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Guitar Joke

I love the Guitar Hero games. It's the game I think I had been waiting for my entire life. I grew up in the Metal 80's and fully immersed myself so much so that when I recently heard about the latest installment in the Guitar Hero franchise being all about 80's guitar, well, to me it seemed extremely obvious: HEAVY METAL!

Imagine my disappointment (and many of you out there as well) when I read the initial tracklist and found jokes such as Flock of Seagulls, Police, Bow Wow Wow, Asia, Billy Squier, etc. I was actually really pissed. Here was a golden opportunity to showcase what I really believe should have been on the original Guitar Hero game in the first place. What happened? They played a big joke on me.

First of all, the press release mentioned "from the classic era". Uh, guys, that was in the 70's. All of which I very much respect given that I'm a huge Sabbath, Priest, Santana, Scorpions, Rainbow, etc. fan myself. Second, they list 7 initially confirmed songs that are supposed to allow me to "experience the ultimate rock star fantasy". Sorry guys, but pretending to be the guitarist of The Police (whoever the hell he was) or Faster Pussycat (and who is he? Barely anyone knows. Or cares.) just isn't anywhere in the solar system of guitarists I'd like to be. Red Octane already gave me some of those guys in the original Guitar Hero with Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Dimebag Darrell, Tom Scholz and Jake E. Lee. Hell, even Dimebag contributed to a video game in his own special way (see if any of you can track that one down). But with Activision involved it's like someone brought a strap up against the nuts of the franchise.

Also, many of the songs listed thus far just are not what I'd call songs that I want to play on a guitar that make me feel cool. I will say that "Holy Diver" and "Round And Round" *are* songs I'm very happy with on that list. But that's only 2 out of the 14 known so far (wikipedia has a more extensive list than the press release). There's supposed to be 30 ass-kicking songs. So half of them produce only 2 that I like. I was expecting this "Rocks the 80's" to be badass metal, mostly melodic and not thrashy because that's just not fun to play. Okay, Nuno Bettencourt is in there, which adds a little cred.

If I was putting together an 80's Metal version of Guitar Hero here's what I'd put together. I thought about these a lot, they're not the typical songs you'd expect (for example, no damn Paranoid, War Pigs, Iron Man from Black Sabbath) and they're really kickass and definitely songs that I wish I could play on a stage in front of millions. Okay, not all of these songs are 80's Metal but most of them are. The ones that aren't are just awesome and should have been on Guitar Hero 1:

EASY:

Accept - Up To The Limit (great riff)
Black Sabbath - Nightwing
Crimson Glory - Heart of Steel
David Lee Roth - Big Trouble (Steve Vai!)
Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers
Def Leppard - Foolin
Dio - When A Woman Cries
Dokken - Unchain The Night
Firehouse - All She Wrote
Great White - Shot In The Dark
Helix - Heavy Metal Love
Judas Priest - A Touch Of Evil
Judas Priest - Turning Circles (70's classic)
Kingdom Come - Who Do You Love?
Kingdom Come - Perfect O
Kingdom Come - Living Out Of Touch (great riff)
Kiss - Love Gun (70's classic)
Motley Crue - Looks That Kill
Ozzy Osbourne - Hellraiser
Queensryche - The Lady Wore Black
Rainbow - Stone Cold (70's classic)
Scorpions - Hold Me Tight
Scorpions - In Trance
Slaughter - Up All Night
Van Halen - Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love (70's classic)
W.A.S.P. - Restless Gypsy
Winger - Spell I'm Under


MEDIUM:

Accept - Teach Us To Survive
Alice Cooper - Step On You
Black Label Society - S.D.M.F.
Black Sabbath - Headless Cross
Bulletboys - Hard As A Rock
Cinderella - Long Cold Winter
Crimson Glory - Dragon Lady
Def Leppard - Photograph
Dio - Dream Evil
Dokken - Seven Thunders
Firehouse - Reach For The Sky
Great White - House Of Broken Love
Great White - Lady Red Light
Great White - Step On You
Iron Maiden - Flight Of Icarus
Judas Priest - Nightcrawler
Loudness - Crazy Nights
Motley Crue - Knock Em Dead Kid
Ozzy Osbourne - Flying High Again
Psychotic Waltz - Into The Everflow
REO Speedwagon - Roll With The Changes (70's classic)
Savatage - Sirens
Saxon - Beyond The Grave
Saxon - Lionheart
Scorpions - You Give Me All I Need
Scorpions - Don't Believe Her
Scorpions - Rock You Like A Hurricane
Steelheart - Can't Stop Me Lovin' You
Steelheart - Everybody Loves Eileen
TNT - Everyone's A Star
Vinnie Vincent - Ashes To Ashes
W.A.S.P. - Charisma
Warrant - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Whitesnake - Fool For Your Lovin'
Winger - Hangin' On
Winger - Hungry
Yngwie Malmsteen - Queen In Love


HARD:

