I would like to offer my comparison between the games Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but first I will mention something about my broken Rock Band drum set.

I bought Rock Band for myself before Christmas, having had a great time with Guitar Hero 2, and wanting to try out the crazy drum setup. I've been playing for a while, and my snare drum (the red one on the far left) has gradually stopped working well. It's at the point now that I have to bang on the drum really hard just to get it to register.

I've seen videos on the web about other people having trouble with their drum sets. Apparently, there were some issues with the early models (which I'm sure is what I have considering I pre-paid for mine) that are fixed in later revisions. EA is being awesome about replacing the broken drum kits. I've visited their site and ordered my free drum kit replacement. Hopefully I'll be swapping out the drums early next week.

That said, let me get into my comparison between the games, and what I think they should do with the next version of Rock Band and/or Guitar Hero.

I should say from the start that I really like both games. I think the concept is simple, but effective, and the music selection has been, for the most part, both top-notch and groovalicious. But there are places where the games don't overlap that I think could be improved.

For example, one of my favorite additions in Rock Band is that you can continue to accrue star power while you have star power activated. I've always thought it would be a great trick if you could make your way from the beginning of a song to the end with star power running through the whole thing, just by hitting the special notes as you go. There aren't any songs that allow this, but there are many songs that allow you to go for long periods by spanning between star power notes.

What I like best about Guitar Hero is that it has character. Guitar Hero 3 has really neat transitions between "levels" that are animated and tell the story of your band as you get more popular. I realize that Rock Band emulates this a bit in band mode when you travel from city to city, but having some flavor other than the game in Rock Band would have been nice. Playing with my brother in a band and chatting like we're actually in a band between sets has made up for this somewhat, but this leads me to my next point.

I realize that it seems odd to say this, but I would really like to play band mode solo, without having to play guitar and sing. Sure, it's supposed to be for multiple players, but up until Pat came to play with me, I had nobody to play with in band mode. And band mode is wildly different from solo play. It would be nice to get through those parts of the game without having to have another willing person nearby. (Yes, I've been forcing all of my holiday visitors to play with me.)

One thing that drives me crazy about Rock Band is that the 360 won't let me easily move my Live profile between instruments. So if I tired of playing drums, I can't easily switch my profile to a guitar. I have to log out of Live, then log back in under the new instrument. This doesn't seem like much of a problem, but it definitely puts a stall in gameplay, and I'm sure all of my Live friends are tired of being alerted every time I switch instruments. (Live pops up an alert to tell you whenever a friend comes online.)

Another issue with Rock Band and profiles is that when you've created a band, your leader must be present to play. That means that it's really your leader who is progressing through the game. If you had all of your members but that guy, then you would have to start over. Plus, if you only have a couple of players to start out and you want to switch bandmates, the leader can only ever play the instrument they first select. This is a real problem with Rock Band.

My only real complaint about Guitar Hero is in the song selection, and I can't complain about that too much because that's what Guitar Hero is all about. The songs are more heavy and metal-oriented. That's fine, but I like the selection that Rock Band offers that isn't so heavy all the time. Although less Weezer would be nice.

The Rock Band music scrolling bar thing has better graphics than Guitar Hero does, too. They're more consistent. It's a bit harder to tell what all the symbols are for in Guitar Hero. Does the lighted circle mean star power or hammer on? And all the little extra symbols in battle mode are silly. Battle mode is silly.

Another thing that could be improved is the hardware. Beyond the "not working" issues, it would be great to have a completely wireless setup. There are just too many darn wires everywhere.

If you're going to have wires, then provide a better USB hub. It's great that they provided one at all, but it would have been better if it integrated better with the 360. Mine hangs out of the front of my entertainment center now because of how I've had to supply power to it. You would what would be neat? A drum kit that has a built-in USB hub. Plug your guitars into the drum kit. That would be nice.

I hope that the franchise does well, because I would really like to see another Rock Band release that perhaps addresses some of the issues here, and incorporates more of the character of Guitar Hero.

I was out shopping for a UPS the other day after the power went out at home and I encountered a strange thing while pricing at Circuit City.

There were several tents erected outside the from door of the Circuit City store. What the heck?

At first I thought they must be selling tents. Then I wondered why Circuit City was selling tents. Then I realized that these were PS3 buyers.

