ION Rock Band 2 drum rocker kit review

by Stepto
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I’ll take a moment from downer stuff to review the ION Rock Band 2 drum rocker kit, which I finally got around to putting together yesterday and myself and Rochto gave it a three hour break in session.

Short review: Playing the Ion Drum Rocker kit will make you never want to play any other instrument in Rock Band. It’s that much fun.

Long review:

I didn’t think a controller could really fundamentally alter a music game. Even going from the Guitar Hero guitar to Rock Band guitar was an improvement, but I wouldn’t say it was a radical one and even came with some downsides. The Ion Drum Rocker fixes every single flaw with existing drum kits, and totally alters the experience of drum playing. And since it’s compatible w/ RB1, RB2, and GH:WT it may be the last drum kit you will ever need in this generation.

First of all though, the thing is super pricey, $344 after shipping. When it arrives it’s a huge monstrosity of a box, bigger than the entire Rock Band 1 bundle box. The unboxing experience is actually excellent as all sub parts of the kit are individually boxed inside. Waste of cardboard? Yes. Easier to unpack and setup? Yes. The kit comes with all the tools you need to assemble, which is really just one small socket wrench. Everything else is done with adjustable thumbscrew clamps. The kit is essentially seven “pipe fitting” framework pieces: two floor, two vertical, one high center, and two “arms”. There are the four drum pads, 2 cymbal arms, 2 cymbals, a center “brain/control pad”, the big metal bass foot pedal (it’s like twice the size of the RB one) seven cords, and thicker than RB1 drumsticks.

Set aside an hour to build the kit. It’s not that it’s complex, in fact it’s very simple. But it’s large and heavy and the wealth of ways you can space, tilt, and lay out the pads requires some patience to get it right. Oh and the cord experience isn’t bad at all if you do what I did and forego the twist ties and just wrap the cord around the support bars over and over again. It makes the kit end up looking a bit “Borg-like” but was much faster to get done and still looks nice. And as a bonus you can be really flexible with how you mount the Brain. You can mount it way high or way low to make sure you can’t possibly hit it while drumming. I went with mounting it low. It’s perfectly usable and physically impossible to strike while drumming.

Once completed, the kit is roughly twice the size of the RB1 kit. Pictures don’t reflect how big the thing really is. The pads are roughly 10inch diameter and the cymbals are 12 inch. It’s also far heavier and sturdier than the other kit. Be warned, this isn’t a “portable” kit nor does it stow away at all like the rb1 kit. You can disassemble the leg pipes and remove the cymbals and store it that way, just be aware that setting it back up will take 10 minutes.

Here are pics for size reference:

The kit, with a controller as reference. They are much larger than pics show.

BIG!

I wear a size 12.5 shoe. Here’s the bass pedal next to my foot:

BIG SERIOUSLY

Here’s the kit, post calibration, sized with a RB1 kit (we put colored felt on our pads to reduce noise:

OFFICIALLY LARGER THAN MY JOHNSON

Perspective here is still a bit skewed but you can see its a big kit.

Lastly, me doing "Give it Away Now":

OMG I'M HUGE

After setting everything up, place your drum chair/throne in place and practice hitting the pads from your normal position before you actually plug it in. This is because I set my pads up the way I thought they looked good and how I was “supposed” to. This resulted in me realizing I had set it up all wrong for actual playing, I kept hitting the pad rims instead of the pad. I tilted the pads much lower towards me and spaced everything out. I had my wife do the same routine and we made minor adjustments such that we got it to where we both didn’t need to change anything other than chair height to play effectively. This is key, because positioning things takes some effort, it’s not as simple as the RB1 kit of just raising or lowering the height of the kit. If you take the time initially to “calibrate” the kit to your posture, etc, you will find your first song you play is going to be one hell of an eye opener for you. If you wait, you’ll hit the pad rims etc making the first song more of a “oops gotta reposition” experience. The bass pedal is heavy and sturdy and has carpet spikes! Yay no more moving bass pedal!

I plugged them in and proceeded to drum RB2 Hungry Like the Wolf on medium.

ZOMG.

