The World On Eleven.

Through machinations I shall not begin to explain, I've ended with a borrowed copy of Guitar Hero for the PS2 for the last 36 hours.  And for most of those hours, I've had little numb patches on the tips of three fingers.  The challenge of my upcoming days off will be not playing the game until the arm falls off.

Now, I suck at rhythm games, no matter how much I like them in principle--Space Channel 5, Parappa The Rapper, Dance Dance Revolution, the six seconds I spent playing Amplitude--and Guitar Hero is really, at its heart, just a rhythm game... albeit one with a fancy peripheral and a clever attitude.  (In fact, I may have ended up playing Guitar Hero at precisely the right time, the night after School of Rock was shown on broadcast TV. Jack Black, with his hilariously enthused savoring of all things "rock," is the perfect unoffical muse of Guitar Hero and if there's one step the otherwise-savvy game misses, it's allowing the player to rock out with a chubby, hyperkinetic faux-Black avatar.  (Unless he's one of the two unlockable characters, but I don't think he is.)

What makes this game so much more enjoyable for klutzes like me is its play balance.  Guitar Hero has a variety of settings, from extremely easy to very hard, as well as components like a "star power" bar, that allow the desperate to battle their way through a song, and experience the joys of unlocking new songs, while still giving a sense of accomplishment (and finger blisters).  So far, replay comes from the desire to nail a song and not feel like one is completely wretched, but I admit that playing the opening chords of "Smoke On the Water" has an appeal all its own.  The game also compels by virtue its short playing time:  not only is it possible to play a round in four minutes, approximately the amount of time it takes for a spouse to check their makeup, but currently it's impossible to play for longer than twenty minutes at a time.  The last is particuarly helpful, as I found myself growing bored when I found myself doing at all well (and sometimes even when I wasn't).  Despite my recent appreciation for cock rock, I must still have enough of my new wave lyrics-dominated mindset to find the guitar solos in "Iron Man" as mindless as when I was in my teens. How mindless, and yet mindful, one has to be to make their way through even the lowest I.Q. Black Sabbath song!  I really wonder what becomes of one's mind after playing the stuff for a living.

I also wonder what I'm going to do with regard to this game--I'm not going to keep a loaner for months on end, but I can't buying it, either.  For some (probably those who can coax their friends and/or wives into playing), Guitar Hero is a no-brainer purchase. But for me, this game is the perfect rental (all the more frustrating that you can't rent it anywhere) and my brain looks forward to getting some work done soon.

Wait a minute. Reverse That.

So I rented Kingdom Hearts II from Hollywood Video (a combination of two choices from my interior poll and if there's one thing this, Final Fantasy X-2, La Pucelle Tactics and most of Culdcept has taught me, it's that I'm not a console RPG man. All I seem to care about when the PS2 is on is eye candy and mashing buttons--and it's the former reason I figured I would be into the Final Fantasy games. Remember all those commercials for FFVII on the Playstation? That was all eyecandy.

But goddamn, are Square (makers of the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts) RPGs tedious. (And this is coming from a Metal Gear Solid junkie!) It's just button after button of boring speech balloons just so you can then be rewarded with a cut scene of people talking! And Kingdom Hearts II in particular has atrocious "acting"--a character will say something and then 30 seconds later, wave his arms about expansively.

Now, I'm not Kingdom Hearts II's perfect audience, it should be admitted, as I'm neither a nine year old boy or a twelve year old girl. But my fond memories of the Disney games on the Sega Genesis (Quackshot!) made me excited about the idea of these games, particularly when the reviews accentuated how perfectly the classic characters were captured.

And I'm a sucker for high concept, so when I started KHII not as Sora, protagonist from the last game, but Roxas, a kid who looks like Sora who's haunted by mysterious dreams in the strangely wistful sunset world of Twilight Town, I was down with the idea. Kingdom Hearts II takes a strangely Matrix: Reloaded approach to its opening scenes, as the hero occasionally finds himself in dilemnas that he can't quite get out of before the screen is occluded by television static. It's annoying and meta, so I should be all over it, right?

Wrong. The whole damn thing is dreary, droopy and slow, with minigames so dull they were probably plucked from educational software. Additionally, there's not a Disney character in sight, except for Roxas's dream flashbacks to the first game. But even by the time Donald and Goofy came on board (about four or five hours into the game), it was too late. I didn't care--I just mashed my buttons through the fight scenes, mashed my buttons through the dialogue scenes, and went and peed during the cut scenes.

By the time I stumbled on the game's horrifyingly robust gummi ship editor (with which you can costumize a battleship to a creepily OCDish degree for later arcade sequences), I realized my priorities and the game's priorities couldn't be farther apart. With a day left to play the game, I returned it to the video store and then beat MGS:Subsistence again. Whatever Kingdom Hearts II's priorities were, they weren't my priorities. And this is probably the case with RPGs in general--although I wish I could admit otherwise, I just don't care about the spreadsheet approach to customization and character building. That I played all of Champions of Norrath (and not even online!) and nearly none of Final Fantasy X-2, shows that my heart lies elsewhere--with God of War, probably.

Next: Can I have a video game blog without video games?