UPF Discovery: "The Real Guitar Hero" Cigs66

Here is that awesome old dude's Ustream Channel that the crew discovered on Unprofessional Friday today. Evidently he just drinks beer and shreds like a seasoned pro.

I'm so fucking pleased that this is some of the shit that comes out of putting streaming tech in the living room.

http://secure-www.ustream.tv/channel/cigs66-s-ps4-live-show

Be warned, he has a mouth on him, but his fingers are pure metal.

Yep, after they switched off of the stream stuff (temporarily, anyway), I had to go to Ustream and look him up.

It was a strange UPF...

@common_moniker: Definitely. The USSR Anthem blast was...something.

Also, I hope that game Vinny played gets more video time on GB somehow. It seemed interesting.

Terrible and overblown, hes just like every other old guy with a guitar. Just because he was on the show doesn't make him special. Half of upf was watching him play and it was boring.

@purplespandex: Thank you. It was fun to watch in the context of UPF, but yeah. Definitely didn't need to keep going back to him, and would've loved to have seen more of whatever that game Vinny was trying to play instead.

Vinny got shortchanged. The Twitch stuff was interesting and funny, but it wore thin.

Haven't seen it yet. Fellow guitarists, was he an amazing player? Or was the appeal just beer and guitar on the internet?

Just a dude with dimed gain and reverb+delay up shredding. He played a Jackson and Line 6 Spyder combo, so he's pretty much the average Guitar Center customer.

Well you were free to tune out at any time.

Not a big fan of watching videos of guys watching videos, but whatever. I hope Vinny gets the time he deserves with that Mars game, be it through the next UPF or a QL.

I hope they never do that again, but Cigs was alright. He's probably the only person on Ustream actually doing something.

By the end of this week's UPF, I was pretty bummed out (well, more than usual).

When Jeff started browsing the PS4 streams I was uneasy with the way some of the crew were mocking people because it had a whiff of condescension. Also, it's pretty hypocritical to look down their noses at people streaming over their PS4s all the while streaming that out to an audience of paid subscribers. Once they got to the Cigs66 stream it felt like a bunch of privileged hipsters ironically egging on someone they otherwise would have no connection to.

The show just seemed really disjointed after Vinny decided to quit playing the game he'd brought and it had an obvious negative impact on the chat that overall left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

To be fair he was by FAR the best streamer broadcasting at that time.

His skill wasn't the important thing. The important thing was the Giant Bomb community drowning out the downright dreadful comments which were being posted on his channel with positive ones. A great "let's not be douchebags to each other (on the internet)" moment.

I can understand people not wanting to watch people watch videos on the internet but on the other hand this IS Unprofessional Fridays. At least allow the Bombardiers to be unprofessional.

@purplespandex: The man was an icon of keeping the rock dream alive! FREEBIRD!!!

Opinions and all, but i found the idea that Giantbomb showed up to flood this dude with positivity against the shit sea that is the internet far more endearing then watching the video games the dudes are playing.

I personally thought Cigs was the highlight of the show, but the rest of the playroom stuff was very underwhelming. I felt bad for vinny getting steamrolled too, but not as obsessively as the chat got about it.

That man is America.

I thought his Iron Maiden medley was pretty awesome.

Good on you cigs66

You know. Kind of felt this way too. Felt sorry for the folks we were seeing.

But mine was more one of those existential, "Boy there are a lot of lives being lived on this earth and so many of them are forlorn and unsettling" sorts of feelings.

Reminder of what's nice about the Giant Bomb community. Clearly, there are people who did not care for the content of that guy's stream, but no one from this community seemed to feel the need to go on his stream and assault him with vulgarity, profanity, or bigotry.

Maybe there's hope for the internet yet.

There isn't.

Guess I'm gonna have to renew my membership sooner than later. I love it when giant bomb tackles the Internet. As far as laughing at the streamers goes, ain't nothing wrong with poking fun at 17 year old dad's smoking meth online during work hours as long as they have that egotistical represent the hood attitude like the world should be watching them. Double if they're spitting some kind of half ass lesson about the streets or life. Or calling everyone watching bitch ass something or others.

Cigs66 is my new hero, might have just peaked my interest in trying my hand at the guitar again. Cigs don't give a fuck, rock on motherfucker!

Luckily I watch live streams full screen so the chat is mostly useless to me other than when I hit Esc to toss a comment Rorie's way. I thought it was a great show that only further confirmed how like-minded Jeff and I's sensibilities can be on just about any topic other than Lil' Wayne and Dipset.

The appeal wasn't that cigs was a great guitar player, although he could definitely shred the basic Guitar Center licks as others have said. The appeal was, like Vinny said, that we all know that guy even if we don't know cigs, and like someone else said amidst a sea of negativity both from the other streamers and the commenters across all of them, his stream managed to see a huge positive spike from GB's presence in both viewership and comment abuse.

Plus the conversation was great. One of the better UPFs, I knew how Vinny felt when his game got cut off but I mean, c'mon. Everyone else in the room was on another subject and that game looked SPARSE. It's always tough with Vinny, he either finds a way to break/taunt an early access game early or the early access game refuses to give him options and I start wishing for ANYTHING else to be happening on the stream. Luckily that anything else happened to be one of the random, weird things I find most enjoyable about owning a PS4 this time.

I don't get the negativity some people have towards this UPF. Vinny's game was exhasted pretty quick (and looked boring & sparse as hell to me), and the stream stuff was goddamn fascinating. A real weird look into some beautiful messed-up internet that reminded me of GB circa '09. Also didn't hear the guys bash people on the stream at all, so no idea what that criticism was about. Some gentle fun-poking and comments, maybe. It also brought up a great discussion about the concept of this kind of always-on voyeuristic streaming, and people's true understanding of it.