First of all the thing is much much quieter. Second of all, like my experience with the Guitar Hero World Tour kit, cymbals make all the difference in the drumming experience. Lastly because the pads are so large and you completely control your angle and access to them, I five starred medium Hungry Like The Wolf @ 98% accuracy on a sight read. I’d never drummed that song in Rock Band 2 before, and I *barely* passed the medium drum tour in Rock Band. I’m a horrible drummer, but this kit completely changed my skill level. Big pads, access to cymbals, it’s like a night and day experience. I actually bought the kit because while I do bass and guitar and drums and vocals, my wife only likes to drum so this was kind of a surprise present for her. Once she got behind them, it was plain she loved them. And too, once she got used to right hand flick to the cymbal instead of altering an arm pattern to hit a green pad she found she was nailing songs she found too hard before.

At the price I cannot recommend that the average person who likes RB as a party game get this.

But if you, say, have both RB1 and RB2 and a lot of DLC, and enjoy drumming, this may be the first time you spend more than the price of a console on a game peripheral and actually get your money’s worth of enjoyment out of it.

I love it. I give it 48 stars.

Biko

by Stepto
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When I was 5, just after my fifth birthday in fact, Stephen Biko was brutally beaten to death by South African police. In an effort to cover up their crime, while he was comatose they kept him alive just long enough to later transfer him to a hospital 700 miles away, by road, where he would die on Sept 12th, 1977.

From summer of 1987 to summer 1988 I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. Up until that point I had grown up in integrated schools in Dallas, Texas. I was so ignorant of racial tension from my time in the Dallas school district that when we arrived in Little Rock, tearing me away from my lifelong friends, a further insult was that I had to be bussed 20 miles away from where we lived to go to my first year of high school because Little Rock was still under forced integration.

Joe T. Robinson high school. Located in Pulaski county and a bastion of ironic racism. The white kids in my school didn’t hate black people because of their skin color. They hated them because of the bus ride they were forced to take for 50 minutes every single day. Ironic because the bussing had to be done to counter white flight. A lot of the black kids were bussed in too.

I consumed movies when I was in Little Rock. I was too young to even have a learners permit so all I had my Atari 130xe, a book store, and a movie theater a walk away.

There was nascent cable TV too. we had 30 whole channels. It was on MTV, back when they used to have music, that I saw the video for Peter Gabriel’s Biko, re-released interspersed with video clips from Richard Attenburough’s new film, Cry Freedom. I was fascinated.

I’ve grown up in a world of mixed old and new racism. My schools were reflective of the overal demographics of the population. My friend set likewise. The word "nigger" to me was a comical colloquialism. I do not mean by that to dismiss its hurtful intent to those it is used on by white people. I mean to point out when I heard it, my mind didn’t snap to skin color. It snapped to the person using it being out of date. Hey you kids get off of my lawn, type of stuff.

Being red headed and pale skinned, I got used to being called Ghosty, or Whitey by my black friends growing up.

In seventh grade, I once falsely injected race into a schoolyard dispute. Larry Thomas, the African American star athlete of my class, had committed what I thought was a foul during a pretty close volleyball game where he and I were both playing front line center. He’d reached into the net during a set for me to spike the ball, in my opinion. The foul wasn’t called, the coach, Coach Spikes, said we were both going for the ball, no foul. Coach Spikes was African American as well.

I stated, petulantly, that if Larry wasn’t black the foul would have been called, and slapped the net back into Larry’s face.

With a swiftness and power I still remember to this day Larry drove any sense of ever playing the race card right out of my mind by intersecting his fist, through my stomach, into my spinal cord.

Larry didn’t hit me because of my comment. Larry hit me because I slapped the net in his face. It was Coach Spikes who picked my crumpled weeping white ass off the floor and directed me to the showers for disrespecting another player.

I learned a lot about the lessons of race relations in one moment, with no real scars to show for it, on a padded volleyball court in a relatively affluent area of a metropolitan city in the south.

Steve Biko tried to teach it to a nation and they killed him for it.

I watched that music video on MTV video and was physically compelled to understand what I was watching. The clips from the movie made little sense to me. A place where slavery, in effect, still existed? Really?

I saw the movie the day after it opened. Soon after I had bought Biko and Asking for Trouble.

So today, more than three decades later, I wanted to point out the life of an extraordinary man. Someone whose words have impacted me, and made me understand so much more about my fellow humans, and the crimes we, all of us, tend to inflict upon each other when power overrides reason.

From Steve Biko’s trial:

Judge: Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black.
Steve Biko: Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.

The judge replied, "Precisely."

