Holy crap.

Has it been a year?  Already?  To be perfectly honest, when I started this, I had only a small expectation that it would make it a full year.  Typically I give up on personal pet projects much sooner than that, often tossing them aside for some other lofty and typically unreachable goal given my total lack of free time.

And yet, here we are.  It feels pretty good to know that not only has this worked out, but that I feel like I’ve got at least another year’s worth of this in me.  Who knows, mabye I can keep this up indefinitely.  But enough of the crazy talk.

Like all anniversary posts everywhere, I’m going to throw some stats up here, because I’m pretty proud of these.  I didn’t give myself any real goals when I started this, only that I dreamed it would be pretty killer to have a million visitors in my first year, and while I don’t think I quite hit that mark, I’m proud as hell about these stats.

• Pageviews:  1,057,440
• Posts: 174
• Comments:  965
• RSS Subscribers:  233

I wanted to say thanks to all the folks who’ve linked here, posted pieces to digg/stumble/reddit, read, and/or commented in the past year.  Sometimes, just your love of the site or an insightful or heartfelt comment is enough to make the attention whore part of me want to keep posting when I feel like I have “more important” things to be doing.  So thank you, from the cerebral part of me who doesn’t mind being goaded on once in awhile by a few excitement pheremones.

Here’s to what was an incredible year, and I’m looking forward to next year already.

/toast

Of course, I suppose I should spruce the place up a bit.  This design is so 2007.

Keith Stuart posted what comes off as a little bit of a defensive post in favor of Mirror’s Edge regarding some reviews of it (or really at least just IGN’s) which he claims are overlooking the “innovation” that ME brings to the table.

First off, I don’t know what he’s getting so upset over.  It’s not like he worked on it (or did he?).  I’ve seen games that I’ve worked on for years (ones that caused me to abandon my family for months at a time) get ripped apart by shallow callous reviewers, and I had to bite my tongue and take it.  Sure, I would have loved to have gone on the internets and registered my righteous indignation at the reviewer, but to what end?  It wouldn’t move any more units; it wouldn’t convince anyone to buy the game.

Second, I don’t really think that Mirror’s Edge is all that innovative.  After all, someone beat them to market with a mod of Crysis that ostensibly covers their core navigation mechanic.  But more importantly, Stuart makes some heavy-handed comparisons, putting Mirror’s Edge and films like Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and The Magnificent Ambersons in good company.  

Can you imagine, for a second, critics emerging from the press screening of Apocalypse Now, or The Magnificent Ambersons, or Bladerunner and proclaiming, ‘yeah, it had some good ideas, but it wasn’t perfect – I’ll look forward to the sequel’.

Allow me to pull out my LLoyd Bentsen misquote right off the bat, and say that Mirror’s Edge, sir, is no Blade Runner.  It’s not even in the same league, let alone ballpark, as Apocalypse Now.  And more to the point, I think he pretty much makes his own counter-argument by claiming that fictional reviewers might look forward to sequels to films that were never considered for sequels.  The films never made enough money or interest to merit one, regardless if their plots or creators ever deemed a sequel necessary or worthy. 

Apocalypse Now has made in its lifetime $82 million.  Most movies nowadays, especially the innovative ones, cost more money than that just to make.  Blade Runner worldwide made just $32 million.  Pan’s Labrynth is $83 million.  For comparison with some more “mainstream” films (some would say just as innovative), Star Wars (just A New Hope) has made $775 million in its lifetime.  The Matrix has made $460 million.  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, easily the worst and least innovative of the Indy movies, has done $786 million worldwide alone.

The point in pointing out these numbers, since we’re throwing out analogies to films and videogame innovation, is that it seems that no matter how well a movie is interpreted as “innovative” by a reviewer, the truest mark of success lies in its ability to inure itself with the consumer.

However, I wonder, what is Stuart really after here?  Okay, I’ll give.  Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that Mirror’s Edge really is all that.  Let’s say it is just as good as a Pan’s Labrynth or an Eraserhead.

Shoudln’t that mean it is reviewed and received at the “box office” just as well?  None of the movies Stuart lists can be considered a box office smash by any means.  In fact, if we look back at the “Clover” era of gaming, all of which were given the “innovative” nods in their reviews, we’ll see a whole lotta flop.

Okami, Viewtiful Joe, and Godhand, were all for the most part failures at the “box office.”  Okami and Viewtiful Joe were both received very well by reviewers (93 and 90 Metacritics respectively), one enough to spawn an ill fated sequel, but in the end it wasn’t enough to keep the studio open.  Because nobody bought the games.

