for those about to rock

guitar hero 2 ... and didier deux?!?

i think that most compulsive behavior stems from the same part of the psyche.

i think that the instinct that urges a gambler to repeatedly buy scratch tickets, hoping against hope that one last game will be the one that hits, is of the same ilk as the one that spurs on a junkie to continuously seek out fresh hits in vain attempts at re-experiencing the bliss of his first high, like the needle of a record player skipping on the same groove.

i also think that this is an incredible oversimplification of the nature of addiction, but this is only a blog, and if it helps get us on the same page in thinking about what could drive me to play the same song on the xbox 360 version of guitar hero 2 to 2 1/2 to 3 hours in a row into the wee hours last night, then that's merit enough for me.
















i wish i had sidebars to separately lay out gh2's interface and scoring system, but i'll do my best to sum them up briefly here before moving on:

the controller is a fisher price-style miniature electric guitar featuring 5 colored buttons on the fretboard and a plastic-wedge strum bar located where the pick-ups would sit on a genuine six-string.

the game's action takes place on a vertically-scrolling virtual fretboard, where color-coded notes cascade like tetris pieces. in order to play them, you need to depress the corresponding colored buttons on your ax and stroke the strum bar just as they pass the lowest fret and drop off-screen. the higher the difficulty setting, the more notes the game throws at you and the more scoring opportunities you have.

there's also an external system of scoring in place on xbox live that rewards points to a player's online profile based on the completion of a variety of specific challenges that vary from game to game. in guitar hero 2's case, they range from unlocking venues to playing a song note-for-note to earning a massive number of points on a given tune.

the achievement whose pursuit proved to be my albatross last night is the eddie van halen award: successfully hit half a thousand notes in a row in a given song.

some songs contain less than 500 notes, so i pursued this prize by playing nirvana's 'heart-shaped box', which contains over 700 on the medium difficulty setting -- relax, i didn't have to count: there's stat screens in the game where you can find this shit out -- and presents few of the fleet-fingered demands found on songs later in the game.

i spent around the first ten times through the song experimenting to figure out the most economic and comfortable fingering patterns for navigating the note sequences. since there's only four drastically different sections to the song, i played with a few simple variations before settling on hand and finger positions with which to approach for the entire tune.

i spent the next hour coming achingly close to achieving my goal. nervous flinches of my strumming hand here and cues missed by nanoseconds there repeatedly killed my efforts. i found that the furthest i could make it before going off the rails and having to start the song over was right around the end of the guitar solo, where the cumulative note count came out to around 475.

along the way, i was picking up on some trends in my failed attempts; i sometimes hit the strum bar hard enough for it to recoil and register an unintended upstroke, and while i generally breezed through the busy choruses flawlessly, i had trouble settling in comfortably enough on the moderate pace of the verses to be consistently precise. i found myself ping-ponging between polar states of tense anticipation and forced zen calm. it was maddening.

i spent the second hour sitting poised at the edge of my bed a few feet from the television, thinking that closer proximity would help me internalize what was happening on the screen.

i was right, but not in the way i had hoped to be.

halfway through another fruitless effort, i noticed that the virtual fretboard was turning a dull red. not coincidentally, i think, i also noticed that my eyes felt remarkably dried out from focusing so intently on the same screen for so long.

after failing again, i lay back on my bed and rubbed the crust out of my poor peepers. when i opened them, i saw that the corrugated swirls of plaster in my ceiling were MOVING. if you've ever tried one of those visual tricks you've probably been forwarded on email at work, wherein you stare at the center of a rorschach test-style pattern for 60 seconds and then quickly direct your gaze at a white surface, you might have an idea of what i experienced.

the game was in my head. i had degenerated into the kind of casualty that the legal mumbo jumbo and medical warnings at the beginning of every video game manual attempt to steer you clear of becoming.

i stepped outside for a smoke to clear my mind.

when i came back in, i knew that i'd passed the point of no return. to preserve my sanity, i had to complete the achievement before i turned in for the night.

a half hour later, at about 1:30 am, owing to dumb luck or divine intervention or the stone steady hands of catatonia, i nailed 500 notes in a row. 600 and change, to be more precise.

satisfied and exhausted, i stepped outside for one last smoke to crown the successful session.

when i got out onto the porch, i noticed a fluffy white cat sitting on the stairs a split second before the door shutting behind me scared it away, and, for one insane split second, i was convinced that my eyes were playing tricks on me again, and that what i had actually seen was didier, our finicky french cat who spends most of his time outdoors but who also happens to be a dark tabby.

thankfully, i spotted real didier patrolling our front hallway as i came back in.

incidentally, there's a separate xbox live achievement for gh2 that awards you points for nailing 1000 notes in a row on a song.

i'm wondering if i'll manage it without going off the deep end, just like one of those missed notes dropping off-screen into parts unknown.

posted by jomilkman @ 11:19 AM