Today I finally finished the hard drum tour on Rock Band. I have been on it for a while and not playing it very much due to my addiction to playing the guitar on the game, but when I do play the drums, I get through a good few songs. The last time I played the drums, I got to "Go with the flow" by Queens of the Stone Age and then got stuck, although I only tried it twice. Last night, I was playing it and passed with two more tries at it and then I played on until I got to the last tier of songs, and then I turned it off. Today, I got the whole hard tour finished, with Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" as the last song I played, and surprisingly, it only took me three attempts. It felt great to get the tour done and now I am onto expert, although it should prove to be a much harder challenge.

Aside from that, I played the first mission in Battlefield: Bad Company yesterday, and I liked it. The mission was very long, which is good because there are only seven missions in the game, as far as I can tell anyway. Blowing up pretty much everything is fun, and even if it does wear off which I know it will, I liked it yesterday. The controls are a bit werid to get used to, but they are alright once you have played it for a little while. I might play some more tonight, I don't know.

I checked earlier today and Condemned is on its way to me in the mail, it should be here on Monday. I have had this on my list for ages now as I love the look of the second one, but didn't want to play it without playing the first one, so I put it on my rental list and now it's finally coming to me. I am looking forward to it and have added the second one to my rental list now.

Right, I am heading away now to watch The Sopranos, which is awesome by the way, if you like mafia films/television, of which I am a big fan

I switched my package with my online rental site to just 1 disc at a time, unlimited discs a month. My first 1 disc at a time was Turok on the 360. I didn't have high expectations of the game going in, and rightly so, it isn't a technically good game. However, for some unknown reason I enjoyed the game. It wasn't a 'good game', but there was something awesome about stabbing raptors in the head, a lot. The shooting wasn't great, but using the bow and arrow was kind of cool. It was a mindless first person shooter/stabber, and I liked it for that reason.

Anyways, I sent that off this morning and when I got in, there was a new game waiting for me. It turns out because I rate the games on the site after I finish them, they have given me an extra disc for the moment, and that disc is Battlefield Bad Company, which is awesome. I didn't like the demo, but after the great reviews from both websites and community, I decided to give it a rent. I am a little surprised I got it this early as usually I get old games that nobody wants to play before I get the likes of this, but this is cool. I haven't started it yet, I will do that later in the day.

In addition to watching all of the E3 coverage and playing Turok, I have also been downloading and playing on Rock Band. I downloaded the entire The Who pack for 1600 MS points and I am glad I did. There are 12 songs in the pack and some are cIassics, although some are not but they turned out to be good and fun to play anyways so that's great. I recommend that anybody who likes The Who, downloads this pack, if you have the spare points lying around.

I must go now, I have some games to be played!

This is just a quick blog to express my happiness at the fact that the Guitar Hero World Tour guys just announced that the Rock Band drums and even Rock Band guitar will work with Guitar Hero World Tour, which is pretty much the best I could of hoped for. This means I can get Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour without spending a load of money again, which is obviously great news.

Yeah, I might blog more on E3, but I am sure you people have heard all this great news already, and probably too much. Let's just say, I have been watching a lot of E3 coverage, and it's been great.

Gaming is an expensive hobby; it always has been and always will be. Most of us were children when getting our first consoles and games, which meant we had to rely on our parents getting us our games and they would often inform us "Games are too expensive!" That was then though and compared to now, they were not expensive. Just one of things that make games so expensive is the evolution of the music-rhythm game genre.

This crazy gaming genre arrived back in 1999 when Konami released its arcade games GuitarFreaks and DrumMania, both of which involved using controllers shaped around musical instruments to play a rhythm game based around music. This was the start of something huge as in 2005, Red Octane and Harmonix released Guitar Hero which sparked something very special, but very expensive!

What Harmonix and Red Octane didn't know is that many people would fall in love with their very addictive product. Harmonix had managed to create a game that was based around Konami's arcade games of 1999 but made it so fun and so easy to pick up and play that it attracted gamers and non-gamers alike. As any successful game in this age, a sequel was made and eventually publisher giants Activision bought publishers Red Octane and gained a new but very successful series to add to their already impressive line up. With this, Harmonix split off and joined with MTV and created a new game, the multi-instrument edition, Rock Band.

Now, Activision are releasing sequels and expansions to Guitar Hero every few months while Harmonix announces a Rock Band 2. So, where is the money problem? The problem arises when you think about the quantity of plastic controllers that you have to buy in order to play these games. Of course you don't have to buy the controllers every time one of these games comes out but some do. The full Rock Band bundle includes a guitar controller, a drum controller and a microphone and costs a pretty penny to buy. Rock Band only came out in November in the US and May in Europe and already a second one has been announced and is to be expected in the fall. There will be more controllers to buy this time round and many people might, although there should be no need to.

