Just a reminder: Brutal Legend comes out today, for those of us who weren’t at Gamestop at midnight.
(No, yours truly was not among them. One, I needed sleep last night. Two, I don’t have $60 to drop on a game at the moment. Household repairs have a way of derailing the ‘entertainment’ section of the budget. I will start posting more about my experiences with the game when I can afford to get it.)
The video for We Weren’t Born to Follow is up on bonjovi.com. (I spent the weekend working around the house, and I don’t really want their feed cluttering up Outlook or my live bookmarks, so I didn’t get it that way.)
Fortunately, the video includes the new solo, and with Richie’s rework it seems to have been cleaned up quite nicely. Even with an actual solo, though, I still think Jon’s yell of “Guitar!” right before is kind of ridiculous, and it still strikes me as being something more suited to a Poison song.
At least this time the primary video of the band is in color, and the black and white is restricted primarily to the marginal images. Since many of the chosen images of “nonfollowers” are only available in black and white, this was more of a necessity than an artistic decision. However, the inclusion and use of the black and white video footage seems to have been carefully considered and is well-balanced. (I’d still like to see Bon Jovi go for a whole album without using black and white for any of the videos.)
Jon and Richie are both looking good in the video. Richie had been looking rounder again, but he seems to have slimmed back down. Also, being happier seems to work for him; his face doesn’t look anywhere near as drawn as it had for awhile. That alone makes Richie look much younger. Jon’s hair in this video is better than the poofy thing he had going on in the TBS ad. It could still be longer, though, but that’s my personal preference.
Also, does anyone else find it ironic that they titled the song “We Weren’t Born to Follow” and then set up the video like a rooftop concert, which is only one of the biggest cliches in rock that I know of? Couldn’t they have come up with a setting for the video that was slightly more original? I realize that by now somebody has filmed a music video in almost every conceivable location, but there has to have been somewhere more original where they could have filmed this.
(Or Hugh, depending on what year we’re talking about.)
You can play bass in the single-player mode of Rock Band 2, but I usually stick with guitar instead. I think it’s force of habit from playing the older editions of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, where there was no option to play bass in the single-player mode. (Well, that and the character that I’m using in Rock Band 2 right now is one that I created specifically to look like Richie, right down to the cowboy hat and the double-neck guitar.)
Well, yesterday I decided to play some songs on the bass for something different. I haven’t really played much Rock Band or Guitar Hero lately–I had been spending a lot of time playing Fable or finishing up the Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion. The problem is that if I don’t play for awhile, I lose the ability to play on Hard and have to work my way back up to it. I figured that switching to bass for awhile would change things up a bit without changing the difficulty level.
I figured that “Livin’ On a Prayer” would be a good track to start with. The guitar part isn’t particularly tough on that song. That turned out to be a very bad assumption to make. I based my assumption on the guitar part–which is actually mostly fingering along with the talkbox–and not on the bass in the song. To be perfectly honest, I never really paid much attention at all to the bass line in Prayer at all. That was a mistake.
The bass line to Prayer is the key to the whole song–something that I didn’t realize until I’d started. I usually gauge difficulty in Rock Band by how bad a particular song makes my arm hurt by the time it’s done. The bass part of Prayer definitely ranks up there on the list of tracks that can accomplish that.
In short, I would up with a whole new appreciation for what both Alec did and Hugh does when Bon Jovi plays this song by the time that I was done.
Unfortunately, the pop-culture reference that popped into my head the first time I saw the cover was the logo from The Ring. Not sure why, other than the obvious shape and the monochrome palette. Really, did they have to be so literal in translating the title of the album to the cover? I realize that Bon Jovi has done some extremely obvious album covers before (Slippery When Wet, anyone?) and some extremely poor ones, but fortunately this one doesn’t fall into the latter category.
