So I’ve spent the last month or so (since I got Guitar Hero World Tour for the Wii) debunking any claims that I heard about the supremacy of Rock Band over the Guitar Hero franchise.  This is, of course, without even playing the game.  I just knew that Guitar Hero was better.

After purchasing Rock Band 2 for the Wii this weekend and spending several hours with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that having both franchises around is nothing short of a wonderful thing for us rythym-game lovers.

Guitar Hero World Tour (and to a lesser extent, Guitar Hero III) is a kick-ass game; the first weekend we probably averaged 6 hours per day playing it between my wife, myself, and my kid.  There’s hardly anything I can say I don’t like about the game, but I can say now that there are things that were improved in my opinion with Rock Band 2.

The major issue I have with Rock Band is the appearance of the highway (the highway is the scrolling “fretboard” that the notes appear on, for you Guitar Hero/Rock Band virgins); the notes are thin bars, and in the middle of the action, for example, during a collection of energy powerups, they can be a bit hard to see.  The notes in guitar hero are large, colorized circles, and I’ve never had an issue seeing them.  It’s not that Rock Band made it more challenging with the bars, it’s more like they made it more frustrating.

And that’s where my gripes about Rock Band end, I found the Touring mode more realistic and enjoyable (perhaps because I’m a musician myself, my wife and daughter don’t share my views), and the characters and audience rendered better than on Guitar Hero.  The song selection was very good, although I have to say that Guitar Hero World Tour had a better collection of songs in my opinion.  Through all this however, the downloadable content that will be available (and is already available for Rock Band 2 on the PS3 and the XBOX 360) will shame anything that Guitar Hero has to offer.  The catalog for the PS3 and XBOX are already over 300 songs, and it’s been stated that the Wii will eventually have access to the entire catalog.

The biggest selling point to me was the fact that Rock Band 2 is completely compatible with Guitar Hero World Tour instruments; so I didn’t have to go out and buy the whole band kit, I was able to buy the standalone game (which I got a great deal on thanks to a trade-in) and start playing immediately with the instruments I already had.  Can’t beat it.

So all in all, I think we benefit from both franchises as gamers, as they both have awesome selling points, but if you’re a Guitar Hero fanboy, don’t miss out on the fun by not giving Rock Band 2 a chance.

Along with the inevitable release of the full, public version of Internet Explorer 8, we as web developers will experience a simultaneous groan as our clients call about how their sites either display incorrectly or simply don’t work in the newest version of Microsoft’s browser.  We’ve started early in our testing, but the numerous hacks and workarounds needed still don’t produce the results we’re looking for.

Not to fear…IE 8 has the ability to render pages in Compatibility Mode, which emulates the rules of IE 7.  We can tell IE 8 to enter this mode by one, simple line of code within the header of our sites:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Save your files (or header include if you’re using include files) after putting in this line, and IE 8 will display your pages correctly.  Obviously, this only applies to problems that are a result of IE 8’s horrible rendering standards; if you screwed up a tag somewhere, you’ll still see the problem there.

If you’re a Mac-addict like me, you’ve no doubt had someone call or e-mail, complaining about how the file you attached in an e-mail didn’t show properly, embedded instead of attached, or didn’t attach at all.  Before you take another proverbial step, think to yourself “It’s ok….they’re using a PC, they don’t know any better”.  This is actually half true.

My Mac-less boss is the one that brought the problem to my attention.  He noticed that he was getting embedded attachments in Outlook on e-mails sent from the rest of us in our office (all using Macs), instead of the usual attachment he was used to.  On closer inspection, PDF’s, Excel files, and Word documents attached just fine when the sender made sure “Send Windows Friendly Attachments” was checked, however IMAGE files would embed into the e-mail, with apparently no way to have those appear as true attachments to our PC-loving counterparts.

After spending an hour reviewing this phenomena online, it was obvious that I wasn’t even close to being the only person having the problem.  Several pages of less-than-impressive suggestions later, I happened upon a simple solution that seemed TOO simple, and it worked: Send the e-mail in PLAIN TEXT format as opposed to rich text/HTML.  I know, it’s a pain, but to be sure that your Bill Gates fan gets image attachments as they expect; take a second to pull down the “Format” menu and select “Make Plain Text”.