Damn you, James Perry Jr.  Damn you to the Eighth Circle of Hell.

Jim is the man who hooked me on Guitar Hero III.  In the space of two hours, he transformed me from a mild-mannered PC gamer into a hopeless rock-and-roll slave.  And all because of a few minutes pushing buttons on a toy guitar.

Until about a month ago, the only reason I owned an Xbox 360 was because I had some Best Buy gift cards burning a hole in my pockets last year.  In the 12 months that I have owned the console, I might have spent a grand total of eight hours using it, mostly playing Jewel Quest and the first few levels of Gears of War and Lost Planet before the controller tied my fingers in knots.

But that all changed when I accepted an invitation to watch a hockey game at Jim’s home.  After the game, he and his wife fired up Guitar Hero III on their PS2, played on their own for a few minutes and asked me if I wanted to try it.  I was reluctant at first; I had heard about the game, of course, but I had never seen it played, much less played it, and I had no desire to embarrass myself.  After a quick trip through the tutorial, there I was, rocking out (sort of) with Pat Benatar and Foghat.  Two hours later, everybody was about to go home for the night, but there I was, standing in Jim’s living room with the guitar over my shoulder, trying to convince someone to play more co-op with me.  It took me days to get “Slow Ride” and “Barracuda” out of my head.

Less than 24 hours later, I was back at Best Buy, buying the game for myself for my mostly neglected Xbox.  The obsession had begun, a life-changing condition that continues unabated to this very day.  Witness the depths of my addiction:

For two weekends in a row after buying the game, I found myself staying up until 4:30 am working my way through the easy-level career mode and challenging online players to faceoff matches.

I linked my Xbox Live gamertag to the Guitar Hero website and joined online tournaments, consistently finishing in the top 25% of the competitors (still in easy mode, of course; I might be fairly good as a newbie, but I’m late to the party, and most of the people playing at higher levels can easily kick my ass).

I saw a co-worker playing the game on her cell phone, but my phone wasn’t sophisticated enough to play it, so I immediately bought a new one.

I purchased and downloaded all of the game’s songs on iTunes, but I needed something on which to play them, so I bought my first MP3 player and spent a sleepless night converting all 60 songs so that they would play on my new gadget; I’m listening to the songs as I type this.

I’ve started signing some of my personal emails Lars Umlaut, Guitar God.

And I suspect that I will be one of the first in line to buy the Nintendo DS version when it’s released in June.

I have never been so totally absorbed by a game before in my life, and I can’t think why.  Maybe it’s filling in a hole in my musical education (I was a music major in college, but my concentration was in Mozart and Beethoven, so I had very little interest in headbanging).  Maybe it’s giving me performance opportunities that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.  Or maybe it’s just a mid-life crisis.  But a close friend who has been following my Guitar Hero exploits recently sent me an email in bold, 72-point red type with one message:

YOU NEED HELP!

And she’s probably right.  There’s no way I’m getting past “Through the Fire and Flames” on my own…