Hello there! For reasons that are probably obvious to most of you, I'm not going to continue posting to this blog. If you'd like to keep up with me, I can be found at the following address:

http://blog.jeffgerstmann.net/

If you are after things like "what Jeff thinks about games or music or movies or gas prices" or "points-related video," it will appear on this new personal site for now.

So, yeah, wow. Rock Band. While I've certainly seen it before and had a handful of chances to play it, there's nothing quite like getting it home and being able to put it through its paces without the watchful eyes of your peers or game company representatives making sure you aren't sucking at it.

As planned, I've been sticking to the drums, starting on easy, and working my way through. Don't forget to calibrate your set. While I play Guitar Hero with no offset on my LCD screen, Rock Band seems to think I'm about 30 milliseconds ahead or behind, I can't really tell which. Either way, after calibrating, my 90% finishes started going up to 96 or 98%.

It's tough to play drums because I'm used to using the drums to keep time. But now I'm keeping time, and that's weird. While I've thumped out beats on a drum machine before, sticks anda foot pedal are way, way different. I think I understand why so many drummers can't seem to get through a song without speeding up significantly over the course of a song. It's that feeling of knowing what you're supposed to hit next, but you have to restrain yourself and hit it at the right time. It's easy to get ahead of yourself, I guess. And everyone else in the band is playing to your time-keeping, so if you speed up, they speed up with you and the whole song sounds sloppy.

Rock Band doesn't do that, obviously, but it'd be pretty cool if it did. Maybe have the players speed up and slow down to your tempo, then judge how well you stayed in time, as well as how accurately you hit the right pads or something? That's probably asking a bit much, I guess.

After two hours of drumming, I now have twoblisters on my left pinky. Nintendo's always been super wary of anything that causes blisters (remember that Mario Party glove?), but Rock Band doesn't seem to care. Actually, maybe there's something deep in the manual about it, but there's no big goofy health screen or flyer in the box that says "WEAR GLOVES WHILE PLAYING, DON'T BE A FOOL." Maybe they realize that drumming in gloves is for punks.

A few more scattered things;

- The cover of Jukebox Hero is pretty good.

- The standard Xbox Live Marketplace menus are an awful way to buy downloadable tracks. They need to patch in some sort of in-game store, pronto. There are already too many things available to download for the stanard presentation to handle, and with more stuff coming every week, it's going to become impossible to deal with.

- My hardware works, though I can feel the bass pedal bend a bit when I hit it. As I get better at the game and start using the pedal more and more forcefully, I'm worried that it'll snap. But not so worried that I'll spend any time trying to strap any metal pieces to it or anything like that.

- While I like Guitar Hero III, I'm having a hard time seeing myself going back to it, partially because I like the Rock Band guitar so much. Maybe Activision will eventually cave in and patch in support for the Rock Band guitar.

- I need to start reading up on software that converts USB gamepad button presses into MIDI signals so I can wire up the drum kit to my PC and use it as a cheap set of V-Drums.

-I think I'm probably going to spend most of my Thanksgiving break behind a set of fake drums.

- Playing bass is also awesome.

- This game needs an online version of Band World Tour. I feel like I'm missing out on the game's most dynamic mode just because outside of the people I work with, none of my friends will ever be any good at any aspect of this game.

I was in a Best Buy the other night and they had knocked $20 off of the Legendary Edition version of Halo 3 and $10 off the Limited Edition. They had stacks and rows of helmets on sale.

Needless to say, I sort of feel like a sucker every time I look at my helmet now. Mine's still on a shelf in my bedroom, watching me sleep and silently cursing my name as I play other, non-Halo shooters.

So if you bought one, where's your helmet now? How do you feel about owning it these days?

...and this sentence sums up why.

"Developed by acclaimed developer, Gearbox Software, Samba De Amigo will be exclusively available for the Wii in spring 2008."

This is not me doubting that Gearbox can make a good Samba de Amigo game. This is me thinking it's really out of left-field that the developer that brought you Brothers in Arms, the Halo port for PC, and the announcement that they may, someday, if they get around to it, make a Heat game is working on an update of a maracas-shaking rhythm game originally made by Sonic Team for the Dreamcast. Starring a monkey.

