I should have been a pair of ragged claws

November. Second controller can play rhythm or bass guitar.

I've been rocking out to Guitar Hero for the last two weeks and wrote the following fan mail to the awesome folks at Harmonix: Wow; Guitar Hero is awesome! The music selection is sublime, the art direction is inspired, the difficulty progression is smooth (ok, maybe not with Bark at the Moon), and the whole feel of the game is great. The loading screen help text is hilarious (the first time I saw the "Freebird" one I almost cried), everything about the game is great. I hope you sell millions of copies of the game and I can't wait for an expansion! Good luck! Soon after I send my message, Mike Dornbrook, COO of Harmonix, replied: Hi Scott, Thanks for the kind words - reactions like yours are the reason we do this. If sales keep up like they have so far, there's no doubt we'll be doing sequels. We've got *lots* of ideas for improvements! Rock on, -Mike Digging around a bit on the company web site, I found out that Mike worked on the Infocom classics Zork, Le...

Serendipity! Last weekend I was doing the dishes singing FreezePop's " Science Genius Girl " and Bessie said that she wanted to play Karaoke Revolution to sing it with music. I immediately tried to defuse the situation. I dearly love my wife, but I must either be out of the apartment or unconscious when she dons the KR headset. So I humbly recommended Harmonix's sublime Frequency as an alternative, because the "Science Genius Girl" appears in that game as well. Shockingly she agreed and I got her in front of the PS2 sans headset. Bessie had some difficulty completing the initial few songs in Frequency. Her opinion of the game was not improved when the game actually booed her if she failed a level. Frantically struggling to keep this dim light of gaming interest glowing, I hastily replaced Frequency with its successor, Amplitude . Harmonix mentioned in its post mortem that they did significant usability testing on Frequency in order to make Amplitude a m...