There was a point in time in which the group Guns N’ Roses was the biggest band on the face of the earth and with the exception of groups like Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, the greatest band of all time. And this was after one album.

Similar to my following of Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses is one of the other groups I follow. Their first album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction is pretty much perfect – many rank it as the #2 rock album of all time, just under Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. At the time people even hailed them as the second coming of Led Zeppelin.

A follow-up EP, Lies, (or GN’R Lies, depending on how you read the cover) had their earlier independent release Live Like A Suicide and four new acoustic tracks, including the controversial “One in a Million”. A song like that would derail most careers, but GN’R had too much momentum.

Three years later GN’R came out with two albums simultaneously, Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. They were much different albums from their previous efforts – they were highly produced, featured long epic songs and horn sections, and were promoted by the band’s first headlining tour. Most fans came along for the ride, some decided that the new albums were too different and the result of Axl Rose’s increasingly eccentric mind. Izzy Stradlin left the group before the tour started, which was the first sign of trouble.

1993 saw the release of “The Spaghetti Incident?”, a 12-song EP of covers, mostly of punk rock tunes. No one knew it at the time but it would be the last full release from the “original” lineup of GN’R (sans Steve Adler, their original dummer who was fired after Lies). A cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” appearing on the 1997 Interview with the Vampire soundtrack album would be the last song from the original lineup.

For a long time nothing happened. Slash quit the group and started a short lived side project, Slash’s Snakepit. Duff McKagan left at the end of his contract. Matt Sorum and Gilby Clarke were fired. Slash, McKagan and Sorum eventually did have a “second coming” in the form of hooking up with Scott Weiland and forming Velvet Revolver – a band who experienced an unprecedented amount of initial success based more or less off of the fact that they were considered the second coming of GN’R.

Of course the real second coming of GN’R (or the other one, if you prefer) was with the band that Axl Rose was now the only remaining original member of. He started hiring new replacements for his former bandmates and started recording new material. Somewhat quickly, this new GN’R had a song called “Oh My God” ready for 1999’s End of Days soundtrack.

Shortly thereafter, though, the band went into stealth mode recording a new album and very little was heard from them for months at a time. Occasionally a snippet of information would come out, like a producer for the album had been hired (or quit, or fired), or a new member of the band (like guitarist Buckethead – famous for wearing a mask and an empty KFC bucket on his head) had been hired (or quit, or fired).

At some point, the name of the new album came out: Chinese Democracy.

In 2002 there was some hope that the band was nearing completion of the new album when they were the surprise closing band on the MTV Video Music Awards. This was followed by a national tour. However, eight dates into the tour the entire affair was canceled (they had maybe played four or five shows) and the band went into stealth mode again. Years went by without a peep from the GN’R camp, other than from producers or members who had quit. Axl became the next Bigfoot – people would report on seeing him in the same way one would report seeing the Loch Ness Monster (of course, Nessie never gets interviewed by a surprise camera crew coming out of a hockey game)

However, in January of this year, Axl went on record (and more or less came out of hiding) as saying “you will hear new music this year”, which was pretty much accepted by most as meaning that Chinese Democracy would be released in 2006. In February, decent quality recordings of the songs “There Was A Time”, “Better”, “I.R.S.” and “Catcher in the Rye” were leaked on the Internet – the unconfirmed rumor was that Axl leaked them himself to test out the waters. That same month, Slash claimed to have heard the album and said it would be released in March, which obviously never happened. Over the intervening months, Axl occasionally dropped hints about the new album – the most prevalent being that there were 32 songs in some state of completion, 23 of which he was working on completing, and 13 of which would actually be on the final album.

Axl made a surprise appearance on the Eddie Trunk show in May (his first interview in several years), he allowed Harmonix and Red Octane to put “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in Guitar Hero II as a playable song. Over the summer the New Guns N’ Roses played several sold out warmup shows and tried out the new songs. The plans were in place for the European tour over the summer with the North American tour to start in October.

And yet time went on with no announcement of the release date for Chinese Democracy. Axl had a chance to avoid or deny the idea that it would still be released in 2006 when he was asked about it on MTV News backstage at the 2006 Video Music Awards in August, but he still maintained that it would indeed be released in 2006.

