guitar hero, undo, cellular automata

So, I finally broke down and bought guitar hero for my Wii. It is the new one, world tour. It is fun, but I have noticed some problems. It is kind of slow to load new things, like hats, hairdoos guitar knobs etc on the customization pages–er screens.

Speaking of slow, sometimes the menus will freeze while they load something without telling you anything about it, until–bam–a number of things have changed. I think this is a problem that most developers who build interactive systems deal with (hopefully successfully) from time to time.

My favorite bad behavior of the slow to respond sort is where all the users actions queue up while the system is thinking and something bad happens. Then you WISH the silly developer had implemented undo.

Back to what I was talking about to begin with: Guitar Hero.
Pretty awesome as is. Rhythm based gaming finally making it big in the states.

I had a weird thought while playing through La Bamba today. I wonder if you could map a cellular automata to an interface like guitar hero’s a rhythm game. Sort of like the musical computations in anathem, only with rock.

strange idea.

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