And that’s because no matter how much a reviewer cares about innovation, the general consumer public does not.  And before everyone throws out anecdotal evidence to the contrary, keep in mind that if you’re reading this website then you are not the general consumer public.  A good review, even the most shining one will never be enough to convince people to go buy innovation.  The market has already proven this.

What convinces the market to buy a title is the general “verve” a product has.  From marketing, to buzzworthiness, to “attach rates,” to simple peer or forum discussion.  Reviews hardly ever come into play.  Gerstman’s 6.whatever review of Kane and Lynch (and the overall Metacritic rating of 65) didn’t stop it from selling well over a million units.  We can always trot out the Enter the Matrix example, where the general Metacritic of 62 didn’t stop it from selling ahead of four million units (or was it six?).  We’ve already visited examples of well received games that didn’t even make enough money to keep a company afloat.

So we can plainly see that even if reviewers can see the innovation (and let’s be fair, there isn’t that much innovation in Mirror’s Edge other than a change of camera), it really just doesn’t matter.  

The game, no matter how innovative, won’t be served by getting a better review, because in the end, it’s the consumer who dictates if a game is worthy of a sequel.  Not the reviewer.

Or if you’re into world domination, y’know, either or.  I’m merely here to provide a service for all of your dictatorship needs.

There’s even a black version in case you needed it for a more formal engagement or something.  Okay good lord I need to stop clicking on stuff on this website.  There’s also the makings of a super creepy version of that alien spy bounty hunter (Garindan) who tells the Stormtroopers where the Millenium Falcon is stationed at on Tattoine.

Hat tip to commenter primal_80s, from the original post on We’re All Doomed.

Apologies that the posts haven’t been coming lately.  I hope you can understand.  I’ve been playing Fallout3.  A lot.  Like, every possible moment I can.  It is, in a way, the ultimate culmination of some of my gaming favorites.  It’s quite possibly the peanut butter/chocolate combination of my American RPG favorites, so hopefully this will be the first of a three part series this week about teh Fallouts.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest Fallout fan on the planet.  I’ve only previously played Fallout 2 until it became impossible to play any further due to a bug in the 1.0 version of the game (I’d come to find out that the 1.0 version was impossible to finish even if I didn’t hit the following bug).  The 1.1 patch made 1.0 saves incompatible, and I wasn’t about to start over after investing over 40 hours in the game.  But I loved every minute of it.  I figured out how to play through the entire game solo mission until I got the “cursed dog” bug, where it won’t ever leave you, giving you a Luck score of 1, which makes the game pretty much unplayable.  You and the guy fighting you will never hit the broad side of a barn with a mini-gun set to full spray.  It’s that bad.  But my time invested?  Loved every minute of it.

I’m also a ginormous fan of Bethsoft’s Arena Scrolls RPGs.  I never played Arena (although I watched my wife play it a bunch), but I dove right in when Daggerfall came out, playing it until I was simply exhausted from the grind.  I played Morrowind again until I was spent, never finishing it either.  Then Oblivion hit and I played it every night ’till at least 2 am (try it with a baby on your hands sometime.  It’s like staying up ’till 5am) until I had logged about 54 hours in and wound up realizing that a thief/assassin didn’t care if the world was in peril; there’s nothing to steal and no one to kill under contract in hell.  So I retired as the world’s greatest Theifsassin and called it a day.

So, as you can imagine, when Bethesda did the press release that they had purchased the rights to Fallout, and when I learned that Oblivion’s Assassin’s Guild writer was going to be doing a larger role in Fallout3, I was pretty ecstatic.

Let me attempt to explain why.

Fallout already was steeped in debauchery.  Not only did they handle the graphic violence better than almost anyone (bloody mess perk = amazing), the Fallout series was always brutally honest about humanity.  Sure, you can be a beacon of hope if you want to.  But you can also revel in sin.  Like drugs?  Fallout has ‘em.  Like sex with prostitutes?  Hell, Fallout 2 will take it one further and let you be in a frickin’ post apocalyptic porno.  You have a sub-class of humans (ghouls) who not only symbolize every underclass in American history, but they even took the literal step of making them horrible to look at.  The player actually is forced to look past the surface if they hope to understand ghouls.  Of course, you’re welcome to hate them and murder them at will, too.  In fact, they balanced a lot of this out by making you addicted to drugs, with negative repercussions, you got a nasty venereal disease from nailing the tramps, and you lost out on any good quests/items the ghouls had by wiping them out.