Also, they were clearly having FUN. DO YOU HATE THEM BEING HAPPY?

DO YOU

I was more bummed when they started playing puzzle fighter cause that shit is borrrrrrring.

He was entertaining. The rest of the watch twitch and ustream stuff was pretty boring but old dude rocked.

Same, I ended up skipping the entire segment over watching about 2 minutes of it. Vinny's game was interesting but would rather see a QL of it where they spend a good amount of time focused on it. It wasn't really a good UF game.

#TeamVinny

Felt bad for the dude. Cigs thing was cool but it dragged.

I thought cigs was awesome! I dont, personally, like that style of playing, but he was good at it and the context of him playing in a woodpaneled basement, drinking beer made me appreciate it. Sucks that vinny got short shrift, but shit happens. Vinny almost always gets a huge amount of attention from both users and people who work on the site (vinny is popular, no 2 ways about it). I think because it happened to vinny more users felt the need to complain. If it had happened to Brad there would be no argument about this at all.

@metallicsheep said:

I pretty much agree with this. Seeing them browse streams was amusing and more than anything else, was at least something different than the same old formula. I've gotten incredibly bored of how rote most UPF shows have become, and it was because of the streaming stuff that I watched at all.

Aside from some of the pearl-clutching about the dumber comments in the various chatrooms, it was awesome to see the guys (and Jeff in particular) genuinely enjoying something completely absurd. And yeah, it totally felt like something plucked out of the Giant Bomb of four years ago. "Should we do this? Probably not. Let's do it anyway! Who's gonna stop us?"

\m/

Watching random people in their homes is more interesting than a lot of the games that appear on UPF. I enjoyed it.

@demoskinos: The fact that you think I should leave because I have an opinion is insulting and telling about your character. It's fine you "liked" watching a guy play guitar on a stream about video games, but it went on for about half of the show and that is way too long. I come for silly video game content, not watching streams of other people doing nothing.

Dude, the show isn't about you and plenty of other people in the chat were enjoying the show. So your options at that point are to either 1. Deal with it or 2. Spend your time elsewhere

Unprofessional Fridays.

I love it when the duders go off and do crazy shit with the internet, like this. [then again, I also love the mindless rambling that doesn't have to do with video games on the Bombcast, so] There's plenty of games content on the site Monday-Friday, and I always thought the purpose of the Premium Friday streams was to fuck around and have a good time.

I dug it.

I don't like to use the word entitled, but holy shit dude you sound kind of entitled. You don't like a specific segment of the show, someone suggests you don't have to watch it, and now you're making jabs about how it's "telling about their character". Almost every single thing on GiantBomb is "silly video game content", why do you have to moan because for once they did something a little different that a lot of people (myself included) found entertaining?

what do you use for smoke weed bro?

UPF sounds pretty dire.

I thought it was the best UPF in weeks, so shrug. Seems like a lot of the GB Community just want to be negative about Unprofessional Fridays lately; it's not perfect, but nowadays there are constantly comments from people here acting like the Titanic is sinking.

I work with an old guy who used to play guitar in a band and he's just as good as cigs66, they're apparently a dime a dozen and I don't think he's particularly special, but watching the guys react to his stream was pretty damn entertaining.

This was only my second UPF of being a subscriber, so I don't think my opinion has any authority, but I thought it was fun. Besides what happened to Vinny, I laughed my ass off. I don't think their intentions with the streamers were malicious at all; on the contrary, the Cigs66 chat cleaned up a lot once the Giant Bomb community came in and told him how he cool he was.

If it wasn't subscriber content, I'd say they can do whatever they want. But considering that UPF is basically all that remains of paid content these days, if this is the direction it's headed I really don't think I'm getting a whole lot for my dollar anymore. I'm here to watch the guys play and talk about video games. I'm not here to pay them to be my surrogate friends.

And please don't suggest I go watch week one hundred and twelve of Demon/Dark Souls streams, because I'm not interested. It's easy to just be glib and say "get over it", but as a paid subscriber I have a right to reevaluate the value I'm getting for this subscription.

A polarizing and controversial UPF? Yep, sounds like another standard Saturday discussion.

@kevin_cogneto:

while I see your point, and I agree the premium content is on the shallow side at the moment, I can't help but feel the stuff that's happened over the past year earns the guys a grace period in my book. Jeff is constantly talking about how he wants desperately to get new people in, and how the site is still growing, and if my subscription helps the site continue to grow in any way, I'm real happy with that. It's not an exorbitant amount of money, so if one week's UPF isn't the best in my opinion, I don't really feel 'cheated' out of my cash like a hell of a lot of people seem to.

Totally get you about Demon's Souls, though. I love the playthrough, but it's such a bummer if you're locked out of that much subscriber content cause the game isn't your thing. For example, I'd rather eat poison than watch a second of DOTA.

@kevin_cogneto: that isnt true... UPF, twice weekly (sometimes more) breaking brad, the occasional extra podcast (powerbombcast and movie podcast) and no ads. For me, that's completely fine. Would I like more? Sure, but it isn't bad for what you're paying. I payed 35 bucks for the whole year. 50 is the normal, which means it's $4.16 a month. That's pretty damn good for what you get if you think about it. It's one thing if you don't like the content, but I think there's a perfectly fine amount of premium content at the moment (just a few months ago non paid memebers were saying there was too much premium content... so yeah.)

I loved it, I thought it was both entertaining and a nice break from the usual content...and cigs was sweet

Watching him at the moment, this guy is great fun, like Vinny said just a talented guy sharing what he does, he could have kept playing his game with cigs in the background but i don't think Vinny minded stopping, sounds like he'll try the game again next week.