It has now been almost a year since Rock Band arrived in the Lawrence household.  While the original Rock Band is gone, Rock Band 2 is here.  We are currently at around 200 songs available for rockin’.

That’s my guitarist at the right (click to embiggen).  His name, is of course “Guitar Dad” and he is currently touring with my band, Crystal Log.  And yes… I have over $42k in the bank to spend on some really cool clothes and instruments.  (Although I think the guitar I currently own is freakin’ awesome!)

Over the last 6 weeks or so I have been working on playing songs on the guitar in “Hard” mode.  Ooooo… The orange fret key… bring it on!  It is difficult, and there are only three or four songs that I can get five stars on, but I’m getting there.  And now when I go back to play in medium it seems really slow.

The equipment has been beaten up pretty good over a year.  I’ve fixed two drum pedals.  We even fixed the springs in the guitar when they broke.  Went to Home Depot for the springs.  An employee asked if he could help me find something and I said I was looking for little springs.  He walked me over to where they were and asked what I needed them for.  I told him I needed to fix a Rock Band guitar.  “Really?”, he said.  “Good luck with that.”

It’s keeping me entertained, but admittedly the novelty has worn off for other family members.  But no matter, Crystal Log will rock on!

Curse that Tom Nook!  I just paid off my first mortgage and of course he wants to expand my house and give me more debt.  I’m so torn!  I don’t want the debt, but then I do need a bigger place to store all of my stuff.  So into hock I go again.  I’ll be doing a lot of fishing and peach picking to get this one paid off.  Plus I’ve got to keep up on my donations to the museum at the same time.  It’s always hard to decide if I should sell that Koi for 4000 bells or donate it to the museum.  Lucky for me I got two of them today so that’s a no brainer, one to the museum and one to the evil Tom Nook.

Have no idea what I’m talking about?  Christmas has come and gone and Santa gave Maren a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk.  That’s me in the picture with the pink hair (an unfortunate mishap at the beauty salon) and the evil Tom Nook behind me.  As with the previous Animal Crossing, it has been keeping us occupied.  Elena, Maren, Emma and I all have a home in our town of Utah (named by Maren).  You can seriously waste a lot of time on this game.  It’s great for Maren because it gets her reading.  Emma likes to play it just because she can do meaningless tasks, even though she can’t read yet.  For Elena and I it is pure capitalism.  Work for bells, get more stuff and expand the house.  It’s a good life lesson. 

But we need some people to go visit in their Animal Crossing towns.  So if you have a Wii you should go buy Animal Crossing so we can visit each other!  How exciting!  Once you have it, email me your friend code and we’ll get setup.

Announcing the arrival of Rock Band 2 to the Lawrence household.  I went to Game Stop at the beginning of the week to pick up the new version.  I traded in four games, used some coupons we got in the mail and by the time I was done I walked out of there with Rock Band 2 for free and a $36 credit towards next week’s purchase of Lego Batman.  Awesome!  You can check out the new intro right here.

So of course, the week has been filled with rockin’ goodness.  There are a lot of songs on the disc, but I still only have about half of them open so far.  I’m working on it.  I’m sure Tim has a lot more.  Plus, I was able to export the songs from the Rock Band 1 disc before I traded it in.  So by the time we’re all done, there will easily be over 200 songs to choose from.  Ooooo… real nice.

As for the game itself, not a lot has changed.  Most of the changes are in the setup and band play.  One of the options I like is that you can quickplay with a local band and choose a set list.  So you can choose three songs to play and it will just seamlessly go from one song to another, without a return to the menu.  Real nice.

The other option is one that helps with the whole family playing… you can turn off failing in quickplay.  So now we don’t have to forbid Emma from playing because she will fail and stop the song.  She can drum or sing to her hearts content and it doesn’t affect the rest of the players.  Very nice.

So to everyone who has played Rock Band with us in the basement before, consider this an open invitation to come back for another round of rockin’!

I love Nintendo. They have truly shown why they are genius game developers. The Wii has been a lot of fun ever since we got it over a year ago. A number of weeks ago I got Mario Kart Wii and it immediately took over all previous activities in the Lawrence household. Everyone spent time using the little Mario Kart driving wheel to take a turn at racing. Highly interactive, and a lot of fun.

Last week I went and picked up the Wii Fit that I had pre-ordered for Elena as a Mother’s Day present. Again, it has taken over. Everyone has their own profile (even Emma) and the last week has consisted on non-stop “fitness” at the Lawrence household. That’s me in the picture to the left, madly doing the virtual Hula Hoop as fast as I can. All of the individual activities and games are very simplistic. But as a whole, and with the Wii Fit board, it makes it pretty fun. I’ve never seen Maren and Emma have so much fun just running in place!

It’s getting everyone up off of the couch and involved. Maren was so proud that she logged 30 minutes of workout time the other day. You can’t really beat that. Elena is even using it on a regular basis. It’s yet another way to show that games don’t have to have the latest graphics to be fun. They just need to be interactive and engaging. Viva la Nintendo!