While the Elder Scrolls games were never really about debauchery, I eventually stumbled upon something fairly “wrong” that made my time in their worlds as a Thiefsassin (screw the term “Rogue” I’m coining a new one here) even more compelling of an experience for me.  It all happened out of complete necessity way back in Daggerfall.

While I was wandering the wilds getting my murder and my killing on, two things happened almost simultaneously.

1. I realized I was wasting a lot of my time in game re-exploring dungeons I’d already been through because they were barren, with no dead bodies in them.
2. The game was reaping dead bodies, with loot on them or not, while leaving items dropped persistent in the world (items aren’t ever reaped.  You drop it, it stays there).

Now, being the Thiefsassin that I am, I wasn’t about to go leaving big ticket items like swords or armor in front of the exits for dungeons.  That shit is to be sold and make you big money!  And I largely ignore cups or daggers left lying about as just general detritus; how am I to remember if I left that cup on the floor or if it was one that happened to be placed there by the designers?  After a few dungeons it’s hard to remember you’ve even been to a dungeon, let alone if you’ve dropped an item there or not.

Then, a funny thing happened.  I was looting a corpse, and I accidentally removed a shirt I didn’t want from the victim.  Instead of putting it back on the victim’s body, I just cast it aside, and it appeared on the ground, neatly folded, and the victim was left bare chested.  I wondered, would this trend continue?  I grabbed the pants, and sure enough, naked legs.  I threw them on the floor (neatly folded, of course), while I yanked off the boots and threw them on the floor as well.

Suddenly, I had the solution to knowing if I’d been in a dungeon or not:  Folded clothes left everywhere.  The bodies would reap, but the clothes would remain.

But more importantly, I realized the hilarity/absurdity of the situation.  Here I was, the world’s greatest Theifsassin, killing my marks, and then taking their clothes off, and folding them neatly next to their bodies.  I began laughing out loud while I imagined what the poor victim’s families must have had to go through stumbling upon the scene:

Oh god, Gwendaline, are you okay?  Did you have too much to drink again last night?  My sweet wife, why are you–   OH GOD SHE’S DEAD.  She’s been murdered, and…wait, why is she naked? MY WIFE IS DEAD.  AND NAKED.  AND waitaminute why did he fold her clothes?

I don’t know, it’s possible I’m the only person who finds this hilarious, but it eventually became my calling card.  If I killed a victim, I put their clothes on the floor.  Even if I knew I wasn’t coming back.  It’s not enough to kill your victim.  It’s not even enough to leave a card.  Only the greatest Theifsassins leave their victims dead and humiliated.  That is the greatest card of all.

So you can imagine how delighted I was when that infamous “nude patch” came out for Oblivion.  The one that rendered the bra invisible?  My interest in it wasn’t sexual.  No, in fact, it was professional.  It was one more degree of humiliation for my victims.  If someone had made the bottom underwear also see through I would have been just as excited to leave the men nude.  I’m an equal opportunity post mortem humiliator.  I’m no misogynist Thiefsassin.  I want to shame both sexes equally.

Now, imagine my excitement when I found out that not only was Fallout3 going to be made in the Oblivion engine, but that it was going to be rated M.  Surely they were going to allow for some nudity?  I was fully expecting at least nude breasts straight out of the box.  Prostitution is practically a bullet point on the back of the box.  They’ve taken moral themes farther than any other game in history.  There’s pat/matricide.  Not only can you take drugs, you can make drugs.  Active player participated cannibalism (if you choose).  Players enslaving NPCs.  Frickin’ interactive slavery for crying out loud.  Garden variety violence no longer seems even remotely T rated in light of this title.

And yet.  They evidently were pretty sore about the ESRB fiasco over the Oblivion nude patch.

There’s no real nudity to speak of in Fallout3.  I think you can game a really blurry view of a crotch if you can find Dukov’s Place and find an upskirt view of Cherry of Fantasia in their silk teddies, but for the most part, there isn’t even side-boob.  And it’s not that I need nudity in the game.  I can surely mod it using the previous Oblivion tools to get it if I wanted (and I’ve already installed a few), but it’s downright absurd that there isn’t nudity in this game.  I’m not asking for even soft-core porn, but when I remove the armored bra from a Raider with the hope to sell it, and a giant grey sports-bra pops up in its place, covering 200% more skin than the original bra did, well, you’re really killing the immersion, and making a hilariously pointless moral stand in a game about depravity.  The bucket’s already overflowing.  Your thimble sized bail-out effort isn’t really saving anyone here.

