Justification

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been coveting a Playstation 3 and Rock Band. I decided to sell a bunch of crap that’s been doing nothing but gathering dust, and turn it into something I’d use and enjoy and appreciate.

Here’s how the eBay sales worked out:

Roland TD7 drum module – $177.50
Roland KD7 Bass drum kick trigger – $102.50
2x Roland PD7 drum pad trigger – $56
1986 1/10 oz Gold Eagle coin -- $95
Birthday and Christmas Fry’s gift cards -- $50 + $50 + $50 + $25 = $175
TOTAL: $606

And the costs:

PS3 -- $400
Rock Band -- $170

Factor in taxes on the latter, and it’s pretty much an even trade.

I’m pretty impressed with the Playstation 3. Aside from being a gaming console, it’s also a BluRay player. The package came with a demo BluRay disc with some movie previews on it, and I was pretty blown away at the difference in quality. My understanding is that normal, standard definition TV is 240 lines of pixels. DVDs are 480 lines. BluRay is 1080 lines. The preview for “Casino Royale” looked spectacular. It also came with “Spiderman 3” on BluRay, and I’m almost tempted to crack that open just to see it in glorious high definition. But I strongly suspect that what I’ll get is a steaming pile of crap in glorious high definition, so it’s going straight to eBay, still sealed. And if I ever change my mind, I’ve enabled our Netflix account to get BluRay movies! Pretty sweet.

So not only is the PS3 a gaming console and BluRay player, but it also connects to our wireless network, and acts as a media sharing client. What this means is that I can share media (pictures, music, and video) from my desktop PC, and see it on the PS3. We pulled over some digital pictures, and they look really good. I tried streaming some home movies, but they were really choppy (presumably too big to stream in real time?) There might be ways around that, though. Music streamed through no problem, so with a little work, we could create some playlists and rip some CDs and have the music available out there.

And then there’s Rock Band. Previous Guitar Hero games allowed two players to play together, with one person playing a lead guitar and the other player either bass or rhythm guitar. Rock Band is the next generation of these games. You get two guitars like before, but also drums (via a nice little set of drum pads) and singer (via a microphone).

The first night I unpacked it, I left the drums in the box and just tried out the guitar. It feels a lot different than the Guitar Hero guitars, and takes some getting used to. It also took me a while to calibrate the timing for my particular TV. Soon enough, though, I was up and running, trying out a few songs. I even tried out an online battle, where you play against someone over the internet, playing the same song and trying to get the best score. The guy immediately jumped to the hardest song in the game and wiped the floor with me. That was funny. At the end of that song, I got a call from my boy Baditude. He also has a PS3 and Rock Band, and could see that I was online (since I’m on his buddy list), so we tried out the online cooperative play. That was a ton of fun. Not nearly a substitute for being in the same room, but it definitely would do in a pinch.

Later in the weekend I got the drums set up, and Diana and I jammed a little. Diana gave the drums a shot, and I’ll go ahead and say I was shocked. Diana is many, many things, but I wouldn’t list coordination and timing as some of her strongest attributes. But her first time sitting down behind the drums, she was busting out 90%’s or better on Medium difficulty. I was (and am) very proud of her.

Even later in the weekend, Diana’s parents came over to play, and Diana wanted to show them the game. We played, and Diana’s parents tried the drums (with less-than-stellar results). They tried singing, which was better. It was fun listening to Diana’s mom singing “Creep” in her classical choir voice. Diana’s dad belted out a half-decent “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, but it’s tough to sing songs without ever having heard them before.

I also started a Solo drum career on Medium difficulty, and am slowly working my way through the songs. I’ve played the game already a bit at Baditude’s, and have been a wanna-be drummer for a long time now, and so far Medium isn’t presenting a whole lot of difficulty. I tried one of the easiest songs on Expert as a lark, and it kicked my butt. So I look forward to the challenges.

Two other cool things about being the game being “connected” is that scores are uploaded to a server, which means that lists of high scores and stuff are all managed on a leaderboard.

Single player is fun and challenging. Online cooperative multiplayer is good. Online competitive multiplayer is really good. Local multiplayer is awesome. Local multiplayer with all four players after a couple of drinks is best ever. Rock Band party, anyone?