Short Stories, Long Odds

My brother-in-law points out my unfortunate Karaoke Revolution habits, and the forced undoing of those habits by Activision:

Also, the Karaoke part of the game will now include a phoneme detector. So no more humming or singing “Nickelback” through entire songs

The game is Rock Band, and if my weekends were ever imperiled by the possibility of competitive, scored karaoke happening in my living room, now my punishment for avoiding the foibles of Guitar Hero is to be presented with Drum Set Hero and implored through longing looks to whip out the sauce on Tom Sawyer.

Its really mean of them to have put Tom Sawyer on there in the first place. Although really, if you’re going to put something impossible to play for most people in your game, why not go all the way and do YYZ? Skip “mostly impossible” and go straight to “we can barely even program this.”