Jimmithy

This soundtrack has firmly placed itself in the spot of "cruising around the city late at night." I keep imagining those scenes in noir movies where people are driving in cars and the street lights pass over their faces in hard, cutting segments of very bright light and almost total blackness. I had one of those moments where "Paris" was playing in the back of my head when I fell asleep one night, only to have it pick right back up the spot where it left off when I woke up in the morning. This music is permeating me. That being said, I do agreed that the game is very solid. It satisfies a very quick and surprisingly easy-going puzzler itch, and stays compelling with an engaging aesthetic.

I was a huge fan of Wing Commander growing up, so this was a no-brainer for me. Honestly, this is a genre that is ripe for an MMO atmosphere anyway. I know Roberts even name-checked Eve Online as taking a lot of the systems of Freelancer and creating a viable MMO experience, so I'm very interested to see what direction he is going to take it.

The load times on the pc demo weren't that fantastic either. It's been a couple of days since I've played around with it, but I thought the pick-ups were live during the loading screens and you could just noodle around while the next song loaded up.

My dad was a serious guitar player when he was in college. He's mentioned a couple of times that he basically paid his way through school being a tech guitar some bands while they toured. The famous family tale is that he met my mom the summer he declined to tour with Bob Seger because he thought Seger didn't have the chops to make it. So, I was fortunate enough to learn guitar with an acoustic Guild that my dad got for himself back in the 80s. That is a very cool guitar, but my short and stump-y "Irish potato shovel" hands didn't work too well with the wide neck. I moved over to the skinnier necks for my first guitar and never look back. I currently have Fender Squire Bullet and a Yamaha F-310 for my acoustic. Both work great for my very tiny aspirations.

I actually picked up the quater-inch-to-usb cable last year when the game was released for consoles, for recording purposes. Aaaaaand because it was just cool and fun. When the demo became available on Steam I went ahead and downloaded it right away, because I might as well. I've already done the hard part by getting the peripheral. I only played around with it a little bit before Borderlands 2 started taking over my life, but it was very responsive and set really easy to obtain goals. I know this whole game reeks of the gamification of learning guitar, and honestly I'm not a huge advocate of gamification in general, but for some reason this really started to click for me. I'll probably end up picking up the full copy soon so I can really play around with it and see what kind of music it can really handle.