Last night the boys and I attended Video Games Live with the Utah Symphony. It was really great. They played a lot of video game music and I knew most of it. It was certainly different than any other kind of symphony concert that I’ve attended before. I had a great time, and I think the boys did too (Elena was sick, so she missed out ) The following are some of the highlights:

• I’ve never seen such a diverse set of people at the symphony before. There were people who looked dressed for the symphony, mixed with people in costume, mixed with geeks wearing video game t-shirts, mixed with goths, mixed with everything else. And the ages were from little kids to AARP members.
• To start off with, they showed a video of Pac-Man running through the streets of New York. The vast majority of the audience was laughing and cheering Pac-Man on. But next to me was sitting an older couple. They seemed surprised that their symphony season tickets were including this concert. I heard the lady lean over to her husband and comment on the video with “I don’t understand why they are chasing him?” And even more funny, after intermission that couple (and the other couple sitting on the other side of us) were no where to be found.
• The concert started with the symphony playing the music to Pong. Yes… Pong. The timpani has never been used so well.
• I watched a 6′ 5″, at least 250 pound man run back and forth on the stage acting as the gunship in a game of Space Invaders projected up on the screen. He obviously has never played before. People kept yelling for him to shoot the guys on the ends, but he just didn’t get it.
• They played a great rendition of music from The Legend of Zelda. Loved every minute of it. Made me want to go home and start playing Twilight Princess again, but I think my brother still has it!
• I watched Martin Leung (The “Video Game Pianist”) play music from Final Fantasy, and play his trademark Super Mario Bros. music blindfolded. Awesome.
• I watched two kids play Frogger on a gigantic screen, with thousands of people cheering them on while the Utah Symphony played the game music. I’ve never felt so sad when a frog has fallen into virtual water. And I’ve never cheered as much for a frog getting across traffic (well… I cheered for George Costanza when he attempted to do it).
• They played music from Super Mario while game footage showed on the screen. It showed every single Mario game I could think of (even Dr. Mario) — and I think I’ve played almost all of them.
• They even played music from Kingdom Hearts while they ran movie clip footage of all the Disney characters used in the game. I’ve never played the game, but being a Disney freak the music and video were great

So there you have my full report. Great evening entertainment. I’d recommend it to anybody. (Except for the people that were sitting next to me.)

I am a man of culture, or at least, I like to think so. So when I received a promo from the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera to get a discount on tickets for the next eight months I decided I’d get some. After all, it’ll make a good impression on my date.

So I bought tickets to the annual Messiah Sing-In, Don Giovanni, and Carmina Burana. But then I see tickets for Video Games Live. What is this? I haven’t heard of this before. So I go to the website and read the following:

Video Games Live™ is an immersive concert event featuring music from the most popular video games of all time. Top orchestras & choirs perform along with exclusive video footage and music arrangements, synchronized lighting, solo performers, electronic percussionists, live action and unique interactive segments to create an explosive entertainment experience!

Ooooo… I am so there. So I bought tickets for not only Elena and I but for the boys as well. Only problem now is that I have to wait until March. It just sounds so interesting, and nostalgic at the same time. If you watch the trailer there is a section where the symphony is playing while Frogger is up on the screen. The symphony playing music from Frogger! Too cool…

At the top of the technology news sections today is this article on how Sony expects to relieve its PS3 shortages by the end of May. Huh? What shortages? I have been keeping track of how long the PS3s at my local Costco stay in stock. They still have eight of them on the sales floor. They started with 20 or so back in the middle of January. And I have been to Target a couple of times over the last few weeks and seen them in stock on the shelves (behind the special Target “no-touchy” glass ) I don’t think I would call that a “shortage”, would you?

Meanwhile my fine Wii is unable to be found anywhere. You have to have good timing to find one. Sure, its not as bad as Christmas, but they’re still a lot harder to find. And why? Well, let’s just say it is hard for someone to shell out $600 for a video game machine.

But the PS3 is a full home entertainment system! Who cares! I’ve always thought Sony misread their customer base by forcing the Blu-Ray on them and thereby the expense that goes with it. There’s even a fine article here on why things are failing - a lack of focus on gaming.

I love my Wii, it is an excellent system (needs a few more games).? It entertains not only me, but the kids (and the cat) as well. No complaints, and I still have a considerable amount of money left over from the purchase, compared to a PS3 that would have broken the bank.

Santa brought a Nintendo Wii for Christmas! (He has such will power to not have played it before he had to deliver it under the tree ) So we spent all day on Christmas wii-ing ourselves. It’s excellent. Brillant piece of machinery by Nintendo. It had all of us entertained with bowling, tennis, and boxing. Maren and the boys really got into it. Emma “thinks” she is playing — but she doesn’t quite grasp the concept yet.

The gameplay works pretty well. It is a lot of fun and I can already tell it will be keeping everyone entertained for quite some time. Now I’ve just got to make sure nothing gets damaged during gameplay, and all will be fine. Also got Zelda: Twilight Princess, so that will be soaking up a lot of my time…

I’m currently addicted to Lego Star Wars II. I must admit that I didn’t really play the first game at all. I didn’t see how it could be entertaining. I’d played other Lego games that weren’t so great. But it’s kind of a slow time of year for video games, so I traded in a few and picked this one up.

Excellent game. It is keeping me (and the kids) quite entertained. The humor is very funny and is what gives it the extra push that it needs to make it great. I think we’ll be playing this one for a while.