Mike Pirnat

If I could have finished Lego Rock Band in a single evening without permanently melting my wrists, I would have. What I expected to treat as a glorified song pack and simply export to my 360’s hard drive ended up being one hell of a fun standalone game, worthy of both the Rock Band and Lego names. There’s a lot to love in Lego Rock Band–here are a few highlights:

• Never fail out of songs. If your audience meter drops into “fail-out” territory you just start losing points from your total, but are given a special recovery mode that gives you a chance to claw your way back into positive territory.
• The drum pedal is optional. You can turn on a modifier that will let you completely ignore the drum pedal. About time, and definitely a good idea for getting families playing.
• Super-easy mode. This will probably be a hit for the younger players.
• Points = Cash. The points you accumulate translate directly into Lego studs, the coin of the realm in all Lego games.
• Fan loyalty. I didn’t lose any fans after turning in a 3-star performance after a long string of 5-star shows; this should make this aspect of the game less frustrating, especially to younger players.
• Fun venues. The venues are fun and imaginative; my favorites so far are the pirate ship and the haunted mansion, and there are strong implications we’ll eventually be playing in space.
• Cut albums. There are special setlist challenges where you first pick out album art, name the album, and choose songs. Once you’ve played the set, it’s immortalized in your record collection. If you’ve ever said to yourself “hey, that’d make a great name for a record,” your moment has finally arrived.
• Your characters are used in the cutscenes. This is just plain cool, and a nice payoff for taking the time to customize your minifig band members.
• Whimsy. The joy and whimsy and sense of humor of the other Lego games produced by Travelers Tales pervade Lego Rock Band, from big sight gags to amusing little details.
• Famous Lego musicians. David Bowie and Freddie Mercury are freaking awesome as minifigs. Seriously.
• Songs that are party/spouse-friendly. My wife often bows out of playing Rock Band with me because she doesn’t think she knows many of the songs. Last night I kept catching her singing along to things from the couch, so that’s a good sign. Okay, so there’s still a bunch of songs I’d never heard before, but I’m going to blame that on the fact that I haven’t really been listening to the radio since 1995ish.
• DLC. You’ve got access to a certain “family-friendly” subset of your existing downloads, and there’s a “family-friendly” version of the music store. The identification of what’s “family-friendly” seems to fall a bit on the conservative side, but I suspect this will be tuned as time goes on.
• Customize your “rock den” (aka menu screens). You’ll unlock various items throughout the game that you can use to decorate your “rock den”–hang posters on the walls, set a tuba next to your guitar case, customize your lights and jukebox… It’s a nice bit of extra detail that feels very Lego.

I have only a couple of minor quibbles:

• Difficulty ratings have changed again. Finally, proof that “Behind Blue Eyes” is not a measly 2-dot difficulty on guitar. Still, it would be nice if the RB family of games could report the difficulty level consistently.
• Some pretty hard songs at the beginning of the game. I naïvely jumped right into playing the first song of the game on Expert… Turns out it’s rated at 4 dots of difficulty on guitar! Ouch!
• Repetition of some songs. In a couple places, you’ll be presented with a special rock challenge… where you start by playing the song you literally just finished playing. It’s not common, but when it happens it’s really irritating, especially if you weren’t that into the song to begin with.

Anyway. I’m overall very pleased with it and can’t wait to play through the rest of the game. After all, I have to find out what Freddie Mercury’s doing on that flying saucer!

lego, video-games

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Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

Our cats have so completely taken over my desk chair that they are collapsing into one another into a sort of feline snuggle singularity, an adorable two-headed mass of sleeping fur so dense that only cuteness can escape. This makes it somewhat difficult to do much of anything in the proximity of my computer.

…

In other news, I am now hooked on Rome (thanks to the local library), am enjoying Lego Star Wars 2 (thanks to a CompUSA store closing discount), and I am now included on the official Planet Python feed (yippee!!).

cats, geekery, lego, photos, star-wars, tv, video-games

A day of bush-pruning and art-show-wandering has left me in the mood to close some browser tabs and have a happy little link-o-rama for June. Joy!

