To get your very own picture next to your comments, the first thing you need to do is register if you haven’t already.   Then, head over to www.gravatar.com and create an account using the same email you registered with us.   After that, all you need to do is pick a picture, from your computer or somewhere on the internet, and Gravatar will allow you to resize it… Then.. you’re done.  Everything else works automagically.  I’m trying to customize the code a little, so I would appreciate it if everyone would give this a shot.   Gravatar is owned by the same company who makes WordPress, so rest assured nobody’s gonna put you on a spam list.   I have site caching turned off at the moment for testing reasons, but in the future it might take a few minutes for your icon to show up.   Oh, I picked Jen’s picture for her while I was testing so don’t blame her for my bad taste

[Edit Mike]:  While I’m testing this, it would be helpful if people would sign up and just post a test comment to this post.  Thanks

The Salem News has a great article on how Guitar Hero is becoming popular at some of the local bars.  Johnathan Phelps writes:

“Although the weekly tournament started just a few weeks ago at Sylvan Street Grille, it has quickly become a popular event, picking up on a trend that has taken hold in bars and clubs from Boston to L.A. Locally, Dodge Street Bar & Grill in Salem and The Pickled Onion in Beverly also offer “Guitar Hero” nights.

“So far, we’ve had a great turnout here,” said Vinny Polcari, general manager of Sylvan Street Grille. “We’ve held other video game competitions like (arcade) skiing, but ‘Guitar Hero’ really adds to the bar atmosphere.”

Jen and I have been in contact with several Central Florida bars about possibly starting up a ‘Guitar Hero/Rock Band’ night and we’re interested in your experiences if you’ve ever attended anything like this.  Oh, and if you have a bar local to us and are interested, let us know.

Edit:  Discussions closed.  Thanks for all the great questions!

The fine folks at Harmonix have granted us an interview and we’re in the process of putting together the questions. Jen and I are really psyched about it and were wondering….. What would our readers ask? So I asked Harmonix if they would mind fielding some community questions and of course, they said ’sure’. So use that little comment box below and post some interesting questions… The three we like best (We are judge and jury on this one folks…. ) will be asked. Just a word of advice… I’m pretty sure asking the question ‘When are we going to be able to play ________ on Rock Band’ won’t be considered.

Continue Reading “Upcoming Interview: Ask Harmonix!” »

Hey all - I’ve just posted a question in the forums that I’m hoping you guys will chime in on. I’m cute but ignorant on all the differences. Would you all head to the forums when you have a minute and shout out your thoughts?

Console War

Rock on.

Jen

The forums are now online and can be accessed from the top menu bar. To celebrate, we’ve started a ‘Pretty Rocker’s’ thread. The thread can be found here, feel free to contribute. And it would be safer to think of the thread as NSFW. Your comments/feedback are welcome.

Edit: I’ve added the ability to use BBCode tags instead of HTML tags in the forums.. No more messy HTML to worry about. -Mike

By mike@rockgamer.com

So last night, just about the time I was accepting the fact that it was going to be a nice quiet Friday night, Inga calls. She said the magic words ‘Are you ready to rock’. I won’t tell you what my exact response was, but it does rhyme with “Yuck Fyah”. I had presumed that Inga broke down and bought the setup, cause she’s almost as much of an addict as Jen and I are… Typically, we all rock at Jen’s, cause it’s a central location and her living room works good for it and can handle a good 6 or 7 people comfortably. I hadn’t been to Inga’s pad yet so after a little Google map work I printed out the directions and headed out. Ang and Jen were already there, along with Inga’s 7 dogs. One of them had this third eye and obviously had beans for lunch, while another growled at me so I had to use my mad ‘Dog Whisperer’ skillz till he submitted. They already had Guitar Hero II rolling, Jen was wailing to Free Bird. People started flocking in.. Hanging out.. Enormous amounts of beer started creeping it’s way inside the house. Damn my broken toe! Not only can’t I drum, but I couldn’t drink cause 1) I live 30 minutes away and 2) Beer and broken toe medicine makes Mikey a sleepy rocker. Within 30 minutes the house was full of beer, pizza, dogs, and people. We had the token new guy (Raj or Rodge, Jen will edit this when she reads it [insert: its Raj FYI - Jen *wink*]) who’s virginity we took on the Guitar Hero II tutorial. But he was eyeing the drums and we switched to Rock Band. I usually tote my Xbox hard drive around be cause I have all the DLC and didn’t think that Inga would have downloaded it yet, but it turned out that Jen just toted her gear.. I should have known by her trademark blue drumsticks.

And we rocked. And we rolled. We sang. Instant, spontaneous party. I woke up this morning to find Jen hacked my twitter account (are my passwords that transparent?) and noted that we were rocking… So I thought I’d post a question to our readers: How do you roll? Do you get together? Do you play online with strangers? Do you play online with friends? Solo? Post your comments. We wanna know.

Peace.