Well I had doubts that this day would ever come, but it finally has. Tuesday, July 22, 2008 marks the date that I finally beat Run to the Hills on expert drums.

It's funny because just about a week ago I had resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't be able to beat the expert drum tour before Rock Band 2 came out. I had kind of lost my motivation to play the original when the sequal was announced. I think for most people this would have inspired them to dust out their plastic instruments and start playing again but not I. I had been playing a lot before Rock Band 2 was announced as I was trying to beat all my scores on hard drums to increase my ranking on Score Hero (I'm now the 7th best hard drums player on SH) but when Rock Band 2 was announced (and was only a couple of months away) I decided that there's not much point in trying to beat my scores if I'm just going to be playing Rock Band 2 in a couple of months. Plus I think I was probably a little worn out on playing, so I decided to just take a break until the sequal came out.

Well that break lasted about a week. I started getting the itch to play again after reading the forums here on this website. I read Hobbies' post on the best technique to beat this song with, and it got me thinking that I really want to beat this thing. I had already been using the technique that he posted, but a lot of the time my foot would fall out of sync causing me to fail.

That leads me to tonight. I started out a little rocky while I tried to shake some of the rust. I was missing notes in the intro (which I never did) and I was failing after only about 40% or so. This lasted for about 15-20 minutes before I was back into the swing of things. For about 30 minutes or so I struggled with getting to the solo without using any overdrive. This is key for me because I absolutely suck at the solo. I always panic when I see those three bass hits in a row. I can hit the bass notes with my foot most of the time but my left hand just freezes. So basically if I try to hit this section with anything but a full bar of Overdrive I usually fail. After about 5 runs of not being able to get through the solo I encounted the most frustrating 15 minutes in the history of video games.

I made it through the solo three times in a row only to drop my fucking stick three times in a row during the huge red roll. This was so frustrating to me that I proceeded to curse loudly at the television and throw my sticks across the room. This is not normal for me. I am a very mild-mannered introvert. I think I scared the crap out of my dog. I decided I needed to take a break for a little bit, so I went into my kitchen and grabbed myself a water.

When I came back I just decided that I was going to do it. I don't know why, I don't know how, but I just knew that it was going to happen. I decided in my mind that I would no longer accept failure, and that I was going to beat this song. I then proceeded to have my best run ever. I barely even went into the orange before the solo, and I didn't even have to activate overdrive until the 2nd chance I got during the solo. After I made it through the giant red roll being in the middle of the orange (and without dropping my stick) I knew that I was pretty much home free. I did drop into the blinking red for a little bit at the very end because I had adrenaline pumping through every vein in my body and my hands were actually shaking because I knew that this was going to be the run where I beat Run to the Hills on expert. As soon as I saw the rainbow of the big rock ending I started celebrating. I don't even really remember what I was screaming, but I screamed something pretty loud. With all of that adrenaline built up in my system I pounded the shit out of my drum kit during the big rock ending (I'm going to be sending them in to get them replaced so I don't really care about taking care of them) and at the end I actually hit the guide button, which stuck terror in my heart because I thought I had lost power or something when the music stopped playing.

Anyway, this is most definitely the greatest video game accomplishment of my life, and in a way I'm relieved that it's behind me. I find it ridiculous that there isn't a song that's half as hard as Run to the Hills on expert, but hey, what are you going to do? As for what I'm going to do now, I think I'm going to work on my DLC songs on hard. As weird as this may sound, I actually enjoy playing drums on hard more than I enjoy playing drums on expert. I think it's just because it's a lot more relaxing to play on hard.

How about I leave you with one of the hottest women on Earth?

This is the first blog post I think I've ever written, although I do microblog quite a bit on Twitter. (http://www.twitter.com/evilcan) This first entry is going to be my general thoughts on the site, but I might do a whole bio/introduction entry later.

Although Giant Bomb is of course experiencing some huge growing pains, I think this site has a lot of potential. I like the wiki aspect of the pages, but I hope the moderation doesn't get in the way of the process too much. For example, how does it work if people submit multiple edits to a page before either of the edits get approved. Does the edit that gets posted later automatically get priority?

 I think if enough people were using the service and were actively trying to make the Wiki as accurate as possible that it could turn into a type of scenario that has worked well for Wikipedia. That is, rely on the users to moderate the content. I'm not talking about giving certain users "moderator" status but allow everyone's edits to show immediately and allow the users to police themselves.  Eventually the accurate information rises to the surface IF (and this is a pretty big if) there is a high enough ratio of good editors to vandals/bad spellers. If there are enough eyes looking out for vandalism or bad information, there is going to be a good chance this information gets reverted. This works on a site like Wikipedia, I think, because the average age of users is pretty high. The average age of a user of this site is going to be much lower (I would think) than Wikipedia, which may cause the good editor to vandal ratio to be much lower.

Besides the wiki, I kind of like the fact that this site is kinda like the social networking site for gamers. It's kinda like Digg/Twitter for geeks, Facebook for the cool kids, MySpace for the pre-teens, and Giant Bomb for the gamers. One feature that I'd like that I don't see anywhere is kind of game collection system done right. A kind of page you could go to to see all the games that you own. Gamefaqs has a system like this but it really sucks. Of course the site has been pretty slow and I have gotten a couple of error pages but that's to be expected on the first day of a beta test. Besides that, I think the site is looking pretty snazzy.
*copies and pastes post into Notepad just in case the site decides to eat it*