First off, how about 101 versions of “Stairway to Heaven”? And if your ears aren’t bleeding too much from that, let’s chase that down with the best 50 video game ending songs.

While we’re on the subject of “top-N” lists, check out the top 10 strangest Lego creations; Han Solo frozen in carbonite looks pretty badass to me. (Now where could I put that?)

Thanks to some clever video editing, we can finally settle the debate about how it’d go down if the Enterprise tangled with the evil Galactic Empire. And even though Gnarls Barkley isn’t really my cup of tea, I have to say that Chewbacca on drums totally kicks ass.

lego, links, music, star-wars, video-games

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Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

Saw this at the grocery store today and had to document it for posterity: waffles you can connect like LEGO bricks! Truly, a concept both utterly brilliant and at the same time deeply frightening.

LEGO my Eggo!

food, humor, lego, photos

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Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

Finally got off my butt (and promptly back onto it) and built my LEGO AT-AT. That kind of says it all, I think.

There are a couple of other photos over at my Flickr account that give a better overall representation of the thing, but I kind of preferred this “artsy” perspective on it.

lego, photos, star-wars

For ages, I have pooh-poohed Joss Whedon’s “Firefly”, thinking it a silly trifle of network TV, the kind of thing that can’t stand up to “real” sci-fi. “It’s no ‘B5′,” said I, despite how my coworkers tried to change my mind. Then the trailer for the movie arrived, and I started to wonder what I’d been missing all this time. And then I bumped into the Serenity in LEGO, and I thought, Damn, that’s pretty neat. There might be something to this… And then even my mom told me it was outstanding.

So, I figured I ought to watch at least a little of the show before the movie comes out, so that I’m not completely clueless among the throng of browncoats who will surely be in attendance. A coworker has been trying to remember for about three or four weeks to bring in her DVD’s. Finally, the waiting got to be too much, so I broke down and bought the damn thing.

And, I have to say, I was pretty much dead wrong about this show. It rocks! Snappy dialogue, great FX, good stories, a fascinating blend of cultures, top-notch acting… In a way, it’s a lot like Cowboy Bebop, only without the jazz music. And completely, utterly addicting–we’ve watched over half the series since about eight o’clock last night.

So — “Firefly” fans — I admit it! I was wrong! It’s a freaking great show!

firefly, geekery, lego, links, movies, retail-therapy, science-fiction, serenity, tv

The lovely folks at LEGO have brightened my day with what is a strong contender for Best Thing Ever: using their software, you can design and order custom LEGO models! The icing on the cake? There’s a Mac version as well as Windows. (Sorry, no Linux version, but two out of three is a huge step up from what I’m used to.)

I am also greatly amused and intrigued by Dance Dance Immolation, which seems to have raised the DDR bar to the point where it would actually be interesting to play.

…

In unrelated news, I’ve started looking at and playing with Aquarium, yet another of the diverse biosphere of Python web application frameworks. Seems kind of interesting, though I’ve not gotten deep enough into it yet to know if I will love it or hate it.

geekery, lego, links, macintosh, python

Here’s how I spent (wasted?) the end of 2003.

I finally built my LEGO Star Destroyer. While listening to the BBC Lord of the Rings series.

It took the better part of two days.

The third day, December 31, last day of 2003, was spent producing this:

• The Small Version [QuickTime, 04:02, 9.0MB]
• The Large Version [QuickTime, 04:02, 45MB]

The small version is the least painful download, but the text (especially the credits) is nigh-unreadable. The sound kind of sucks on the small version too. I put it all together with iMovie, which I really hadn’t had a decent excuse to play with thus far. I am a little disappointed with certain aspects of the software (hard to get decent-quality output that’s a reasonable size to post online; “centered” titles are anything but; scrolling blocks of text have no limit on input but will only actually render so many characters of output; and things sometimes preview differently than they are actually rendered, like the rolling credits that all line up nicely in the preview and look like garbage once rendered…), but it’s free, and it served its purpose of letting me be a complete and utter geek, and in the end, I guess that’s what’s important. I suppose by the time Liz and I start having kids, I’ll need to get FinalCut Pro or something a little more prime-time.

