Oh, the sadness. My PS2 appears to be broken. That means no more Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Gah.

I wish I’d known it was on its last legs before I bought those five new games and two guitars. Buying a new system hurts the wallet, of course, but the fact that I’ll have to buy all this GH stuff again just makes it worse. I can’t be *too* upset; the thing was 8 or 9 years old, I think, so it had a good long run. But still.

Here’s what it does: Every disc I put in, I get a disc error. Doesn’t matter what disc it is.

I read some troubleshooting tips online, and tried some of them: (a) used the vacuum to try sucking the dust out of the insides, (b) used a compressed air can to blow where sucking didn’t work, (c) I put the PS2 in the optional vertical position, as it supposedly reads discs better that way, and (d) "played" a lens-cleaning disc. All to no avail. The lens-cleaning disc probably didn’t actually even do anything since I couldn’t get the PS2 to play it (the instructions seem to indicate that "playing" the disc somehow activates the cleaning function, so getting the read error on that probably prevented it from doing anything useful).

So, any advice on either fixing the PS2 or on purchasing a new system? I’d considered buying a Wii after playing one over the Xmas holidays, so I thought about getting one of those. However, the research I’ve done seems to indicate that the Xbox360 is the best platform for playing GH and Rock Band, thanks to its networking capabilities that allow you to buy additional tracks at an online store, and play with your friends remotely.

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Speaking of Guitar Hero, it’s about time for another progress report. I’m no longer the sniveling wuss I once was, complaining about not being able to hit the blue button. These days I’m fighting to hit that damn orange button, but I mostly manage.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself, having received my first five-star review on Hard, after playing "Bulls on Parade" (for the first time on Hard), but then I ran into Ling on AIM, and she was bragging about, like being good at GH on Expert. I haven’t even tried it on Expert  yet, except to try the Dragonforce song, which is so hard, the loading screen simply says "Good luck" before you attempt it. I’m proud to say that I made it 1% into the song before failing. If you really want to feel bad for yourself, check out this nine-year-old kid playing it on Expert nearly perfectly.

So, I’ve mentioned before that I’m obsessed with this game. I’ve got all four of them, and progressed through all of them on Medium, and have now started to play them on Hard. I can get a five-star rating on pretty much every song on Medium (well, not the Dragonforce song), but on Hard I’m mostly getting three-star reviews, though I’ve only just started.

Because I’ve been playing the game so much, and because I’m like old and decrepit and stuff, my fingers started to get really sore–especially my pinky, which kind of felt like it had been slammed in a door or something. Resting my hand didn’t seem to do much, but I couldn’t rest it much anyway, because I couldn’t resist the siren call of the game. So to rest my fret-hand, I taught myself how to play GH lefty.

Did I mention I’m obsessed?

I’ll say one thing about playing it lefty — the guitar designers really didn’t think that whole thing through there. When you play lefty, you can’t use the neck strap, which is annoying, but more importantly, using the whammy bar is almost impossible.

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