We all have a 9.11 story.

by Stepto
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Labor day weekend, 2001 my wife and I went to Boston to join a gathering of Internet friends. I drove up from Dallas, because it was a side of the country I rarely got to visit, and Rochto flew in to Boston Logan Airport on Sept first, 2001. We had a great weekend. We saw Humpback whales, went to a Blue Man Group show, visited salem ("MORE…..WEIGHT.") and I made gumbo for my friends.

The morning of the third, I drove Rochto to Logan. We got out of the car and went through the airport security. At the time Logan was being basically completely redone because of the Big Dig. I watched as construction workers in yellow hard hats bypassed airport security and metal detectors easily with just a wave and a tip of their hard hat.

"If anyone has a hard hat on the plane," I joked to Rochto, "fake illness and get off the plane"

I watched from the window as her flight took off. It was early, I hopped in my car and headed out from Boston.

My route took me by New York City.

Ignoring the GPS suggestion to take the route around I said "fuck it" and decided to drive through Manhattan. My car at the time was a 1999 Porsche Boxster, an artifact of Microsoft stock price during the .com bubble. I took the top down and drove through the city, all the way to the tip to see the towers. I stared at them while at a red light, rising above me. Magnificent.

I left the city and moved on to continue my trip back home. I took my time getting back, reaching Dallas on September 7th.

"A plane hit the world trade center."

When you hear that, at 8am in Dallas (where it was 9am in NYC) your first impulse is a small plane. An accident, surely. I’d just walked in. A co-worker popped up from her cube and spread the news. We were due to conduct a postmortem on Windows XP training development. First thing I thought of was those towers rising above me. Instead we watched clustered around the TV’s installed at the Las Colinas Microsoft campus as another plane hit. Towers fell. And, unknown to us at the moment, heroes struck the first blow in the war on terror. What would they think of our country now?

Later in the day, the next thing I thought of was my wife on a plane out of Logan, source of two of the jets that day. The place I’d made the flippant joke that security was lax for construction.

All my life I’d lived within the cone of sound of DFW airport. With the planes grounded, our house just three miles away was silent. I felt the sixth sense of a greater or lesser path for our society, and had no way to articulate it, or even to see that my underlying unease was more than the simple crime of what had happened to America.

I’ve said it before. There is an old adage that a liberal is just a conservative that has never been mugged. On 9.11 the entire country got mugged.

I’m tired of having the shit scared out of me to make my decisions in life. Who I vote for, what measure should pass. I’m tired of thinking about pre 9.11 and yearning for that time and people saying that yearning is naive.

I cannot imagine for a moment that Bin Laden is displeased with what we have become. I think, in fact, he is extremely pleased. We’re looking over our shoulders. Our freedoms are far less than before. Every election since has been based not on who can best serve us, but who can best protect us. The checks and balances of our government are off kilter. Our military, stretched. A wound left on lower Manhattan remains bare and, to a certain extent, still bleeding.

There are those who say a return to the less paranoid days of pre-9.11 are naive. That kissing my wife before she actually boards the plane as opposed to at a line an hour before that she must arrive early to get through is ignorance of evil. That questioning the false premise of the invasion of another nation means I’m weak on national security.

That thinking it’s wrong for our government to create far more leniant rules to eavesdrop on conversations based off suspicion rather than fact is an abuse of power somehow means I would want another 9.11. Fear is our primary watch word. We now judge our lives and our well being on who will prevent attack. Those that stated that a government that governs least is a government that governs best have handed unprecedented power to government.

Somewhere, do not doubt it, Osama Bin Laden is smiling.

We have constricted. Recoiled. This is natural. This is normal. I don’t like it, but I cannot deny the underlying premise for doing so is not cynical so much as it is still, seven years later, shock and hurt.

I would that one day within my lifetime, we forgive. I don’t mean forgive terrorists for believing that in attacking civilians they achieve their goals. I mean forgive ourselves our understandable reaction, and move forward instead of backward.

Oh you beautiful wonderful people.

by Stepto
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So I began to notice over the past few months my Internet connection slowing down or not providing the full throughput. It was occasional and I didn’t really think much of it other than become slightly annoyed during a Halo game. It’s gotten worse over the past 2 months and I finally set about trying to figure it out.

Turns out Stepto.com web traffic is up something like 400% in the past 12 months. And since the site is hosted from a little machine on my desk here at home, ’twas impacting teh haloz.

