Daily Archives: July 3, 2007

You might be a rock ‘n’ roll addict

I’m still firmly ensconced in Guitar Hero. I completed the medium campaign last night, and started on the hard version. Surprisingly enough, it’s… hard! It’s almost like the textual description of the difficulty level conveys some meaning…

However! Fear not, faithful reader, for I have been racking my brains as to how the worlds of MMOGs could benefit from the world of pressing buttons in time with music and pretending it’s in some way related to actually playing a guitar, and I’ve come up with something. This is true innovation, mind, not the half-arsed rehashes of existing ideas some people try and pass off as original stuff, oh no.

Right, so, in some games, you have classes who use musical instruments. Bards in DDO, Minstrels in LotRO, those types, and you press buttons on a keyboard to activate their music-based abilities. Now hold on tight, because this is where the pure rush of innovation comes at you like a Prussian kickboxer: what if, instead of pushing buttons on a keyboard to activate their music-based abilities, you pushed buttons on a chunk of plastic shaped like a guitar to activate their music-based abilities!

But that’s not all, oh no. Others would probably be exhausted after coming up with one idea that revolutionary, which certainly isn’t staggeringly obvious to everyone who’s played both LotRO and Guitar Hero (or seen them being played… or been told about them by a passing acquaintance), but what about melee? You’ve strummed away with the guitar based abilities, but your foe has nevertheless engaged you in close combat. At this point, your standard MMOG bard drops the lute, and begins fighting with a sword or something. Very inefficient. What he should use is… a lute bayonet! I know, sheer genius already, but it gets better. How, as a player, to employ this devastating weapon? It would be totally immersion breaking to have to switch to a keyboard, so the answer is: motion sensing technology. More pure innovation straight from my brane, not inspired by playing with a Wii over the weekend, certainly not. As the mob closes, you stab and slash at it with your controller, all the while continuing the hard-rocking assault upon its senses. For a particularly devastating special attack, you unstrap the guitar, grip it by the neck and spin it around and around and around until you get a bit dizzy and your foot gets caught in the cable and you fall onto the sofa crushing the packet of Frazzles you left there.

So far so good, but it’s all a bit single player isn’t it? Not very massive. Rock Band is in the works, for up to four players (guitar, bass, drums, vocals), so we just scale that up! Imagine, a 40 player rock-raid! If Lynyrd Skynyrd’s triple lead guitar approach was good, 10 lead guitars would be better still! A choir of vocalists! They could bring out hurdy gurdy controllers, and sackbuts, dulcimers, giant truck-mounted pipe organs launching projectiles from the bass tubes…

y’know, I think I might’ve been consuming too many sugary beverages while playing Guitar Hero, I might just have a quick lie down. After one more crack at Ziggy Stardust on hard level…

Thought for the day.

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.” — Carl Jung

“Or he could spend five minutes in an MMO.” — Melmoth