Just two more days until the release. I’ll pick it up Monday night after I get back into town. Short sentences = me being excited. There is another great group of songs. There are some again that I’ve never heard of and some that I could take or leave, but most just rock and will be a lot of fun.

Best part: The Devil Went Down to Georgia as the final song.

It’ll take me a couple of years of practice to beat it on expert, but I still can’t wait to try.

The recent commercials for The Orange Box piqued my curiosity, especially the Portal portion of the game. The wormhole gun concept seemed like an interesting variation in the First Person Shooter game line. The commercial has worked so far: I went to their website, was impressed by the game trailer and am now considering buying the game. The infinite variety of being able to transport from any wall, floor, or surface to any other boggles the mind.

Then again, there is a flash version of this concept. I might just stick with that.

So, returning to more obscure things than football. Back in the days of the past century, my brother had a Super Nintendo, and the greatest game created for that ancient system was Uniracers. “What?” you say. “Never heard of it,” you exclaim. Please, let me explain.

Uniracers is a side-scrolling racing game with unicycles. Not with people riding unicycles, no, the unicycles themselves would race. The strange unicycle anatomy consisted of a seat-shaped head. The wheel spun on its own to move the creature about, and the rest of the frame made up the body.

The unicycles would race across a two-dimensional track with loops and turns and jumps. Performing tricks with your unicycle gave you a boost of speed with more complex performances of daredevilry giving extra acceleration and velocity. The more complex tricks also gave you some bit of 80′s slang. “Awesome” “Tubular” “Wicked” If you couldn’t get your wheel down in time to hit the track and landed on your head (seat) instead, you lost all of your momentum. The desperate push for more speed led to riskier manuevers. The only downside of the game was the eventual overuse of the L and R buttons. To this day they barely work.

The game moves with amazing speed considering that it’s running on a Super Nintendo. This isn’t your standard car race game where the road scrolls by underneath you. This has more of the feel of Sonic the Hedgehog with the camera struggling to keep up with the sudden changes of direction and bursts of acceleration.

I really hope that somebody decides to update this game for today’s slightly more robust systems. Combining this game with the Wii’s motion sensitive controller would lead to an incredible experience. I’d be first in line to buy it.

I haven’t spent this much time playing console video games since my grade school days playing Final Fantasy (the first one, not VII) and Crystalis (how’s that for obscure). Of course, I’m talking about Guitar Hero (and Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80′s and very soon Guitar Hero III and Rock Band).

This is the rare video game that literally hooks you from the moment you first play it. There are other games that draw you into an elaborate tale or enthrall you with incredible imagery or blow you away with sound design. But Guitar Hero is one of the few games that will hook you from the first time you play, just because it’s fun.

It’s also one of the only games that I can regularly get my wife to play. She loves it. Her friends love to come over and play. It’s all the fun of Dance Dance Revolution without the ‘looking stupid’ part or the Japanese anime music. I’ve now gotten to the point where everyone that stops by the house has to at least try “I Love Rock n Roll.” After that they’re hooked too.

I’m going to predict it now. We’ll see what happens down the road.

The Guitar Hero (and related games; ie. Rock Band) will be the most successful video game franchise in history.