Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I got it ages ago — before going into the hospital anyway — but haven’t found the time to play it until recently, but now that I have, I have been having fun with the “pro” version of Rock Band. I have the keyboard, which is a one octave piano controller, as well as the guitar controller, which has a zillion buttons — six (one per string) for every fret, as well as six strings to strum or pick. Unlike earlier versions of music games (perhaps with the exception of the drum controllers), playing these instruments is getting very close to “the real thing”. When you play synth parts on the keyboard, you are literally playing every note in the song, on the actual correct keys of course — I think you can actually use any MIDI keyboard, not just the one that the game comes with. So if you can play the keyboard in the game you can play the songs on a piano. The guitar is the same. You have to finger and strum or pick all of the notes. Playing on the buttons is a little different than a real guitar, but it’s surprisingly close. The game can “dumb down” songs a little, but once you get up to the full levels, again, you really are playing the songs.

So far I’m just playing the simple stuff — today I only got as far as managing to play I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones without being booed off stage — but it’s a lot of fun. I think that they’re coming out with a true guitar controller (with real strings, that makes real sound) which might be even more enjoyable, assuming that this keeps my attention. As fun as it is, it’s also devilishly hard (and that’s coming from someone who can beat all the music games on Expert, and used to play guitar in a Guns’N'Roses cover band), so it might become “work” at some point.

I’m quite impressed with the current iteration of the Rock Band franchise as a training tool — at this point, you can quite realistically use the game to teach yourself to play a few intruments (to say nothing of being able to use the singing elements of the game to do vocal training). I also suspect that for most kids (and adults) that the learning curve is much faster with the games than with a traditional teacher, to say nothing of being radically cheaper!

At the urging of the girls of the house, I recently picked up a Move for the PS3 (it’s Playstation’s improved knockoff of the Wii controller). It’s pretty cool, and Nefarious is enjoying being sucked into the virtual world of EyePet with her pet monkey “Tiny” that she’s been training. It’s quite cute, especially when it mimics singing that it hears. That said, I am super jealous of XBox owners and the Kinect, which really seems to be a generational jump in interface design.

Other than that I got Lego Harry Potter working for Caitlin’s DS, but I don’t have a jiggling picture to go with that. She’s also been playing the sports game that comes with the Move, and tells me that the archery game is pretty good.