Even the prostitution stinks.  All she does is go lay down in the bed you’ve purchased for the night, and you get to sleep next to her.  You wake up in the morning, and she leaves.  Sex isn’t even hinted at, other than an “I’m done here” voice call way.  It’s really less virtual prostitution and more like a 25th marriage anniversary simulation that you just paid 120 credits for.  Mass Effect certainly created a more titillating sex scene.  They at least showed some blue side-boob.

Now, I’ve had some folks call me a “pervert” for finding this beef with this game, but come on.  I’m not a sick bastard for enslaving people (or wanting to enslave at least the slavers?  I’m not at that point in the game yet)?  No one questions my desire for the bloody mess perk which causes my victims to spontaneously explode into a gooey mess with eyeballs flying at the camera?  Cannibalism is taken at face value somehow?  I know I’m just retreading an old straw-man here, but why is super ultra violence and moral depravity okay so long as it’s not naked?

Let’s face it:  Fallout is about a post-apocalyptic wasteland frontier.  The universe is painted with some of the most desperate souls, doing some of the most desperate acts conceivable by man.  So where the hell is the original sin?

Fallout without at least some R rated nudity/sexual themes is like the Wild West without the guns.  It’s like Vegas without gambling.  Amsterdam without the red light district.  Okay it’s like the Wild West and Vegas without the strippers and prostitution, too.  The fact that Fallout’s missing one of the pillars of debauchery is inexcuseable.  Especially when the Fallout franchise pretty much created the expectation for it to be there in the first place.

But to be fair it isn’t really Bethsoft’s fault.

I have a feeling it’s the ESRB’s.

More on that tomorrow (or at least later in the week).  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to experiment with alpha settings on an underwear.dds file.

Kotaku re-linked here (well, in the way that only they can, by linking to themselves first) in a piece about some awesome artwork Makani drew for the TF2 announcer (seen above), and it made me realize I’ve been remiss in my hosting duties in not pointing out her work awhile ago.  I first started following Makani on Live Journal when I saw her Harry Potter genius fanart linked in a friend’s LJ, and since I had been reading it forever, I didn’t think anything of it when she started playing TF2 and started putting her TF2 fanarts up in her journal.  She also does a lot of fun stuff with Gordon Freeman and company.

So anyway, I’ve been following her artwork for awhile, and I have to say that I’m insanely jealous/enamored of her craft.  Her poses are always amazing at expressing what the character is feeling/thinking/emoting, and her style is really reminiscent of some of the glory days of Disney design.  She really deserves to be working at Pixar or Disney doing some character layout for scenes.

At any rate, I’ve already said it in my twitter feed, but as much as I give Kotaku shit, I’m honored beyond words that my artwork was even mentioned in passing in a link pointing out her amazing talent.

If you don’t already follow her artwork, be sure to swing by her Live Journal, her Deviant Art feed, her gut busting hilarious and hilariously named Harry Potter fanart website, or her equally hilariously named personal website.

I’ve been trying to incorporate some dice rolling into a card game I’m trying to build in my spare time for fun (ha ha ha I’m crunching what spare time), and while the game itself is taking too long (this is a CCG, after all), I’m finding the die roll the most controversial part of the game.  Folks who’ve tested it for me either love it or hate it.

I’d love to say that “at times,” it creates the most drama, but the reality of it is that the die creates almost all the drama.  There’s a lot of good push and pull in the cards, but the die?  You love it, and then you hate it.  And then you love it some more.  It is the harsh mistress.  It giveth, and it taketh.

I could go on for days about the damn thing, but the point is, that randomness it introduces and the absolute mystery of the outcome = instant drama.  Are you going to fail?  Succeed?  Critically fail?  Crit hit?  Even if I allow you to modify your target number with some cards, to attempt to make it easier for you to hit your target while at the same time feeling a bit more in control of your experience, you can always roll a one and miss.

It’s funny what some randomness can do for your game.  If it’s balanced right, it can be a lot of fun.  Modern gamers really don’t seem to enjoy dice rolling in their simulations.  Most gamers wouldn’t realize that there’s tons of dice rolling going on under the hood (the AI shooting at you has a 75% accuracy rate with a – 10% on each successive shot in a burst to hit.  This would literally be computed with dice on each shot as % dice (two D10s) with a target number of 25, and then roll a D10, and subtract it from your roll for each shot after the first).  But people don’t want to see the randomness.  Especially when it’s their guy rolling the numbers.  People these days want skill.  They want to feel in control.