In October a strong rumor was posted on RollingStone.com which indicated the album was to be released on November 21, but no one has ever confirmed it. When asked about the release date, GN’R’s manager just stated “there are only fifteen Tuesdays left in the year” (new albums are released on Tuesdays). A Harley Davidson ad featuring the final studio version of “Better” was placed on the HarleyDavidson.com website on October 21, only to be replaced by a version featuring “Paradise City” (from Appetite for Destruction) with the “Better” version changed to “coming soon”. When asked further on the release date for the album, GN’R’s manager stated “we might not bother with a release date – you might just walk into your record store one day and find it there”.

So that’s where it stands today – the tour is continuing (one canceled date notwithstanding) and the album is still “officially” being released in 2006, but no one knows anything else. As I write this there are nine days until the rumored November 21st date and still nothing from GN’R and/or their label. One potential problem is that the 21st is also the date that the new Jay-Z album is released (Jay-Z had previously “retired” so this release is seen as significant). Employees from record stores not only report that their usual indicators of an impending release show nothing for Chinese Democracy, they also show nothing at all whereas albums coming out in 2007 have at least some trace in the system.

Some speculate that perhaps the management wasn’t kidding with their statements that the album might just appear on store shelves one day. Given that the aforementioned Jay-Z album that’s being released on the same day has already leaked online and Chinese Democracy hasn’t, it might be that the album is being handled in such an interesting manner to thwart piracy (it’s hard to pirate an album if you’re not even sure it’s finished yet). While an album magically appearing in stores would not be the best maneuver from a marketing push perspective, the Eminems album still sold amazingly well when their releases were pushed up unexpectedly to odd days of the week (like the Friday before the scheduled Tuesday) to thwart piracy. Of course those albums at least had a release date to speak of, and GN’R’s popularity in 2006 doesn’t compare to Eminem’s popularity in 2002.

Still, Axl does have in his possession something resembling the final album – he’s used it as collateral to get into clubs (he used it to get a club to stay open on his birthday – the DJ reported handling two CD’s). The “13 songs” statement seem to indicate that the final lineup of the album has been decided on (I find myself wondering why he’s trying to finish the other 13 songs). Sebastian Bach, who hung out with Axl enough to get himself used as an opening artist on their tour, says that he’s heard the album and that it’s “amazing”. Rumors have circulated that people in the parking lots of Interscope (the label, I believe – “Geffen Records” no longer exists) were listening to it via loudspeakers on the building. It’s also been rumored that last week’s concert cancellation (the original official story was that the fire marshals were trying to force GN’R to tone down their show and really force them out, the “official” official story was that the local police would fine the group if they drank beer on stage – but why they would forego a $200K concert to avoid a $250 fine is weird) was due to Axl needing to fly to California to make some last minute decisions on the record (the other rumor is that since only 3,500 seats of the 5,000 seat venue were sold, Axl took it as an insult and canceled the show). Supposedly the cover art is finished and the marketing campaign is ready to go.

And yet – no album. Or release date. It seems extremely weird for an album that’s supposedly going to be released by the end of the year to not have anything remotely more concrete available in the way of information. But then again, nothing about GN’R has been normal thus far – Axl has used the same name of the group despite being the lone original member (Dizzy Reed is a holdover from the Use Your Illusion days but he still wasn’t in the original lineup) and then went on to spend close to ten years recording an album at a rumored cost of $14 million (perhaps that’s it – the record label has already spent so much money they don’t want to spend money to promote it). This truly is the Duke Nukem Forever of the record industry. It could be that Axl and crew have been mum because they’re working so hard on it. It could be that they don’t want to disenfranchise concert goers by stating that the album in fact won’t make it out in 2006 like they promised. It could be that they just don’t know yet at this point when it will be out. It could be that they’re targetting December 26, 2006 as the release date – the last Tuesday of the year. And it could be that November 21, 2006 will see at least something – a single, an announcement, etc. (the “Talking Metal” podcast believes the date will be December 5, 2006 – and there’s some speculation that they might have insider information).

My main curiousity is – what is the point of no return? At what point is it that it’s literally too late to get the album into stores? It’s been said that between Thanksgiving and Christmas record labels “shut down” (which is why the Christmas albums all come out in October or so) and so if it doesn’t make it by November 21st (the last Tuesday before Black Friday) then it will likely come out at the end of the year or not at all. But if this coming Tuesday (the 14th) comes and goes with no announcement does that mean that the 21st is impossible? Or will it really be one of those “walk into the store” kind of deals? And if it is, will the album be successful? Appetite for Destruction shot up the charts with no video or radio airplay or advance promotion, could Chinese Democracy do the same?