From a design perspective, it seems fairly solid, if obvious, in my estimation. With the size of CD covers, and now the minuscule screens of MP3 players, it’s a good idea to have extremely clean, strong images as cover art. While the image itself is in keeping Bon Jovi’s ongoing overuse of black and white photography, it is at least a good photo. The tonal range is well balanced, and the exposure appears to have been carefully controlled. The end result is exactly the kind of cover art that I like when I’m listening to music on my Zune; strong images like this one make it easy to identify the current album in a glance.
All told, it’s a decent effort that accomplishes exactly what it set out to do: provide a clear, identifiable image to promote and sell the album.
I finally got my hands on the Brutal Legend demo yesterday. (I only have a Xbox Live Silver account right now, so I had to wait.)
The opening sequence was awesome. I had already seen it in one of the gameplay demo videos that had been posted over the last several months. However, being able to watch it on my TV instead of on a grainy web video on my monitor was awesome. I also turned on the blood and gore and turned off the swear filter, just to see what was filtered out of the demo video. As far as I can tell, the swear filter is going to end up being more of a matter of a personal mood–the game is actually funnier with it on. The blood and gore is going to end up being dependent on my mood too–seeing the heads pop off of the members of Kabbage Boy was funny, but slightly gratuitous.
The basic single-player battle system seemed to work well for a hack and slash player like myself. I always have trouble avoiding hitting my allies in other games–big battles in Oblivion, for instance, were always a problem for me. However, the AI on the allies in this game seem to be good at staying out of my way. The controls were simple and relatively intuitive, especially for the guitar-based magical attacks.
I did have some trouble controlling the car, but I believe I may have been attempting to steer with the wrong thumbstick for some reason. I’ll have to play the demo through again to see if that is the case. It may take me awhile to get the hang of driving, but the problem that I had seemed to be all from mishandling of the controller and not the game itself. As long as I had the thumbsticks under control, the car itself, along with its steering and acceleration system, was also simple enough to handle.
Unfortunately, the demo didn’t answer the biggest question that I had–the prominence of the real-time strategy elements of the game. I never really enjoyed RTS games, mostly because I never really got to be good at them. This still leaves some questions for me as to whether I really want to purchase this game. If there is a stronger RTS element to the game itself, I most likely won’t enjoy it as much.
Artist: Bon Jovi
Album: 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong
I haven’t done a random song in awhile, so this time I actually picked one of my favorites, rather than letting the shuffle on my Zune do the job of selecting it.
This song has been one of my favorites from the day that I bought the box set. The box set was different from a lot of the albums that I’ve purchased. I didn’t listen to this one on my way home from the store; I wanted to savor it.
This song immediately stood out to me. Something about this song always calls to mind “The House of the Rising Sun”, another of my favorite songs. This is some of Jon’s best work as a songwriter. While infidelity is a topic that Jon and the band have mined many times, this is one of their best outings in that territory. (Actually, infidelity seems to be a theme that Bon Jovi consistently hits out of the park on every attempt–Bed of Roses, Damned, Dirty Little Secret…) Not only are the lyrics instantly clear that this relationship is an illicit one, they are wonderfully poetic and expressive as well. Every line captures a little bit more of the emotional struggle against the temptation of the relationship.
Also, this is one of the few Bon Jovi songs to really use the more gravelly sounds of Jon’s voice to good advantage. Many of the band’s songs are great in spite of that, or the sound of Jon’s voice doesn’t make much of a difference in the sound of the song. This song isn’t like that. It takes what could be considered flaws and uses them to heighten the emotional power of the song. The raspy sections of the song only underscore the emotional turmoil of the song.
This is just one more Bon Jovi song that should have been released as a single in its own right. Songs like Temptation are the ones that showcase the depth that Jon and the band are capable of bringing to their work, and yet these are never released in the American market. In many ways, it’s almost as though the band has a double life–there’s the catalog of Bon Jovi songs that everyone knows, and it’s the catalog of a party band. And then there’s the catalog that is well known only to the fans–and that’s the catalog of a band of immense depth and powerful songwriting.
If they released more of these songs as singles in the United States, I have no doubt that both public and critical perception of the band would be completely different.