when i first saw the game i thought someone who could play guitar (for real) wouldn’t find it very much fun. i figured it was for air guitar wannabe’s

i had the occasion to play guitar hero II at an office christmas party. i had a blast. like everyone who picks up that toy guitar/controller for the first time, i sucked at the game, but it only took a few tries at Strutter (“as made famous by KISS” <snirk>) and Woman (as made famous by Wolfmother <double snirk>) and i started getting the hang of it.

i can think of 3 improvements that would make the game better. license the real songs so they can lose the “as made famous by”. get rid of that raised line on the yellow button, you have a tendency to “lean” on those buttons and you will get a blister on your finger if you play for any length of time…

last, license (regardless of the cost) at LEAST the following songs:

smoke on the water (this one is a no brainer)

bang a gong

whole lotta love

it IS called guitar here after all…

i can think of 3 or 4 other things that would be great additions to the guitar hero franchise (frankly, i’d be suprised if they hadn’t thought of them already), but i’ll just wait for game company to contact me

the game is worth the price, you get a lot of game play for your dollar.

i used to enjoy reading the magazine/flyer from Programmer’s Paradise. Back in the dos (ie. before the internet) it was one of the only two places to get information on or buy products for programmers. The other is the now defunct Computer Language magazine (too bad about that too, because at least they wouldn’t take the python-or-delphi-is-the-best-programming-language-ever tact that dr. dobb’s does.) news for the delphi folks, it’s pascal. super-duper pascal, but pasal just the same. of course python is what ruby wants to be when it grows up.

anyway, i ordered few things from programmers paradise. i stopped when there wasn’t anything listed under $500 dollars. and now, there’s not much listed under $1000. that pretty much completely eliminates the home/hobby developer. and to a certain extent eliminates the medium sized business.

it’s not programmer’s paradise fault, microsoft always had high prices for their compilers with maybe the exception of quickbasic. borland used to have great compilers in the $100 range, but now $2265 is not out of the question for some of the stuff they sell.

for the most part i don’t need to work in compiled languages anymore. compilers are too expensive and somewhere along the line the fun was sucked out of programming with a compiled language… windows helped that along but making a 2000+ function api.