To add to this, Activision has announced Guitar Hero: World Tour, which is basically the same as Rock Band in the sense of its more than just guitar now, despite "Guitar" still being in the title. There is a whole new drum kit controller and of course a new guitar controller. The main problem is that the two publishers are not working together to make controllers compatible with each other's games, which means there could be a massive hole in your wallet or purse if you are a fanatic of the genre and want to play both games on more than just guitar. To add to this even more, Konami has decided to jump into the console rhythm market too with Rock Revolution, which again features multiple instruments.

How long is the genre going to continue to grow like this? How many times are we going to have to buy these expensive bundles just to enjoy a game to its fullest? There is strong reason to believe that this genre will just get even more insane as it's managed to grow so fast in a relatively short period of time. These companies are always going to keep outdoing each other with the next best thing and the only ones that suffer are the consumers who are too addicted to this genre to skip these games.

To anybody who doesn't play a lot of the genre, you may be wondering what is so addictive that makes players crazy enough to buy all of this, over and over. Well, it is simply because they offer fun, great and addictive gameplay both single player and multiplayer. The best thing about Rock Band is getting a group of friends together and going crazy. It is reminiscent of the old days where friends would get together and play 4-player splitscreen and have a ball of a time. It can provide many nights entertainment, even if your friends don't play games very often. It can be so much fun, even on your on, which is why many people keep buying all of this hardware. It might be a lot of hardware, but at the end of the day, it's totally worth it!

It's easy to see why gaming is more expensive these days compared to several years ago, especially if you are a big fan of the music-rhythm genre. With constant sequels and even more newcomers, there is an almost constant stream of these games being released, which is great because there is more fun to be had, but just keep an eye on your wallet before it decides to attack you because of serious abuse!

It arrived today. I installed the extra 2GB of RAM so that's me up to 4GB of RAM, and also removed one of my hard drives from my last PC to this one and everything is working great. I have been sorting out everything and getting all of my programs installed again so I haven't tested any games yet. Speaking of games, I got a free game with the PC, which I wasn't aware of. The game is Tomb Raider Anniversary, which is pretty cool I guess.

I need to test out what I can run though, so at this moment in time I am downloading the Crysis demo and seeing what this thing can do. I will then possibly buy some more games that I have been interested in, but never could run. Also, I realized that I only have Civilization 4 on it's own with no expansion packs and I looked at getting them, but it worked out cheaper to buy the complete box with both expansion packs and the original game, so I ordered that I love Civilization 4, I can't wait to get back into it.

Other than that, I finished Stranglehold today. There are still a few achievements that I can probably get so I will do that tomorrow and then get that sent back. It's about time since I have had the same 3 games for quite some time now, so it will be good to get another rental in soon.

Right, I am going to go back and try and get other programs sorted and some other files too.

I ordered my new PC on Monday. I have been checking up and it has now been packed and sent off. I hope to get it on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest as the site promises next-day delivery, although it is Sunday tomorrow so no post. Anyways, I ordered a mid-range PC, nothing too fancy because I simply don't have the money for anything very high end at the moment. Here are some specs for anybody that cares:

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ 2.40GHz (Socket AM2)
- Asus M2N-SLi Deluxe (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
- GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (I ordered another 2GB to add)
- Pioneer DVR-215DBK 20x DVD±RW IDE Dual Layer Lightscribe ReWriter (Black)
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
- Western Digital 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache

I am not paying an awful lot for it so I am happy with it, it should run what I need it to and if it doesn't, I can always buy new parts if I need to, but I shouldn't do for a while.

So yeah, other than that, I haven't been up to much. I have been looking for a summer job but I am having no such luck at the moment, nobody seems to be hiring around my area. I have been playing some games while looking though, and they mainly consist of Rock Band and Lego Star Wars. I actually am finished with Lego Star Wars now and have wrote a review for it, check it out and leave a comment if you wish, good or bad, I don't mind.

So I have sent back Lego Star Wars now, and have also sent back Overlord. I just don't see me playing Overlord again anytime soon. If I have a desire to go and play it again, I will just add it back onto the rental list, but I don't see that happening, at least not anytime soon. I still have Stranglehold to play anyway, which I haven't really made too much progress in, it's alright so far but it's pretty boring once you get past the excitement of the gunplay and realize it's more shallow than you first thought it was. I think I will get it completed though, I hope.