So in a dice game, it seems that to allow for the player to feel they’re in control, you have to give them decisions to make.  Dice games inevitably turn out to be risk/reward gamble games for the most part.  Force players to make quick mental calculations about probability, and let them determine if they’re going to press the attack or hang on another turn, based on what previous rolls have told them.

In my research, I’ve stumbled across this great little Yahtzee-esque game called Zilch.  And like any good dice game, it’s got some kick-ass risk/reward mechanic.  You have to keep rolling to hit a minimum score in order to bank some points, but then to get ahead you have to take some risks and try for higher scores to bank, which starts guaranteeing you’re going to roll a “zilch” score and drop all points from that attempt.

There’s even a penalty for trying to “go big” too often.  If you zilch 3 times in a row, you lose points from your bank (which is normally untouchable).

It’s a nice little game, and I think I’m learning a bit about risk/reward with dice just from playing it, even if that lesson is to create situations in the game design to force players to risk above their comfort zone every so often.

It feels good when it pays off, and it infuriates you when it doesn’t.  Those damn dice; who knew there was so much drama in rolling a little piece of plastic?

I doubt it’s going to come to it tonight, but folks love to debate about how we should just switch to a more easy to understand popular vote when it comes to electing our POTUS every four years, especially when there have been a time or two when one candidate won the popular vote, and another one won the electoral college.

Now, before anyone gets in a huff, I’m not going to talk politics.  I’m going to talk about political systems.  Because hey, it’s a lot like a game.

Some of the guys at work have started playing Warcraft 3 again during lunch, and while I hate playing the game personally (losing in it doesn’t make me feel unskilled; it makes me feel dumb), I love hearing them talk strategy.   “Okay, you go anti-air and I’m going to start off with a quick creeping to level up to a level 3 Hero” or “You start off with a grunt rush while I tech up and stay on defense.”  Hell, we even watched a video today where pros not only started off with plebe rushes (seriously, using workers as troops), and even used wisps offensively.  And before anyone else jumps down my throat for not already knowing these strats, keep in mind I don’t play.

I love the strategy.  I even don’t mind watching some of the videos showing how the battle played out.

So here I am, watching the returns coming in on election night thinking that this is a lot like watching a Warcraft 3 replay (or watching two pros duke it out) in realtime, only this is for all the marbles, as the expression goes.  There’s even these kickass realtime aps that allow you to get even more detailed info on a county-by-county state level!

Red/Blue maps of the country are just so much more interesting to look at.  There’s sites that even have the results of previous elections.  How did Bush win in ’04?  Ah, I see, he grabbed the conservative middle-ground and appealed to the farm-belt and southern states.  How did Bush Sr. win in 1988?  Whoah.  PURE PWNAGE.  How did Clinton win in 92?  Looks like he went for the urban vote and still had a broad appeal across middle-ground states.  It’s like watching different players play the exact same map (well, almost exact same with a few different electoral votes per state over the years) over and over, yet coming up with drastically different ways to win.  Especially if you look at how Carter won in 1976 vs. how Reagan won in 80and 84 (I’d offer links to images but unfortunately you’re going to have to head over to the site linked above and use the drop down tool).

This is sooooooo much more interesting to me than a miasma of purple across the entire country.  If we just went by popular vote, we’d have Bush in ’04 winning by 1 or 2 percent.  And Bush in ’00 winning by…1 or 2 percent.  Probably Obama winning by a handful more %.  It’s boring.  And it tells us nothing about how they achieved victory.  You can’t see the strategy, the history of how the campaign evolved.  It’s literally too simple of a system to be even remotely interesting.

I thought I was ready for this election to be over.  I’ve said previously that I was sick to death of the campaign, and I still stand by that.  But I want the analysis and the statistics and the strategy to last just a bit longer.  Mind you, I don’t want it to extend into other branches of government to resolve it, but sometimes I wish that the drama of the actual vote counting took a bit longer than just one night.  It’s like watching the only Warcraft game held at the national level, and it’s only played every 4 years.

Would people sit and watch election night coverage if it was just two competing health bars pushing each other back and forth around the 50% mark instead of seeing who took which “battlegrounds” (media’s word, not mine)?  I wouldn’t.

That’s not much of a game, now, is it?

