"Rock This Town" once again proved to be my downfall. But for an official event held in the Rotunda of the MoA, the GHII Tourney on Saturday sure seemed pretty unprofessional. Since my one and only performance was at 12:15, I was left with quite a bit of time to discuss the merits of the contest with those around me.

For starters, the field was open to over 200 competitors...however, the limited time constraints for the tourney left them able to only take the top 10 scores. 10 out of 200. One song eliminated 190 people. Which means after all the excitement and all the build-up, most everybody who went to the MoA on Saturday ended up being done after only 4 minutes. Hardly exciting.

There were other problems to. The biggest was the apparant inability of the organizers to realize the significance of HD Lag in any sort of gaming. Especially one who's major focus is on timing. Anybody who has an HD TV knows that there is a certain lag associated that doesn't exist in an old school fat TV. So failure to properly calibrate the delay left each player with a different delay, and no opportunity to adjust for it (I've played GHII on a 360, so I've come to realize that if the game isn't properly calibrated for the lag it can take anywhere from two to three songs to get used to the delay). This wasn't helped any bit by the fact that the entire tournament was played on Expert.

That's really my biggest complaint. If MoA and GameStop are supposedly trying to draw a diverse fanbase and make the tourney accessible, why set it at the absolute highest difficulty? There's a big enough cut-off when people transition from Medium to Hard, as there's an extra bit of practice required to start moving your pinky to hit that fifth button. Expert Mode is just that. If you think of Easy as the Tutorial portion of the game, Medium becomes a more standard difficulty. Hard is a good enough difficulty level for an open tournament, as anybody who's good enough to win a tournament on Expert is theoretically good enough to rise to the top of the pack in the Hard setting.

There were other issues. Since this was organized by GameStop, every store in the district was asked to bring their 360 Kiosk to the Rotunda. These were all wired together and hooked into some massive power supply somewhere. Whoever set it all up though didn't realize the kind of juice the whole thing would be pulling though. Throughout the opening rounds of the "tournament", one entire section of 360's would repeatedly power down. Not surprisingly, most of the people who were forced to start over (some people had to restart twice) didn't make it through. Why? Because they were slowly getting adjusted to the Lag, which was then restarted (and never recalibrated by the organizer) when the machine was powered down.

All in all, the whole thing turned into a joke. There were people who I knew could do better who were coming out of it with scores between 50-60%. This is not a game where you can just get "lucky" and get a high score. If you can consistently get a certain range, that's the range you'll get anytime. You're not going to consistently hit 95% in a certain song, then suddenly fall apart and hit only 55%. And when everybody mentioned the lag as they came out of there...yeah.

It's sad when an tourney at a local restuarant is more professional and entertaining than a large-scale public event. And if anybody who was running that tourney is reading this...next time make sure you make that if you're going to set up a website ahead of time, you actually go ahead and put more info on there. Because had I known it was going to be on Expert...and there was a good liklihood I'd only play one song in the whole 4 hour period, I wouldn't have bothered. I'm not good enough on Hard yet to even think about playing on Expert. The whole thing was just a waste of my time. And for shoppers who were watching, it was the same song...over and over again (the first two hours were people playing Rock This Town). Hardly entertaining for them.

I hope they learn from this, and next time have qualifiers at Local Gamestops. That way by the time it gets to the MoA event, they can have a solid bracket already built...and everybody just plays on the same giant TV. That way it's the same lag, and the audience sees a variety of songs.