I'm not really excited about the PS3. Apart from it making the price of the PS2 go down, it's a really expensive console that isn't going to bring much new to the table. Sure, it's more powerful, but what I've really been waiting for is games that are more fun.

Which brings me back to Nintendo. I've bought a few Gameboy DS games lately, and they're all fun.

I don't know why I like Cooking Mama. You just cook food. There really isn't all that much of an accomplishment system. Sure you can do a bad job cooking, but that rarely so hard that you do less than good. But playing the game is fun. I can't quantify why. But this particular game has whatever it is that I'm lacking on all of my big console games.

That's why I'm looking forward to tomorrow (it is tomorrow, right?) with the launch of Nintendo's Wii. It's the first Nintendo game system that I've really wanted to have since college when the lure of Mario was just too strong to resist. From what I understand, I should be able to play my current Game Cube games on it, as well as games from their old Nintendo catalog via their netwroking service. It'll be cool to play classic NES and SNES games on the big screen.

I spent a half hour on XBox support today trying to work out why my wireless networking adapter suddenly won't work any more. I think I'm just going to grab a wireless bridge while I'm out today. It just goes to show that if you spend $500 on something, you still have to deal with any issues that might render it brick-like. And the PS3 is more expensive than that.

It should be an interesting holiday season, games-wise.

I was waxing nostalgic with some other folks on IRC the other day about computers that we had grown up with. My very first computer was a Timex Sinclair 2000.

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was state of the art for a home computer at the time. 2K of memory. A 1/8 inch phono port to plug in the tape recorder to save and load programs. I was lucky to have a couple of accessories: The chicklet-style keyboard overlay and the 16K memory expansion pack, which was the size of four decks of cards and was so heavy that I had to duct-tape it to the expansion port in back to keep it from falling off.

Of course I proceeded from there to the venerable Commodore 64, and on to the Amiga. But before our conversation could carry me completely through my computer evolution, they started to discuss (for some reason) video games, especially some of their old favorites. This included revealing some of their reasoning why those games were favorites, and that's where the problem in this story begins.

I've been playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on the XBox 360 for a week, on and off. It strikes me as a much better game than Morrowind, the previous edition in the series. Why? Well, sure the graphics are better, but I find that the game itself is better played.

For example, in Morrowind, you start the game by stepping off a boat and into a town, and there really isn't much direction at all. I guess that's part of the allure of the game, but my main issue with it is that because there is no direction, I couldn't really figure out what I wanted to do.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of people have enjoyed Morrowind very much because of these free-form exploration possibilities. But those people could enjoy Oblivion just as well, and be better pulled in to the storyline if they wanted to be.

Oblivion starts the game with a kind of "trainer level". I think these are important to have in games, even for experienced gamers, since it initiates you into the feel and control of the game, and sets you on a path that you can follow to complete the main storyline.

In any case, the games sited by the folks on IRC were mostly games that came out at some point for the Playstation. (Yes, I seem to hang out with a younger crowd online, when their earliest memories of video games involve a platform that came out when I was 20.) They frequently talked about how good a game looked. Nobody ever mentioned how well the game played. Sadly, game play is one of those things that if done properly is very transparent to the person it is affecting.

Some of the best games I've ever played were games that didn't have graphics. I'm an Infocom junkie. For example, I think that Wishbringer was probably more influential to me than 99% of video games I've played. Wishbringer was all text, and it was the story that drew me in, not how many polygons the characters had.

It's weird how a majority of games for the XBox involve shooting things, thus requiring high polygon counts for aiming and high framerates for evading. If all you're gauging a game on is how it looks, then your criteria is pretty easy to evaluate.

Call to Duty 2 is a very good FPS on the 360. The graphics are amazing, and everything moves very fluidly. I suppose there is a kind of story going on while you're playing, but really it's all about the mission. It's a linear mission. It's a timeline that's pretty well known, since the results of the wars are well published by now. The game itself is only engrossing because it requires concentration to shoot things well.

Immersion. That's what I really miss about gaming — Caring about what's going on in the game. If I'm excited about a game it won't be because I killed a record number of Nazis or cleared a certain number of stages in record time. It will be because I managed to figure out a story or a trick to the game.

Sure, all of those mindless games have their place. For example, I love playing Wik on XBox Live Arcade. I don't know why I like it. I think it's just because it's mindless fun. But if I'm looking for a serious gaming fix, where do I turn? There is a shocking lack of anything as robust as the Infocom games or the Lucasarts SCUMM games anywhere on the market.