Okay, I had no idea these things have been on the market since at least August of this year, but holy jeebs if I had known about them I would have gone as Sam Fisher for halloween.  An adult even modelled them on the news toy segment I was watching and they are as close as we’re going to get to the Splinter Cell look south of spending more than $100 to obtain it (or painstakingly making it yourself).

What’s interesting to note, is that if you do a search on kid’s night vision goggles, nobody else is making them look like the Splinter Cell ones.  They’re all binoculars, or glasses with lights attached, or some other not Sam Fisher looking things.  It’s almost as if Jakks Pacific (the makers of these things) specifically targeted the video-game mythos of what night vision goggles should look like.

And I have to say that it was a very, very good business move on their part.

Because I now want a set.

Picture below of a kid wearing them shamelessly stolen from Geek Dad’s Flikr page.

Awhile back someone made a paintover (embedded above) of what they thought Faith should look like in Mirror’s Edge, that parkouring game that EA’s releasing later this month.  The demo just dropped on PS3 if you’re interested; I think the 360 one drops tomorrow (actually today I guess, it is past midnight here).  There’s been a bunch of fan response about which one they like better, and Leigh wrote a great piece (which hits home for me on multiple levels) about how stylized characters are important for conveying desire, and real characters are important for conveying value.

As a huge aside to the point of this piece, I think it’s funny that someone felt she needed bigger boobs.  She’s aerobically athletic.  Show me a female marathon runner with a set of C or D cups and I’ll show you some fan art.  The very idea that she’d be thin from running, scrambling, climbing, and parkouring all day almost precludes the ability to hold fat anywhere on the body.  Maybe she just gave birth?  I don’t know.  I’d love to just try and chalk it up to “it’s a videogame” but we all know I’m on board with dismissing that mentality entirely.

But the irony in all of this character and breast discussion is that you can’t see yourself in Mirror’s Edge.  You just can’t.

If you look down, you see your legs (not your boobages).  If you happen to stand in front of reflective glass, you see…reflective glass.  You don’t see your own reflection.  Maybe you’re part vampire?

The only time you see yourself, at least insofar as the demo is concerned (as that’s all we can play at this point to evaluate it) is when there is a cinema playing.  Then they show you a reflection in the glass.

I suspect this has everything to do with rendering (real-time reflections are hella expensive on the GPU), but it kinda makes the title of the game hilarious, seeing as I thought one of its meanings referred to how you were supposed to be running on the edge of these mirrored buildings…which…don’t show your reflection.  I suspect there will be more introspective threads echoing the title in the plot as well.

So, yeah.  Uh, I guess this is kinda like wondering how big Chell’s boobs are?  It’s pretty irrelevant to the gameplay, the story, the character, et all.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t have character discussions and how body types and body images are important;  I’m just finding it hilarious that after all of this awesome discussion you can’t even see the point of contention in the subject matter at hand.

Also, just in case you were wondering:  I’m less than thrilled with the demo.  It’s nothing more than the same level you’ve seen in the videos a hundred times by now, and it’s so linear you might as well just go watch the video again.  If this is an indication of what the final game is going to play like, I’ll pass.

But the subject of making a great demo to sell your game is a post for another time.

Well, Guitar Hero: World Tour is out, and hoo lawday, are the reviews all over the place for it.  I don’t normally put a lot of stock in reviews, but I do find it interesting to read into the disparity of them all.

It appears, for the most part, that GH:WT is for the “gamer” who wants to play a rhythm game, and Rock Band 2 caters more towards a musician’s fantasy of actually being in a Rock Band.  Sure, I’m reading into the reviews a bit to get this, but it’s interesting to note that the people who seem to think Rock Band 2 is on top claim that the note charting is superior in Rock Band, whereas others who claim Harmonix has to play catchup with GH:WT site mostly the features and geegaws of the GH title.

/shrug.  Either way, gamers win here.  You’ve got your choice:  Do you like challenging note charting which doesn’t necessarily reflect the notes being played?  Or do you want something that makes you look and sound more like an artiste?  There’s no reason to take sides, really.  Some folks prefer dark chocolate, some like milk chocolate.  The super rich elite can have both if they really need it.

But don’t just take my or the reviewers’ words for it.  You can check out the note charting comparisons for yourself that altstrum.com has taken the (painstaking?) time to put together.  While in many cases the chartings are very similar, I think the discrepancies can best be seen in the solos or in the more artful hammering on/off sections.

Oh, great, now I have to buy GH:WT.  It’s got Hot for Teacher in it.  

Wait, nevermind.  Not a fan of the charting.