Let the Corruption Commence!

The inevitable took place at approximately 7:30pm yesterday evening: We introduced Hyeon Ju to Rock Band 2. And let me just say this Korean fish out of water took to the plastic instruments far better than that same metaphorical fish would take to a bicycle.

She rocked.

She flubbed her way through the first few notes (guitar on Easy) so we turned on No Fail Mode, only to see her never fall below the upper half of the performance meter again. Had I have turned off NFM we certainly would have broken a few high scores on my profile.

She doesn't know any of the songs (although she recognized "Oh, Pretty Woman" from a movie... gee, I wonder which one) but she really enjoyed it. After about 8 songs or so, however, she opted to sit and watch... I had the sense she was studying my technique. 

She doesn't have any videogames at own, nor really ever played them she said, and I didn't get the feeling that she enjoyed it that much. That was until I went to pick her up this afternoon and all the other kids were raving about how lucky she was to have host parents who played Rock Band 2 with her.

A couple of us host families are going to rent out the room in the association offices with the giant projection screen and hook up the Xbox 360 for a Rock Band Party with all of the kids. I don't like to move my equipment around, but since I probably have another $200 worth of downloadable content for it, it makes sense to use mine. 

When I asked her at dinner tonight if she wanted to play, she said she wanted to play tomorrow instead. But later on she came downstairs for water and saw me playing -- blowing off steam -- and right away went for the drums. I was just about to go back to work, but how could I resist her request to learn the drums? Kristin, busy writing a paper for biz school, decided to play too.

This time I totally forgot to turn on NFM and was worried we'd have to restart right away, especially since the drums are a lot harder than the guitar (thanks to the kick-pedal) but hell no, we didn't need to restart. She had never seen this setup before, it was her first song ever on drums (Weezer's "Say it Ain't So"), and when I looked down halfway through the song, she was rocking a 3x multiplier. She even figured out how to trigger Overdrive during her second song without me even breathing a word about it.

My only guess is that her expertise playing the ocarina (no, not ...of Time) carries over to Rock Band 2.

So I'm proud to say that, ladies and gentleman, THE METROGNOMES may have finally found their drummer.

My guess is she'll be playing guitar and drums on Medium mode by the time she heads back to South Korea in February.

2 comments:

Jessica A. Walsh said...

That is so awesome!

Jackie said...

Adorable. She sounds so sweet!