So on the one hand, wow I’m super humbled you guys are checking out what I have to say. On the other hand it’s taking up my line. And on the gripping hand the hardware for Stepto.com is old and decrepit and needs to be updated.

So! Sometime in the next 24 hours Stepto.com will be moved to a new circuit and IP range. This will be the first IP change for me since 2002! Let’s hope Netsol moves faster than it used to.

This means that the site will be intermittently available as I move into the new IP space and DNS catches up.

This month celebrates the 10th anniversary of my registering Stepto.com, so no better time than to give it a refresh.

Dunno that I will go so far as to do a redesign but you never know!

Oh, and thanks for reading. :>

I’m sorry I’ve been away, I had the PAX

by Stepto
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Growing up I used to go to Star Trek conventions a lot. Not just because I liked Trek, but because the conventions themselves were a wealth of cool sci fi presentations and expo’s. You could find rare comics or books, out of print board games, and usually get a lot of news on upcoming sci fi movies or shows. As an added bonus I’ve seen most of the major stars ot Original and Next Generation Star Trek speak, like Deforest Kelley, Jimmy Doohan, Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Jonathon Frakes, Nichelle Nichols, and Michael Dorn.

Then I got a girlfriend and had to throw all my toys away.

I’m of course full of shit, but somewhere along the way I ran out of time to dedicate a weekend to a good fan con. To really enjoy them is an all weekend thing, as there is so much to see and do. But it’s been at least a decade or more since I last went to one.

I’ve been up in Seattle since 2002, and had of course heard about PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo. It was always described to me as a science fiction convention where there was no star headlining it, and no topic it was focused on. A convention where Geekdom itself gives the keynote and Video Games, Cosplay, Comics, Music, Caffeine, Alcohol, and all manner of tech were the primary attendees. Now that I work at Xbox it was a no brainer that I would be there.

I’m literally dehydrated from all the nerdgasms I had this weekend. It’s really really really hard to describe just how jaw dropping this event is. And there were 58,500 people there.

Line for entry

It’s pure unadulterated sensory overload for all things geek. People dress up, bring their consoles and DS’s and PSP’s and Computers. There’s panel discussions on the geekiest things imaginable. Then there’s the expo hall.

OMG the expo hall.

OMG OMG

You can see everything there. I geeked out to Starcraft 2, Spore, Left 4 Dead, Resistance 2, Gears of War 2, Endwar, Halo Wars, Project Origin and of course, had hands on time with:

Guitar Hero World Tour didn't suck at all.

Guitar Hero World Tour didn’t suck at all. The drum kit is surprisingly good and the guitar strum action has been much improved to still provide a tactile click, but be much much quieter. It also supports a Rock Band-like touch strip. They didn’t have many songs to play at all, but I found myself convinced I would pick it up when it comes out, October 26th.

But my main love will always be:

I sang Pearl Jam's Alive and got applauded!

Rock Band 2 was everything I wanted it to be: Subtle improvements to an already awesome game. Not much here has changed except improved UI, slightly easier vocals (expert is more forgiving) and slightly quieter instruments. But I loved every second of singing Pearl Jam’s Alive to the crowd. The line for Rock Band blew GH:WT away. You simply couldn’t get to play the game without an hours trek through the line.

Of course our booth was pretty popular too, here’s the crowd watching Major Nelson demo the new interface for the Xbox 360:

oooooo. ahhhhhhh.

oops sorry that’s the Judy Nails lookalike the Guitar Hero World Tour booth had, who could nail expert guitar without breaking a sweat while being drooled over by a crowd of geeks.

Here’s the crowd at the MS booth:

oooooooo. ahhhhhh?

The reaction to the OS was overall favorable but I think the people most nervous about it really need time to play with it. I kept hearing people bemoaning the fact that a lot of the changes seemed to be in an attempt to make the UI easier for casual gamers. What a lot of people don’t realize is that we took a lot of our cues and advice from the hardcore gamers. I think people will love the new UI when they get a hold of it.

Last but not least: OMFG HEADCRABS!

ARE THOSE DEBEAKED?????

This was probably the best weekend I have had in a while. But I was completely exhausted by the end of it. Between the booth and so many people to talk to and so much to see I feel like I only got a moment or two to spend with the people I wanted to see the most. I spent most of labor day literally sleeping and resting from the stress of the weekend and the week preceeding it, only to head back to the grind today.

But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was an amazing time. Never been? Make sure you make PAX09.