One of the most interesting things that came out of this year’s GAUGE was the most prolific Rock Band performance I have had the pleasure of being a part of. This is not to say that I have not had fun playing the game up until now, but it’s a whole lot different when you play with two other people on the hardest difficulty level and begin to make headway. This not only sets up next’s years event but also shows that we have the potential to excel in any potential sequels (e.g. Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero 4).
For my own experience, warming up the week before became frustrating. I had made plenty of progress during the past month and I was starting to crack the songs in the final set on Expert. I’m far from being considered an elite player in the game, and odds are I will never achieve that distinction, but it’s still fun to work on techniques and improve my ability to handle the 5-button plastic guitar. The frustration wasn’t that I was one song away from completing lead guitar before the trip started, but that my scores were not improving the final two days before GAUGE.
Please understand that I wasn’t nervous about being able to play the lead once we started playing as a group, but I did not feel as though I was ready to carry the band if and when it was needed. This turned out to be far from the truth, but there is this disturbing thought in the back of my head that I’m on a rather large plateau before being able to make a noticeable bump in my fan count again. 6.3 million fans isn’t anything to be unhappy with, but until I crack 9 million I’m probably not going to be satisfied with my abilities.
“Say It Ain’t So”
Early e-mail discussions were flying around to identify our band name. Most suggestions weren’t sitting right with everyone and the tide turned from gaming into coming up with many ways of making a negative commentary on everyone’s favorite FFVII character - Yuffie. Most people enjoy making disparaging remarks about her, but our goal of forming a band name was still incomplete after two weeks of fighting over e-mail. On the plus side, once we finally gathered together we came up with our band name - The Wutai Clan. Sure, it didn’t insult our favorite character, but it was a delicious pun that proved too hard to resist.
“In Bloom”
As we started with the earliest of songs we were all a little nervous about whether we could handle this game as a band on Hard. We (not everyone, but more than none) chickened out on even the easiest songs before things starting rolling. Song failures didn’t happen once, and when our scores consistently ranged between 92 and 100 percent on songs we knew we were ready for everything else.
“Learn to Fly”
Most songs were easy to get through on Hard. In fact, consistently sticking to the first 20 or so songs in the game (as ordered in career mode) was a good recipe for gaining confidence and executing almost every section of every song. Like any good team, we were starting to gain an almost purely instinctive timing on when to activate Star Power to gain a ton of points or insure that a difficult section of a song wouldn’t sink one of the band mates.
“Go With the Flow”
In a solid effort to easily garner cash and fans we kept plowing through the smaller song sets and easier songs. Most of our set lists didn’t change over a long period of time. This aided our efforts in achieving our goal of maxing out fans on Hard difficulty but also not getting a dismal amount of stars on multiple song sets. With rare exception all songs were 5-starred over days two and three of the event. The coasting proved to be a good thing because having a relaxed demeanor while switching games every couple of hours proved beneficial for all goals on our docket.
“Enter Sandman”
Late into night number 3 we started hitting some of the harder songs, and my inability to make quick movements between end notes began to become exposed on the Metallica song. Still, this was the night we finally hit our fan limit on Hard. This was a golden moment for us because it was probably our biggest achievement for GAUGE. Unfortunately it was short-lived.
“Flirtin’ With Disaster”
In an attempt to push for permanent glory in the game I decided that we needed to go after our Hall of Fame Induction on Hard. The song set we went through wasn’t all that surprising, but on song #6 we hit a brick wall on the Molly Hatchet song. It wasn’t a surprise that we failed that one because it is a nasty song on Hard, especially if you have never seen it before (which our bassist had not). Not only was the failure spectacular, but we lost a ton of fans that put us back under the Hard fan limit. My band mates did not let me forget this fact for a while.
“Won’t Get Fooled Again”
We decided that rather than slamming our heads into a wall trying to get into the Hall of Fame that we should start playing the easier songs on Expert to see how many fans we could get back on the hardest difficulty level. A couple thousands fans here and there were not helping much. After switching to the later cities that still provided easy songs we started getting fans in chunks of 100,000+. This proved to everyone present that the better we did at the highest level the more fans we would get. Ending the Wutai Clan experience for GAUGE VII on this note proved to be the absolute right thing to do.
There will be plenty of off-season training involved, and it looks like Rock Band 2 might be out before our next event. Even if it is not we still have plenty of time to enjoy the downloadable content to keep this game giving us fresh and fun experiences.
May 29th, 2008 |
The problem isn’t the system, the problem is the people. But I’m not going to write about why piracy is no different than theft. And why piracy is most certainly immoral. What I’m more interested in today is the vast number of gamers who are not pirates, yet sit around saying, “I never would pirate anything, but I understand why they pirate it.”
EO2 is a throwback to games like 
sick, or had a doctor’s appointment or what. But I was home and I knew Voltron was going to be on.
