Silent Bob has 40 chronicles

1. Rhythmically Challenged Relatives
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Dec 27 2008

   I ran into my sister-in-law on Christmas. I asked how Santa treated everybody at their house, and they said they were having fun with their new Guitar Hero : World Tour game, saying they’d spent “all day” playing it.
   
   “Oh, really? How many songs do you have unlocked so far?” I asked.
   
   “What are you talking about?” she asked, puzzled. “We played one song all day and couldn’t pass it?”
   
   “Jeez! Did you start with something ridiculous like Judas Priest or Metallica?”
   
   “Yeah, it was super hard” she said emphatically. “It was ‘Eye of the Tiger.’”
   
   She went on to say her side of the family was over the day before, and they had tried to play the Blondie song because she “really, really” wanted to sing it while the others played guitar and drums.
   
   “So how’d that go?” I asked her. I was chuckling in my head because her singing is akin to a cat caught in a bear trap. I'll give her points for enthusiasm though - when she sings, she always belts it out at the top of her lungs, pitch be damned.
   
   “Wellllllllll…you know how the words are supposed to scroll across the top?” she asked.
   
   “Um, yeah,” I replied, wondering where this was leading.
   
   “Well, the first word of the song would show up on the far right and then the song would fail before I could even sing one note.”
   
   “What?” I was stunned, to say the least.
   
   “Yeah, my dad was so retarded he couldn’t play the notes for the guitar, and my brother was even more retarded on the drums. Pat [my brother] took over a few times on guitar or drums, but the others were so bad the song would fail before the lyrics came on.”
   
   Feeling a little sorry for my brother’s plight with his rhythmically challenged wife, daughter and in-laws, I called him up today to see if he’d be up for a little jam session.
   
   Uh…..yeahhhhhh. Now don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m no master on Guitar Hero. I’m a self-proclaimed “Mr. Medium” and happy with it. When I play it’s to relax and enjoy some decent music. I don’t pretend to be competitive at all. My brother? Let’s just say that I couldn’t believe he fooled his wife enough into thinking HE was the best player in their house.
   
   This great “family gift” that was supposed to be so much fun for the family to play together? It’s kind of like the people who believe golf is relaxing. We didn’t break or throw any clubs (or any plastic instruments!), but it was the total opposite of its intended function.
   
   The first song we played, I chose Medium for guitar, and he went with Easy on drums. I wasn’t going to give him any grief. Drums are tough. We were dipping quickly into the red, and I hadn’t played enough notes to even earn a star power to help us out, so the song quickly failed.
   
   “Dude!” my brother exclaimed. “How could you miss so many notes and make us fail?”
   
   “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss a single note, guy.”
   
   “I know I was hitting mine on drums. It had to be you.”
   
   This went on pretty much all day. He knew he was messing up every song but always put the blame squarely on me.
   
   I tried switching up instruments with him. Easy on drums is just that – pretty darn easy. So even for an inexperienced drummer like myself, I was hitting nearly 100% of my notes without a problem. Meanwhile, I kept hearing those discordant “clinks” when guitar notes were getting missed by my brother.
   
   “That one’s too hard on guitar,” he’d say. “Let me back on drums.” We’d change. The result was the same.
   
   Listening to him drum was like giving a drunk monkey some sticks and cans. I mean, some of these songs had such simplistic beats that I’m pretty sure an amoeba could keep the rhythm. I asked him, in all seriousness, if he heard any difference in when I drummed versus when he drummed.
   
   “Nope. I just don’t get it,” he’s say. “I’m hitting all those notes but they’re not registering.”
   
   “They’re not registering because you’re not hitting them in sync with the notes on the screen.” That, and he would hit two to three notes where one appeared on the screen. Each additional hit registered as a miss and usually hastened our FAIL.
   
   “No, I mean LISTEN,” I said, trying my best to keep my patience. “When you drum there is no discernible rhythm at all. Everything’s totally random.” Then I’d go into a quickie dry run with some patterns I’d seen come up over and over. The one that always tripped him up was one of the easier ones – Y-Y-Y-R (three quick yellow cymbal strikes and then a red snare, repeated usually over and over). I’d tap out five or six sets of those and have him try to imitate. He’d do okay on that, but when he tried to do it in-game, it was just pathetic.
   
   Over the course of four hours, we finished five songs. FIVE! On Easy. And one of those was a close call, with the needle dipping dangerously into the red on the final two notes of the song.
   
   But you know what? I still had tons of fun. Part of it was just hanging out with my brother. Despite living in the same town, we don’t see each other as often as I’d like. (Boobacca, on the other hand, I see every day). And I’ll admit there was a small part of me that enjoyed playing with somebody who sucked even more than me. I mean multiple degrees of suckage. Is that wrong?
   

   
   

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Silent Bob has 3 comment s on this chronicle.

1. WinterWonderLAN
   Posted On Dec 28 2008

   haha, yeah, I also experienced some noob relatives with GH:WT, but often times it was related to problems in the menus, lol.
   
   Either way, it was a great time and it was definitely a holiday of Guitar Hero

2. ZMaine
   Posted On Dec 27 2008

   FACEPALM
   
   wow, i don't know how you kept your patience, i would have lost it LONG ago, right when they said "Eye of the Tiger" i probably would have gone of on a tangent

3. Boobacca
   Posted On Dec 27 2008

   The "drunk monkey" and "beats so simplistic an amoeba could keep the rhythm" comments had me rolling!
   
   I'm pretty sure I could beat him too.
   
   Glad you had fun though! That's what it's all about.