I'm back! No Rock Band 3... sad for most, but not for me!

Sorry I have been gone for like, a week. Anyway, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos said on January 7 during CES that there will be no Rock Band 3 this year. While I am mostly against the idea of music and rhythm games, I wonder if Harmonix will be trying to break away from the cookie cutter sequels that have happened with Rock Band 2 and the other Guitar Hero games. Here's my philosophy on music and rhythm games. I talked to one of my friends the other day who loves Guitar Hero. He likes it because it feels like playing an actual guitar. I'm sorry, but playing an actual guitar is much harder than it is on Guitar Hero. Also, people will spend their after school lives playing this game because they feel like they are accomplishing something. While I believe that the first Guitar Hero game felt new, it bothers me when Guitar Hero 2 and Guitar Hero 3 are raised up to the heavens just because they have new songs. I mean, why wouldn't someone who plays Guitar Hero or Rock Band not devote time to learning how to play an actual instrument? As someone who is learning how to play guitar (and I am sure guitar players would feel worse about the hype), it almost destroys me when someone says that they are learning how to play guitar by playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band while I am playing the actual instrument. Well, that's my two cents on it. Overall, for Rock Band 3, I want to see something that breaks away from the first two Rock Band games.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

I don't know how to word this without making it sound like a "bash"-fest. It's a little late, but my brother bought Mortal Kombat: Armageddon for the PlayStation 2 at GameStop. It was bought for $15, so I wasn't expecting that much when I decided I was going to play it. I loved Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance and Mortal Kombat: Deception for Gamecube, and I knew that Mortal Kombat: Armageddon would feature, pretty much, every character from the six previous installments of Mortal Kombat. While this sounded cool to my brother, I asked myself: Will they have enough to room to put them all on the PS2? I started to play, and I was happy that the jumping was so much cleaner than that of Deadly Alliance and Deception, but every character only has 2 fighting styles, one of the fighting styles they had if they were in Deadly Alliance or Deception and their weapon. I didn't really care for it that much. In Deadly Alliance, I would beat everybody with Shang Tsung, but I could only do it with the Crane fighting style. In Armageddon, they took away the Crane style and kept the Snake style. WTF? There were a lot of situations that this happened: Raiden, Sindel, and Tanya were three people from Deception that lost their second fighting style which pretty much destroyed the power of the fighter. After being somewhat let down by the fighting, I tried Konquest, which changed the currency system. In the previous games, there would be six different types of koins: Ruby, Sapphire, Jade, Gold, Platinum, and Onyx koins. This was fun, because you had to pay, say, 300 Ruby koins to unlock something. However, you could only pay Ruby koins. You couldn't say, trade Jade koins to get Ruby koins. You had to collect the right ones. In Armageddon, they changed to just having koins, to avoid this, I guess. Overall, the Krypt (where you unlock stuff) lost its charm by telling you what to get and took away the unforgiving part of the game. It was an overall disappointment, but it was a pretty good $15 spent.