And overall, I’m curious about the album because the leaks, to me anyway, sounded good. I know this isn’t GN’R with Slash (the closest we will get to that is Velvet Revolver). I know this is essentially Axl’s solo project with the same name. It would be like if Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip was also called The West Wing but it was still about an SNL show in LA and not The White House. I bought Daikatana the first day it was out because man – what a story. I want to hear this album because I want to know what an album from an eccentric perfectionist spending a decade and a small fortune sounds like. Was GN’R huge because of Axl, or despite him?

All I know is – no matter what, if I wake up one morning (maybe next Tuesday) and hear that Chinese Democracy is suddenly on store shelves, I’m stopping what I’m doing and running to the nearest store and buying it. And any CD singles with unreleased songs. It’ll be like 1992 again.

A couple of years back I picked up a game called Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance.

Metroid: Zero Mission is based off of the same game engine as Metroid: Fusion which for all intents and purposes was “Metroid 4”.

When the first screenshots of Metroid: Zero Mission came out everyone just sort of assumed that it was a remake of the original Metroid game. Nintendo had done this before – 1993’s Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES had the Super Mario Bros. trilogy from the NES (including the Japanese version of SMB2) and “tightened up” the graphics to 16-bit SNES standards. So people assumed that Metroid: Zero Mission was Metroid with the “All-Stars” treatment.

However it later was revealed that Zero Mission was something of a “reimagining” of Metroid. They had taken several of the facets of Metroid, like enemies leaving missiles, and some of the level layouts, and then taken a hard left. It was more like a “remix” of the original game.

As a bonus, it contained the original Metroid game, emulated from the NES, as an unlockable bonus when you beat the game (which was sort of weird since Nintendo was selling this game for $30 and also selling a ported cartridge with Metroid alone for $20 at the time).

So I got this game and started playing Metroid: Zero Mission. And it’s really good, and I’m really good at playing the game. And the whole time I’m thinking about how this game is so much like the original Metroid.

Thing is, while I love Metroid, I was never that good at it. I never beat it (though I saw others beat it) and actually I’m not 100% sure if I ever even beat the first boss. But before too long I had beat almost all the bosses in Metroid: Zero Mission and was on my way to the Mother Brain.

So I’m thinking to myself, “well, I bet it’s that in the last ten years or whatever since I played this game last I got a lot better”. And I don’t doubt on some level that’s true.

And at some point I finally beat the game and unlocked Metroid. I immediately fired up the game and played a few rounds.

Now I remember why I never got far in that game. It wasn’t because I wasn’t as good a gamer back then – it was because Metroid is fucking hard

Somewhere around the same timeframe, I got a disc for the GameCube called Mega Man: Anniversary Collection. This was a collection of the eight “Mega Man” games (as opposed to “Mega Man X”, “Mega Man Zero” or “Mega Man Purple Monkey Dishwasher”), the first six of which were on the NES and had more or less the same engine, the seventh was on the SNES, and the eighth was on the PSX/Saturn. I started playing the original games and yup – those games were fucking hard. Like, really really hard.

At this point I have a flashback of having to run down the hallway because my little sister decided after getting killed in Super Mario Bros the answer was to go to the NES console and start beating on it. A neighbor of mine’s younger sister had beat their NES so hard that it required a second cartridge to be shoved in to keep the first cartridge down – she had broken the “toaster oven” mechanism, it seems.

Now, Metroid was hard for various reasons, but one of them was that – the hardware (the NES) was limited and was so new that no one knew what they were doing with it yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game and a classic, but a lot of the gameplay mechanics were due to the fact that they were so limited with regards to experience with the hardware and with what it could do.

But it didn’t take them too long to figure out what they were doing – The Legend of Zelda is still a masterpiece and I think even a tiny change to its graphics or gameplay would have ruined it.