Black Label Society - Funeral Bell
Black Sabbath - Digital Bitch
Bulletboys - Hell Yeah!
Crimson Glory - In Dark Places
Dokken - Kiss Of Death
Dokken - Sleepless Night
Dokken - Mr. Scary
Dokken - Sunless Days
Dokken - Don't Close Your Eyes
Eric Johnson - Cliffs Of Dover (pure guitar mastery)
Gary Moore - Oh Pretty Woman
Iron Maiden - Powerslave
Joe Satriani - Devil's Slide
Joe Satriani - Flying In A Blue Dream
Joe Satriani - If I Could Fly
Judas Priest - Demonizer
Judas Priest - Painkiller
Judas Priest - Hellrider
Judas Priest - Metal Meltdown
Lynch Mob - River Of Love
Lynch Mob - She's Evil But She's Mine
Ozzy Osbourne - Desire
Ozzy Osbourne - Fool Like You
Psychotic Waltz - Haze One
Queensryche - Eyes Of A Stranger
Racer X - Superheroes
Racer X - Viking Kong
Ratt - You're In Love
Ratt - Lay It Down
Savatage - Conversation Piece
Savatage - Strange Wings
Savatage - 24 Hours Ago
Saxon - Searching For Atlantis
Scorpions - Make It Real
Solitude Aeturnus - Spiral Descent
Steve Vai - Erotic Nightmares
TNT - Sapphire
White Lion - Hungry
White Lion - Lonely Nights
White Lion - Lady Of The Valley
Winger - Blind Revolution Mad
Yngwie Malmsteen - Enemy
Yngwie Malmsteen - Leviathan


Okay, that's a massive list but I pared my huge list of songs I love down to this. So I expect several 80's Metal compilations. Or just choose any of these from each section, group them as you like and just put it out so I can finally play these "for real"!

But please don't release the lame thing you call 80's guitar.

Billy's Balloon

This is my kind of humor!

Hungarian Surprise!

Unknown to me and maybe even id Software way back when, 12 years ago a couple Hungarian DOOM novels were written and released (bottom two books). Of course I know all about the English DOOM novels by Daffyd ab Hugh but these are a surprise to me.

Scans of these books are posted in my DOOM photo section.

The top two books comprise Masters of DOOM split up. The translation of the text is "DooM Legendája (Legend of DooM). Hogyan változtatta meg John Carmack és John Romero a világot (How did John Carmack and John Romero change the world)".

Thanks for the info, Timea Cseke (IMPgirl)!

OGDC Interview

I was up in Seattle last week for the OGDC conference where I was on a panel discussing development of MMOs and the panel was fielding all kinds of questions. After the panel I was interviewed by Evan, whom I've known for years.

Right now, in the news section on Gamasutra is a blurb about the interview (with link). And it's so great to see my story just under GAMECOCK's story.....LOL. So perfect.

Anyway, here's the interview.

World's Oceans In Extreme Danger

As you all know, I'm not much of an activist. I like making and playing games and being a happy consumer like you all. But sometimes you have to wake up and pay attention to what's happening in the world while we're all at home having fun playing World of Warcraft or Gears of War.

As reported on Project Censored, the world's oceans are in extreme danger (story #3) and there's very little being done to reverse the devastating warming trend that is changing everything about the planet's most vital resource.

If you can't get out there and do something directly at least you can do something in a minor way: vote for a president that will actually do something about this problem, for real. Bush is most definitely not that person, nor do I suspect, any Republican president unless I see an extreme environmental conservation strategy on the bill.

VOTE!

Slipgate Web Team

Yay! We've finally started building our web team and our VP of Web Tech spent a few seconds and reworked my original site design into something cooler.

You can check it out here

As you can see, we're doing a lot of interviewing. This week's interview schedule has been MySQL DB Admin, Technical Director and VP of Marketing candidates. We're still hiring for Senior Programmers, Senior Game Designers, Writer and more. See the page for details.

Update on my MMORPG: it's coming along really well and the team we have is just amazingly talented and producing incredible stuff. We'll probably come out of stealth mode later this year.

Happy 15th Wolfy!

Yup, it's Wolfenstein 3-D's 15th birthday today. Still no great source port on the horizon that i know about - it'd be cool to see Wolfy with multiplayer running on Vista.

C'mon guys, someone's gotta do it. I wish I could but I'm already too busy making my MMORPG.

Anyway, blow out the candles on the virtual cake and have a bite of air everyone!

Metal Spoon Prank

Sorry, but this made me laugh pretty hard.

Zero Wing Rhapsody

Basically, take the Zero Wing animation from years ago, take Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, mix together and get this! Great job!

Daikatana DM Downsized

It's taken a while but The EO and .petroid have done something pretty cool: they stripped Daikatana down to the smallest size possible for playing deathmatch, 114mb total download.

I tried it out and it worked perfectly. There's been some modification of lots of little things and it has a great little launcher included to simplify some options. I connected to a master server and found about 5 of them running and people were DMing so I joined and it was tough to stop!

Here is the download - have fun and hope to see you in there.

UPDATE: The Escapist covered the release in a news story!