I'm sure people will tell me that gamers don't want to play adventure games any more. Is it that I'm crazy to think they should want that kind of game, or that gamers have simply come to accept what they're handed?

Seriously, do we need another war game for the 360?

Next rant: Real-time "strategy". When was the last time in real life you had to micromange hordes of troops with 20-second deployment times? If the next generation of warfare involves gathering and deploying infantry to the battle zone within one minute, our teenagers will be able to conquer the world.

I had a conversation with my brother over Xbox Live a week or so ago. He was playing Hexic HD from the XBox Live Arcade while we chatted.

One of the neat things about the XBox 360, and the XBox for that matter, is that you can download games from their online service to play on your console. These games don't require a disc, and you can activate them from a button in the Live interface.

He was remarking how he really wished that Live had a vertical-scrolling space shooter. One of our favorite games of this genre is Xenon2 by the Bitmap Brothers. That was among my favorite Amiga games.

I was thinking about this idea when I saw a commercial for Gametap.

Gametap is an interesting service that offers classic arcade and console games for play on your PC. I suppose they've written (or appropriated) an emulator, and have acquired the rights to all the ROMs in question. My grand idea would be to have Gametap partner with the XBox Live folks to provide all of those classic games via XBox Live Arcade.

Just think, you could play any of those classic games right through your XBox console. You'd hardly ever have to buy disc-based game at all, instead buy credits on Live and spend them on the classics. Play Pac Man, Burger Time, Galaga, etc. all without leaving your living room!

Of course, all of these games would need to be made to work in the XBox. Considering that the hardware is reasonably similar to a PC, it shouldn't be too difficult to get an emulator running. They've already got the original Gauntlet in Live Arcade. (And you can play multiplayer over the internet!)

The trouble with this idea is Gametap's subscription model compared to Live Arcade's purchase system. Gametap only seems to offer a monthly subscription to all of their games. You pay a flat price per month and you can play any game they offer. With XBox's Live Arcade, you have to pay for individual games, but you can keep them for as long as you have a Live account.

I don't know whether I like the idea of the subscription service or the outright buy, but it would be nice to see this variety of games added to the XBox.

I broke down last night and used my remaining credits on this new game, Wik. The guy you control is like a frog, kind of. You can't move him directly, you can only point in the direction you want him to jump, and then hop him there. He can also move by throwing and sticking his tongue to some surface and swinging from it. The whole premise of the game is to feed these grubs - scattered about the board, always being taken off by other manner of insects - to your donkey before your donkey walks off the bottom of the screen.

I use the words "donkey" and "frog" tentatively here, since neight really looks like one.

It's an interseting game. A bit hard to control, which is part of the puzzle, I think. Still, I enjoyed it enough to see what would happen next.

Just think how many games I would sign up for if they were games I played as a kid. Maybe Microsoft shouldn't partner with Gametap - I might become suddenly very poor.

I received my XBox 360 on Saturday morning, and Riley helped me open it. He wasn't very helpful with setting it up, but I did manage to get the thing hooked to my TV without too much difficulty. I guess you might want to know how it is.

Well, my initial impression is "eh" with a few "oh, that's neat"s sprinkled in.

Let me clarify a bit. The 360 is a very slick console. I suppose that it's just me being jaded by new technology releases that makes me not get really excited about these things any more. I suppose that it might have been more exciting had I some friends that cared at all about the XBox. Nevertheless, I'll mention some things about the 360 that stood out for me.

First of all, Live is always on. I mean, you can turn it off, but why would you? The features that it offers are some of the coolest that I've seen a console do. If you're buying an XBox, then Live is one of the reasons you should be doing it.

There is a big X button on the controller that lets you access a fly-out menu at any time, even during a game. You can see your gamer profile there via a "gamercard". A feature here that interests me is the "acheivements" that you can earn. As you complete goals in your game, you are awarded points. These show up in your profile. I will attempt to place my gamercard here:

What's really neat about the Live features is that they all happen inside the game. So as you make and acheivement, a bubble pops up at the bottom of the screen telling you so. When you review your Live profile, it shows you not only the points you've earned, but the task that earned it. I imagine that in a racing game like Burnout you will receive Live points for all of the things you receive points for in-game. I wonder how they reconcile all of the games against each other.

