who seem to exploit a certain title or series (nintendo, final fantasy) but they manage to balance the level of exposure and demand with the level of quality. And i think you can tell just by looking at the box art.

The ones on the left? Pretty nice! The ones on the right? They get a little lazy, I think, and not lazy in an awesome way, lazy in a “we never replaced this makeshift cover art but that’s ok” kinda of way. But you know, I don’t expect much of Activision these days. Nothing classy anyway. Nothing, let me repeat, like this.

Back in simpler times, when you bought a game you were just buying that game. Sometimes that’s still true, but more often the content is dependent on things you can’t control. With a game like MAG you know you are paying for just the online mode, but you don’t control the servers. I’ve always been cautious of games like this because if the servers are shut down or malfunction, I don’t get to enjoy the experience that I paid for. It’s like buying the tickets to an amusement park, but when you get inside all the rides are closed.

This analogy also explain the feeling you get when games like Black Ops suffer from online inadequacies.You get into the amusement park, but only three rides are running, there’s a huge line and when you get on the ride, it’s going way slower than it should and actually, it just isn’t fun at all. So even though the concession stand and the merry-go-round are doing everything they are supposed to, you didn’t pay $60 for a merry-go-round. That’s only worth about $20. In this scenario, the merry-go-round is the story mode for Call of Duty. I avoid buying a game based on it’s online content because I don’t want to be stuck with the merry-go-round instead of the roller coaster.