But there was hope for NinjaPlease!: the finals would be a complete reset, with all previous scores wiped out, leaving a single four-song winner-take-all final championship match. And thus began NinjaPlease!'s quest to figure out a way, any way, to defeat the dreaded Beard Rock.
Fargo: At the heart of the conflict was this: 1Up was fielding a team of four very good players, and GameSpy was fielding a team that included me. Something had to give.
Thursday, 6:30 p.m.
The call reverberates throughout GameSpy: the team needs new talent. To date, the squad has tried to load the team up with editors, but after two weeks, it's clear that Fargo's Medium-Hard bass skills are no match for Beard Rock's Expert bottom line. With other publications filling out their squads with web programmers and art designers and video editors, the time has come for action, and auditions are being held in the editorial demo room.
Several players look promising. Heather, a web programmer, cruises along on Hard bass without much trouble. Jeff, GameSpy's media editor, is doing okay on Hard drums, an impressive accomplishment. But the team strikes gold in the form of David Mealing, a long-time Fileplanet manager who also happens to be a real-life bassist and solid Guitar Hero player. On several songs, he routinely puts up bass scores of 98-99% on Expert, and he's invited to join the team Saturday afternoon for one final practice session before the finals Monday night.
Sluggo: I can't believe we went this long without David on our team. The guy was getting close to 100% on Expert on songs he'd never played before. It seemed like that might be the bump we needed to catch 1UP.
Saturday, 5:30 p.m.
The band is just arriving for a few hours of rocking out, but Sluggo's already been here a while, playing through the Expert drum and vocal campaigns for his upcoming review. He's also been feverishly scribbling on the room's whiteboards, trying to pull an Uri Geller and predict what songs might end up in the finals. He divides the songs into three categories:
It's Sluggo's opinion that there are a handful of marquee songs that would make prime finals material (marked by *'s and ?'s in the photo). Among them are "Foreplay/Long Time," "Highway Star," "Tom Sawyer" and "Don't Fear the Reaper," and the band makes a few attempts at each just to be prepared.
There's some debate over whether "Green Grass and High Tides," a 10-minute Outlaws epic, would actually be picked, and the band takes two practice whacks at it, scoring 1.6 and 1.8 million on successive attempts. Feeling confident with their new bassist, the band wraps up around midnight, with the finals looming two days away.
Fargo: Here at GameSpy, we hold ourselves to an extremely strict practice regimen. Nobody stops playing until the mini-fridge runs out of beer.
Sluggo: I don't think it's an overstatement to suggest that the mini-fridge may have been the single most important element of our team.
