I made my now-annual trip to the Lou this weekend for all three games of the home series against the Braves. This year’s trip was even better than last year’s, although with tamer weather. (Unrelated, but I found this Contra/guitar video while digging up that link to last year’s recap.) We got off to a late start as I needed to spend about an hour talking to sundry ticket office employees about why I wasn’t able to print up the tickets for this weekend, so by the time we got to St. Louis, we only had time to pound a few beers at the Majestic before taking the Metro down to the stadium. Friday’s game was an unpleasant tilt in which Kip Wells struggled in front of a porous defense. Afterwards, the sole Braves fan who made the trip after the other two moved off to Colorado Springs this summer joked that he regrets forgetting the broom he’d bought last year in misplaced anticipation of a sweep (the Braves were up 2-0 on the series with Carpenter starting game 3).

We went to Grant’s Farm fairly early on Saturday and had a great time looking at widespread tree damage caused by a violent Friday afternoon storm with gusting winds at 60 mph, exotic animals, and drinking free beer. Shockingly, I’d never been to Grant’s Farm before then, in spite of having gone to the Affton ice center across Gravois at least a hundred times for practices and games over my youth hockey career. Grant’s Farm is definitely a good time and the weather cooperated beautifully. After that, we drove down Gravois and had a few drinks and some tasty skewers in the Venice Cafe biergarten. Chris met up with us for Saturday night’s game, an exciting game that had us on the edges of our seats all night. All five of the Cardinals runs were scored during a smoke break. It took that long to walk down from the upper decks to the smokers-aren’t-welcome-here patio outside the open air fence. At least I got to hear some of it on the audio feed they reluctantly piped outside for us scum and peeked in through gates on the climb back up to see some more. Due to some undersized sneakers, my feet were causing me some pain by the time we got back to our seats—more on that later. The Cardinals ended up scratching out a close win, 5-4, and I went home happy with the series split and to be decided by an Adam Wainwright vs. King Jo-Jo Sunday matchup.

After the game, we met up with the crew at Majestic for some drinks and then were invited to play a demo of EA’s Rock Band for the XBox. Review here, pre-order for the low price of $200 here. My friends had set it up on a hi-def LCD projector, running through several hundred watts of JBL goodness. Incidentally, Rush was drinking some beers at a bar down the street after playing St. Louis Friday night and a friend of mine conjured up the moxie to invite them to join us for the game—I swear that happened and yes, they declined immediately.

If you haven’t heard of Rock Band, like I hadn’t before this weekend, it’s something like Guitar Hero except with a drum kit and vocals. (Two guitars, the drum kit, and a microphone are included in that $200 price.) I played all four instruments: lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. The lead guitar and bass are pretty much exactly like guitar hero with the exception that parts of the songs allow the band to jam out and go into improvised solos. I was having too much fun to do a scientific inquiry, but I’m pretty sure the software employs some sort of scoring algorithm to rate how well the players’ solos worked with one another. I know of people who’ve made AI agents that try to make those kinds of subjective judgments, and it would’ve made sense to include one.

The drum kit is four round synth drum surfaces on the same level and a floor kick. I had a hard time my first try because I’m a little color blind and had a hard time telling green from yellow. The second time through, I took the advice to just go with the positioning, where the columns on the screen are analogous to the drums on the kit, left to right. My shins are too long to work the kick and whip over to the drums on the left very well, but I think I got the hang of it. It was hella fun, to say the least. Drums solos are a blast.

Including vocals seemed pretty ambitious of EA, but they did a very good job. The original vocals are included and do a good job of making a chorus effect with your own crooning to make a decent sound for the spectators. How well you sing was measured, as far as I could tell, in two dimensions: in frequency and duration. They may have used a Hidden Markov Model on a drastically filtered waveform, but I’d guess they just sampled F0 and gave you a window (sized on difficulty level from Easy to Expert) in which to match the target frequency and another window on how close your transitions to stop and frequency changes match up to the targets. As I said, it worked pretty well. Jeff tried singing “Creep” by Radiohead on Expert and the margin of error was very, very small.

That’s an incredibly fun game and at $200 is going to sell to every dorm room on every campus this Winter when it’s released.

Sunday, we met up with Boxcar Fritz and HLF for Wainwright’s dominant start and Isringhausen’s 200th save as a Cardinal. Before heading back to Chambana, we had a late lunch at Norton’s Cafe in Soulard for oysters in the half-shell on their backyard patio.

Two-day weekends don’t get much better than that.