Totally natural fit for the Wii, so I'm pretty excited. Samba's one of the reasons why I still occasionally hook up my Dreamcast.

Dear Nintendo,

This is quite possibly the most complete game design doc I have ever read:

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=25950789&page=0

It simply doesn't get any clearer than that first post there.

Please make this game. Thank you

This week's games are Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels and Sin & Punishment. The first game eventually found its way to the US as part of that Super Mario All-Stars collection that came out on the SNES, but it's the game that the Japanese know as Super Mario Bros. 2. It's pretty tough. Sin & Punishment is a late-model N64 shooter that has things in common with games like Space Harrier and Panzer Dragoon. I have fond memories of it due to getting the import, but it never received a US release. It's totally awesome that we're finally seeing games that didn't come out in this country and I hope we see more of it.

Actually, now that S&P is out, I'm hoping that we'll start seeing games that were never actually released at all. At the last SpaceWorld convention, Nintendo showed an underwater tank game for the N64 called Echo Delta. I didn't get to spend much time with it, but it certainly seemed rad. It was scheduled to be released and the game looked mostly complete... but it got canned. It'd be super rad if Nintendo dug up the game, did whatever it needed to be fully finished, and released it.

http://www.cnettv.com/

I'll be on CNET's live internet show today at 1PM Pacific to discuss the Halo 3. Tune in!

The office's Xbox 360 Elite just died today. Pretty crazy, and not at all a red ring error. Was loading upa game, and all of a sudden a sound starting coming out of the system that made it sound like it was grinding the disc into a million pieces, or at least putting a deep gouge into the bottom of the disc. I freaked out and popped the drive, the disc was still spinning in the tray. After putting it back it, it started to grind again, then a quiet whirring noise, then silence.

The drive's totally dead. Now it just whirs and makes a bit of a beeping noise and lists any disc I put in it as "unplayable." I went ahead and filed a regular support claim with Microsoft, mostly because I'm curious to see how long it takes to fix. Some people are reporting as much as a two-month turnaround on busted consoles these days, which is totally nuts.

Halo 3 Review, Short Version:

From Bungie's 9/14 Weekly Update:

The only sounds (during Campaign playthroughs) were the occasional curse as a Jackal sniper ended a battle. Otherwise it was eerie silence. It's scary for us because we can't tell what they're thinking. The groups of journalists got on very well, in spite of working for rival publications -and played a ton of co-op, multiplayer and Forge. Campaign scoring seemed very popular and I can say that some of the press are total achievement whores. A small group came back after they were theoretically done, to go through co-op on Legendary because they were missing one scoring item they felt they could unlock.

Total achievement whores? I have no idea who he could be talking about.

Expect to see reviews landing on just about every review source you can think of on 9/23. And stop sending me Xbox Live messages about the game, I think the thing I had to sign means they can set everything I own on fire if I talk about it.

So I finally got around to investigating this whole "pre-order Halo 3 at 7-11" thing that some locations are advertising, and it doesn't seem like it's going to be quite that simple. At least not just yet. The guys behind the counter weren't any help at all. The older one looked at me like I had just landed from space. The younger one quickly rushed over once he realized what I was asking about and mumbled something about how they had no idea how it was all working because "the guy hadn't shown up to tell them how to do it" or something to that effect, and that I should try back ina few days.

You know, you'd think they'd get that sort of stuff squared away before putting the poster up.

Anyway, I gave up on it and pre-ordered from an online retailer, and, like a total sucker, I pre-ordered the Legendary edition. I'm surprised that places are still taking pre-orders for it, seeing as how it's supposed to actually be a somewhat-limited item. Maybe even the rabid Halo fanbase isn't falling for this. Seriously, after shipping, $160 for one game? One game that doesn't come with any peripherals or rock guitars or anything? I might just cancel it and go with the regular limited edition, I don't know. Even though it's not big enough to wear, I just don't really have room for a silly little helmet around here.

