"Oh my God, I am the winner"

The title of this post (a quote from the American cinematic classic, Billy Madison) was my wife's idea and is referring to the fact that I came in 1st in yesterday's "Guitar Hero III - Frets of Fury" tournament. Yes, that's right. I am officially a rock god. Ok, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to divulge that I didn't have the guts to enter into the "expert" tournament. After witnessing some of those experts warming up, I knew that at least a few of them would destroy me. So, I entered the "hard" tournament.

This is how it worked: there were four simultaneous tournaments going on, one for each difficulty level (easy, medium, hard, and expert). The tournaments were bracket style, so you were matched up against one other person and as you won matches you moved up the bracket. When called for a competition, each player picked a song that they felt they were strong in. Then, the pair played through both songs. If one person won both songs, they were declared the winner of that challenge. If the score was split, then each person picked a second song that they felt good about. A coin was flipped, and then the winner's song was used for a battle mode. The winner of the battle mode won the match and advanced up the bracket.

I had a rough start and thought that I was going to be eliminated right away. I chose my song, ZZ Top's "La Grange," and was handily beat. It's bad times if you get beat on the song you picked for yourself. But then my opponent picked Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" and I really nailed that one...I had a 412 note streak...and I never lost again for the rest of the tournament. What did I win? Fortune and glory. But more specifically I won fifty dollars, a Guitar Hero tee shirt, some various GH stuff, and a PS2 game. Not bad! The guy who won second place in the hard tournament (his name was Chad) won some money and prizes, too. As we were collecting our prizes, he looked over at mine and was a bit puzzled by one of the prizes. He said, "What's that?". It was still in the plastic so I opened it up and said, "Huh...it's a Guitar Hero wristband." He looked at me and said, "Well, now you can throw away all of your other wristbands."

In other Guitar Hero news, the official trailer for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith has been released. It looks amazing, and I repeat my assertion that I will need to rent an apartment for at least 1-2 months following its release in June so that I can devote the appropriate amount of time to it. It's been revealed that only about 60 percent of the songs will be Aerosmith tunes, which is discouraging, but expected, since they would like the game to appeal to non-Aerosmith fans as well. However, they've leaked a few of the Aerosmith songs that will be included and I'm encouraged that they're including some really obscure fan favorites like "Make It" and "Uncle Salty".