And the NES was groundbreaking in this way – for the first time, what you were playing actually sort of looked like what it was supposed to be representing. In this era of 3D graphics we take this for granted but at the time, the NES was the first game system where you were controlling an actual sprite that looked like what the character was supposed to look like, not some green square that you had to “pretend” was carring a sword (which was a green line)

But I can’t help but be amazed at, in hindsight, how hard those games were. In May, a game called SiN Episodes: Emergence was released by a developer named Ritual. It used a “dynamic difficulty” feature to adjust the difficulty of the game to your gameplay style (or lack thereof). There was a bug in the game when it shipped originally and as a result, one section of the game was excrutiatingly difficult. I kept up with the feedback on message boards (some of which were frequented by Ritual employees) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard so much bitching and outcry in my life, and I’ve seen people literally beat on consoles before. And most of these people were the kinds who played old NES games, back when games were really hard.

I actually went and playtested this game and what I didn’t realize before showing up was – they literally wanted me to sit there and play through the entire game. The idea behind it was that it was the first “episode” in a series of games and so it is shorter and also less expensive than other games. The concept is known as “Episodic Content” and depending on your school of thought, it’s either the best thing since sliced bread, or a horrible way to bleed gamers or more money.

Now I had a couple of problems – first, I’m not the best FPS player. Oh sure, I like them and all but realistically, I suck at them. And the second problem is – I rarely finish games.

Still, I was there already so I figured give it a shot. And I finished the game in a bit over six hours. And this was on one of their “beater” systems with a lackluster video card and long load times.

And I also beat it when it finally came out – before they fixed the bug which caused it to be too hard at one point.

It got me thinking though – I’m not sure how many games I’ve ever actually beaten before. I know back in the NES era I finished Zelda and Mega Man 2 and 3, and back when PC gaming got reborn, I finished Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM (but mostly because they just ran out of levels)

Actually, I think it’s one of the big problems in the game industry is that people don’t finish games. They finish TV shows and movies (which is easy enough since the movie or show is at max three houts) and they usually finish books (unless it’s War and Peace or some book they can’t stand) but they generally don’t finish games.

And the biggest reason that they don’t finish games is because games are hard. Movies and television don’t require input. Books just require you to turn enough pages. Music just requires you listen. Games require you to play. Which is great of course – it’s the point. But unless you really really like the game you won’t keep playing. And even then, when the stupid boss battle kills you in seventeen seconds over and over because your last save point left you with 11% health, you still won’t finish.

So the game industry is trying some different tactics with regards to difficulty in length. Perhaps the bravest maneuver I saw was in the game Prey. In the game at some point your character earns some powerup (with a Native American name I can’t remember at the moment) and after that point, when you die, you go through this “afterlife” sequence where you’re dumped out back to where you were before. So basically, death has no consequence (other than a short but annoying cutscene). On the one hand, this on some level helped the game since it made it a lot easier to finish and, as a result, most people who bought the game did finish it. On the other hand this tactic may have backfired since it made the game artificially short – when coupled with the fact that the game just wasn’t that long to begin with, some felt ripped off since this game was full priced.

Another tactic is to break up the game into smaller chunks – like they do with episodic content. Of course, this tactic runs afoul of pricing problems – SiN Episodes‘ three pieces will run the end-user $59.97 if they all remain $19.99 and that’s about $10 more than your average PC game. Although you can pull out anecdotal examples from the past (like the $74.99 SNES version of Street Fighter II) or adjust prices for inflation, it doesn’t change the fact that the consumer basically wants to pay no more than $50 for a full-length game and no more. They don’t like that episodic content is trying to make more money in the long run. They don’t like microtransactions and smaller content releases (the tide turned on Oblivion quickly when the developer started releasing add-ons at $2-3 a pop). They don’t like that Xbox 360 games start out at $59.99. This drives them to wait out the cheap bin or go to used game stores.

And for this the user has to wait. I loved SiN Episodes: Emergence but it was released in May and Ritual hasn’t even released the name of the second episode or a single screenshot from the second episode, much less a name. And Valve delayed Half-Life 2: Episode 2 until January. Maybe that’s the other big problem – the movie industry generally makes their timelines, the game industry doesn’t.

Anyway, the original point of this it-took-way-to-long-to-finish rant is that games used to be really hard and somewhere along the way we stopped expecting them to be hard. We started to whine when we couldn’t beat them (and then we started to whine when they were too easy to beat). We used to eat what we were fed and now we’re complaining about the food. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. Rebellion is a good thing sometimes, and other times it kills otherwise perfectly good ideas.