So I might be imagining things, but I have a feeling that the new online version of Tekken might not be wired up for cross-region play. I've had the Japanese version installed for some time now, but it's only giving me Japanese players. I would think that there'd be a lot more low-ranking US games up and running right about now.

I've done what any sensible person would do: I've dropped 30 more bucks on the US version of the game, and now I'm downloading that. Unfortunately, it won't let you have both versions installed at the same time. On the upside, that gives me hope that all the money I've earned and costume parts I've purchased will carry over to the US version. That'd be nice. Hwoarang without his silly-ass cowboy hat is hardly Hwoarang at all! At least I'll be able to actually read what all the costume parts are now...

And dude, is it just me, or did the PlayStation Store go from zero to 60 over the course of, like, three days? Between Warhawk, Tekken Online, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, the Sony download store looks...

A) Pretty radical.

B) Pretty different from Xbox Live Arcade.

Between Tekken being out in the US now (better connections with closer opponents) and Warhawk, I suspect my PS3 is going to be getting a lot more use from here on out. Though I still prefer the 360 version of Puzzle Fighter because, you know, points? Broke 45k last night, by the way. Streets of Rage 2 is easy.

OK, now that that'sout of the way...

Full text and video reviewcoming on Monday. I will make no guarantees about the nature of that review because for some people (total jerks), saying "THIS GAME HAS WATER" could be considered a spoiler.

Blog entry on how anyone who has ever said "I AM STAYING OFF THE INTERNET TO AVOID SPOILERS FOR " is a bad person coming soon!

The best part about owning a newer, faster PC: I can render these goofy videos in like four minutes, instead of the 45-60 minutes it took on my old machine.

I've abandoned this blog as of late, because I'm spending a bunch of my at-home hours moving files and hardware from my old PC to my new one. But I'm just about done, so that's pretty nice. Just need to get this video camera wired up, then maybe we can have us a chat about some points!

And by points I guess I really mean Garry's Mod, Picross DS, and Tekken Online, which are the three games totally dominating the rest of my spare gamin' time.

So I'm messing around with my 360voice profile a bit to make sure it lists all the games I actually own, right? As part of that, I have to pop in my NHL 2K6 disc. I left it running for a bit, and when it got to the demo, it just totally locked up. During the demo! Totally sweet.

Anyway, some people have been asking about a points report, and yeah, I'll probably get one going next week, but I probably won't talk about E3 very much at all. Between the podcast, On the Spot, our gut reactions piece, and our E3 awards, I think I've said everything that I'd have to say about E3, really.

Burnout: Paradise
Call of Duty 4
Killzone 2
Rock Band
Unreal Tournament 3
littlebigplanet
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Echochrome
a new PSP
a new PC
World in Conflict
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Guitar Hero III
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground
The Simpsons Game
Super Mario Galaxy
SingStar
Virtua Fighter 5
BioShock
Everyday Shooter

A: When you're trying to pack for E3.

Q: When is the exact wrong time to crack open your copy of Puzzle Quest and get totally hooked on it?

So now the Xbox 360 version of Virtua Fighter 5 is going online, joining Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on the PS3, which will also receive an online update later this year. That's pretty cool. But will it work well enough to matter?

It seems like every time you talked to anyone involved with either series, and the question of online came up, they'd always sort of claim that it'd never work out well enough to meet their high standards or something. You'd see a lot of quotes like "we're focusing on the single-player experience" or something, which never makes much sense when you're talking about a fighting game.

So what happened? Well, online gaming sort of keeps blowing up, for one. For another, other fighting games, like DOA4 and the retro releases on the Xbox 360 and PS3, have gone online with varying levels of success. Have they been perfect? Heck no, but they've certainly been playable. At some point, I guess, the Tekken and VF developers must have realized that the bandwidth situation isn't going to suddenly skyrocket and allow them to offer zero-latency games, so they're making do with what we've got.

It's pretty exciting, but at the same time, it's all probably going to come down to how much lag you're willing to put up with. For the religious zealots of the Virtua Fighter world, any lag is probably too much lag. For the rest of us, though, it should work out just fine.