Rounded up Youngna and Janelle last night for a field trip to a fundraiser for the Children's Hospital of Montefiore held out at Barcade.

The main attraction was a Guitar Hero setup - a play-along guitar game for PlayStation2. The had the thing hooked up to speakers and the video projected out onto the back wall. A grounp of nerds ensued (myself included).

Joel (formerly of Gizmodo) organized the whole thing. That's him rocking out on the right.



Mom, I hope you're reading this, because this is the only thing I want for Christmas. Like more than the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier (1984) or Lazer Tag (1986).

The guitar is a basically PlayStation controller (plugs right into the PS2) with five buttons (instead of strings), a mini control-pad thing (that
mimics the way you'd strum a guitar) and a whammy bar (!!).



The game plays a lot like Dance Dance Revolution - as music plays, you hit the buttons to play along. The more accurate you are, the more the crowd goes apeshit (and the more points you earn). It's much harder than you would think (the video shows the "medium" difficulty setting).

There was one guitar hooked up for the first part of the night, but after the raffle (hold on, more on that below), the guy who won a brand new copy of Guitar Hero (yes, complete with guitar!), ripped the box open and hooked it up so everyone could play two-player style. [video, 10m]



$10 raffle tickets put you in the running for an XBox 360, a signed old-school Gameboy, er, a copy of Guitar Hero, or a bunch of other swag.



Five raffle tickets = we won twice (but none of the good prizes). Here Janelle w/ my video card (?). I don't even know what one would do with this thing.



And five minues later Janelle won this fabulous Puppy Love shirt (huh?)



Disappointed that Jesus didn't want me to win either the XBox or Guitar Hero, we packed up and left around 11pm. We said our goodbyes to Teddy Salad on the way out.