One thing that I was very happy to find that the XBox supported was a home-network connection to a Windows XP (not just Media Center) system for music playback. You need to install some software on that PC to make it work. Actually, I couldn't get it to work with what little I tried, but I suspect that has more to do with my network/router/firewalls than it does with the ugly software Microsoft provides on their XBox website.

Also, while I'm speaking of the XBox site, I'll mention that it generally works with Firefox, but there are some pages, like the support pages, that don't look quite right. I suppose this is to be expected, but it's just another example to point at of poor multi-browser support.

So, onward to the games...

I suppose that I should have signed up for one of the many games you can download (yes, you can download games and movies to your hard drive via the Live connection) so that I would have more to write about than Kameo, but so far, that's all I've played.

Kameo is a weird game and its controls are irksome. Yes, I've gotten used to them, but they're a pain to learn and I still slip up now and then.

Basically, you are an elf princess with the ability to shapeshift. You change forms by pushing one of the four colored buttons on the top of the controller, ABXY. All of the actions you can perform as that form are activated by the shoulder buttons. Sometimes you can interact with people or things by pressing A, which is usually the button you press to return to your normal form as Kameo.

Controlling the beasts you turn into is a pain. I realize that it's part of the game that the controls operate the way they do, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. For instance, one of the forms is a giant rolling armadillo thing. When she's not rolling at high-speed, she walks around on these stumpy legs that take forever to change her direction. When changing abruptly to walk South while faving North, this form spins slowly around in place on its little stump legs.

More aggravating is the Ash form - a small red dragon - that will not aim in the direction that I attempt to point him no matter what I try. I mean, in one stage I attempted to use his fire breath to ignite a lantern as part of the stage requirements, and died several times due to incoming cannon fire simply because I could not aim him properly.

You can tell they tried to take advantage of some of the more impressive specs of the 360. There are some scenes where little flying things swarm all over the place. Often, too many things to see what's going on. In other scenes, trolls and elves fight in skirmishes in which you can partake, and there are sometimes hundreds of individual characters moving on the screen at the same time.

The water effects are also pretty neat.

I guess my real disappointment - for lack of a better word - is that I don't see a lot here to ooh and ahh over. Sure, you can tell that the graphics are a little better and the system is doing a bit more. But does that really enhance the game? Some of the best games ever made were not so extraordinarily complex or graphically expansive. I would really just like a good game.

Those who would suggest that a racing game like Project Gotham is "good" can about-face and search out OGN or one of the other fanboy networks. What the 360 really needs is a few games that make the PS2 good even though it's fairly behind in technical capability. Games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, or Katamari Damanci are good. More games like Prince of Persia, Fable, and Psychonauts (Please - A sequel for Psychonauts!) would also be good. I'm just preturbed by the idea that sports, racing, and first-person shooters are all the XBox could be any good at.

Don't bother me with traditional consol RPGs, either - they all kind of suck. The Baldur's Gates games for XBox were a couple of the worst games I've ever played. Not only is the "plot" linear, but the character progression is linear too. (You'll be level X at this point in the game because you've killed Y monsters, and they know that and what powers you will have.) Killing endless creatures does not imply "Role playing", in spite of what console game developers would have you believe.

In that vein, I'm disappointed that this launch game doesn't really leave me saying, "Wow, the 360 is super-cool!" I'm sure that it is but this game isn't doing it for me.

Well, I hear that Target is selling games ahead of launch, so maybe I'll stop by there and see what (if anything) they have. Otherwise, tomorrow is the day.

A side note - I keep going in that EB Games store by BJ's, and I need to stop that. I'm not sure what the vibe is that I'm getting from them, but it's not a good one. I've been sold games on the assurance that, "yeah, it's good, I love it," that have pretty much sucked. They also never had a very high opinion of the XBox - it's like buying a Honda and then taking your car in for service and having them ridicule you for buying the Civic instead of the Accord.

Yesterday when I asked if they had any other XBox 360 games or accessories, they said no and then asked with whom I preordered my 360. I told them I already had mine and they all stared at me blankly. I could tell that they were trying to decide whether to call me a liar or a fool outright. I said I won the Mountain Dew contest and they all shoved their noses back into their Gameboy SPs without a word.

I need to take my business elsewhere.

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