Guitar Hero - Guitar Pro -> no chasing the dragon needed

So I've not long watched the South Park episode "Guitar-queero". It's a very good episode, and I would go and watch it if you can. What it did though is hit home something that I've been thinking for a while and that's how much I've been neglecting the real guitar (very sad I know), so I decided to properly try out Guitar Pro and find some tabs for some of my favourite songs from guitar hero. These ones give you a real buzz even in GH . I decided to download them from iTunes no less (my first time!) - that'll make the record labels happy!:

The Allman Brothers Band - Jessica
The Sword - Freya
The butthole Surfers - Who Was In My Room Last Night
Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies
The Rolling Stones- Can't You Hear Me Knocking?
Kansas - Carry On, Wayward Son
Police- Message In a Bottle
Ozzy Osbourne- Bark At the Moon

So I'm real glad I tried the program out properly, I've just learnt the rhythm for Freya and it really didn't take me long at all. I've just got to make time to keep using it. Guitar Pro does fit the gap somewhat. Cheers to Gaz for recommending it to me. It's good to get away from programming all the time, and it's really enojyable when you learn a new part and nail it down. Learning music is meant to be good for the brain and the soul, so its good to keep it up :). On another note though I am looking forward to Rock Band, and as many people, to the drums, especially if everything people say is true about it being comparable to real drums. Think I'm going to skip GHIII for the moment and concentrate on real guitar and work on getting those achievements ;).

I've also been busy working on the new project this weekend, it seems to be going pretty well. I've lots of classes from my other XNA projects that fit pretty well into the project straight away. A lot of time was spent on getting the jump for the character just right with the physics engine I'm using (Farseer). There was also some niggles with the collision detection and logic involved with jumping that took longer than expected, though I'm sure this will crop up when the scenery becomes more sophisticated.

I've managed to translate the physics co-ords to local tile ones, using a rendertarget method I've come up with, it seems to work - and the performance seems to be good. Some screenshots should be forthcoming when I've got something more interesting on-screen. A few tweaks to make to the Tile Manager then I'm going to work on projectiles - that means weapons and ammo, then I think I might pull out a particle system I've wrapped up in another project and put that. Animation is a priority, theres some ideas that I've got to improve it over Herriman.. so we'll see.