Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Decision

So after much debate and a great deal of insulting each other's band name ideas Cam and I settled on "Powder Blue Stanza." Since then we have rocked pretty hard at least three times a week. Not even the plague can dull Cam's commitment to the game, although he did have to switch from vocals to guitar (mostly cause I don't want him sneezing on my damn microphone), a situation that places both of us on our weakest footing.
If you had told me two months ago that I would eventually care how well I can sing Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" I would have said "I don't even know that song, why would I care about it? Who are you, anyway? How did you get here from the future?" But now it tears me up inside.
And there have been other challenges to overcome. Last week during my one and probably only Rock Band Party Night the blue pad on the drum stopped working entirely. It had been on the fritz for a while before that but my heart was still filled with unreasonable suspicion of all my friends. And Cam's friends. And Cam. Sometimes even me. When something that expensive breaks logic usually falls by the wayside, at least in my experience. All is not lost though, EA sent me a new drum pad set, supposedly free of charge as long as I send back the broken set. Hopefully everything will work out.
In the meantime after weeks of playing as a band Cam and I have yet to fully complete a single city, mostly because every single one contains at least one horribly, horribly annoying setlist. And these usually go under titles like "Crowd Favourites" or "Jukebox Regulars" or "Harmonix Favourites". It just seems absurd to me that what the people who made the game consider to be the best songs are actually the worst songs. How did any good songs get in there that way? There must have been an influential minority of programmers with decent taste in music, I guess.
But, in the end, the decision to buy Rock Band (and let Karen buy the supporting X-box 360 for me) was a good one. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go practice singing while no one's around.