Gold Stars

I have been playing a lot of Rock Band with Pants lately. Well, for the past 6 months. 10 months. Something like that.

We'd stopped playing for a few months and then picked it back up again recently when our downstairs barkeep had Guitar Hero running in the bar, and then later that week, invited us over to his place where a bunch of people got together to play Rock Band. I'd lost a fair amount of skill, so playing in front of people was a little embarrassing (though not nearly as embarrassing as singing was).

Well, after a steady month of practice, I had recovered to my former skills and at this point, I've actually gotten good.

Tonight, I was playing Bass on "Hysteria" by Muse (downloadable) on expert and I got through the whole song. 3 stars. 86%. Something I'll write home about.

Then later, I was playing Guitar on "Gimme Shelter" by the Stones, and the craziest thing happened: at the very end of the song, right around 166K points, my 5 star rating went to 5 gold stars.

I didn't even know there were gold stars. It certainly wasn't because I'd played flawlessly (there are bonuses in Guitar Hero for flawless performances, but not in Rock Band); I finished with only 98% accuracy.

This is a whole new challenge that's opened up for me in this game.