If you’d rather not spend your days downloading huge, self-indulgent QuickTime movies, here are some highlights:

My thumbs still kind of hurt.

I think I will be taking a break from LEGOs for a while.

Yeah.

Probably a good idea.

geekery, holidays, lego, lord-of-the-rings, star-wars

I hate being materialistic…

But Lego makes it so damn easy!!

Behold, and weep for my hopelessly bourgeois soul.

Sigh.

lego, retail-therapy, star-wars

It’s time for an update, since I haven’t posted in a few days. Let’s see…

Had a nice little early birthday party thing on Saturday night. There were twelve of us once everyone arrived — Jim, gieves, Mandy, Don, Liz’s friend Talitha (or however she spells it), AG.com’s Julie (sort of like “TV’s Julie”, but oh so much more glamorous), Angie, Brent, H2 and her husband Bob, and (obviously) Liz and myself. We dined on various tasty munchies, including the infamous Rocky River “bar cheese”, a gloopy cheese dip rich with horseradish. We had some nice bottles of wine, though not as many as we expected. A rousing game of Cranium. Good times were had by all!

We decided to have the party a week earlier than we otherwise would. This has totally confused my dear friend Cathe, from whom I received a guilt-ridden email about how awful she felt about missing my birthday, despite the fact that it’s really not until next Monday. To clarify, we had wanted to have the party on the first of March, but we’ll be out of town to attend my grandfather’s funeral. And we can’t postpone it until the eighth, since we’ll be in Ann Arbor to see the RSC. So one week early is better than two or three weeks late, in my opinion!

Gift highlights, if you must know, include the Lego Imperial Star Destroyer — at 3100 pieces, the largest Lego set ever released — thanks mom-in-law Anne! — and a replica of the One Ring from H2, to caress during meetings and publicly call “my precioussssss…”. I can’t wait!

We finally got around to setting up our Frigits on Friday night. They are the ultimate cat toy. Set just one marble going, and the cat is upstairs and watching attentively in seconds. I’ll post some pictures sometime.

Sunday, I thought I’d go out and take advantage of Triple Points Weekend at Suncoast, and maybe do some errands. But what looked like “just an inch” of snow on our driveway turned out to be six inches (more in some places). I am a pretty miserable judge of snow depth from the inside of the house. Once we dug out from the snow, we went out to the mall, where the selection at Suncoast totally sucked, and I got all disappointed and cranky. At that point, we forgot about the other errands we had been planning and promptly went back home to ignore the outside world. This allowed us to munch on leftovers and catch up on Futurama, Batman Beyond, and so forth. Liz bid on (and won!) an auction for a Chilly Willy model cel. And I finally got around to seeing Heavenly Creatures, which I’d TiVo’d earlier in the week. What a charming, beautiful, and downright odd little movie! I had no idea what to expect from it, and was amused, frightened, shocked, and touched by it. Highly recommended.

What else? Hmm.

It was clear and warm on Thursday and Friday. I delighted in being able to drive my shiny, clean car to work on Friday morning. By midday, the clouds had come back, and Saturday was entirely rainy, so much so that nearly all of the snow melted. Then, as I alluded to above, we got slammed with snow in the wee hours of Sunday, with another round of snow today, just in time to make the morning drive miserable. Why haven’t I moved somewhere warm yet?

This week I need to get my driver’s license renewed (it expires on Monday!), and I need to buy a green shirt for Saturday. Since Grandpa was red/green colorblind, the family has decided to wear reds and greens to the grave. (The completely unsubstantiated and unscientific but delightfully sentimental theory being that he couldn’t see those colors in this life, but can finally appreciate them…)

Oh, I remember now!

The guy who used to own pirnat.com, pirnat.net, and pirnat.org has let them expire, so I bought them today, as I should have years ago. Hopefully I will put them to better use than he did — which shouldn’t be hard, because he’d just left them pointed to stupid domain parking pages for the past three years or so. I feel an urge to get out my Daffy Duck voice and shout, “Mine mine mine! Down down down! Mine mine mine!”

And in conclusion, I would like to say that I totally need one of these.

birthday, cars, food, friends, games, geekery, lego, liz, star-wars, tv, weather, wine