I hate Guitar Hero III. Because I can’t stop playing it.

Last night, I was up until 11:30 playing ZZ Top’s “La Grange” on Expert. I’ve completed 42 out of 42 on Easy, 42 out of 42 on Medium, and then topped out at 39 out of 42 on Hard. (I’ve given up on Metallica’s “One” and Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” Yech.)

I completed 21 out of 42 on Expert, but now the songs have gotten really tough. I spent practically six months trying to complete “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” which is really easy for about 70% of it, but the rest is wild and funky solos that are impossible to play accurately, so you let your fingers flail wildly and hope you hit enough notes that you can make it through to the end. Usually, I don’t, but one time, I eked myself across the finish line, and I was thrilled beyond measure.

So instead of turning the dang thing off, I immediately moved on to “La Grange” and proceeded to embarrass myself.

“La Grange” is a repetitive riff for about half the song, but it’s a difficult riff to play, so you don’t build up enough credit to help you survive when the solo gets going. The solo is easier to play than “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” but it’s far, far longer. There’s a brief respite if you can get past the first onslaught, but it’s uphill all the way to the end after that. Every time, it ends in disappointment, with the crowd screaming “You suck!” then my character, a reject from Kiss who wears a Viking helmet, throws the guitar to the ground and stomps on it. I’ve tried using Elroy Budvis, who’s sort of a disco Elvis, and Metal Head, a former nuclear warhead retrofitted to look like Robby the Robot. None of them can play the thing, because I can’t. And all of them end up stomping on the guitar.

I was exhausted last night, and it was everything I could do to rip myself away from the TV and go to bed with ZZ Top running through my dreams.

My twin boys, Corbin and Cornelius, are stuck on the first few Hard songs. They’ve played Foghat’s “Slow Ride” so many times that every time I hear the first few chords of that thing, blood shoots out of my eyes. Since they’ve already completed Medium, they’ve decided to “help” their mother and play her game for her, since she wisely has better things to do than waste her life on Guitar Hero. She played with me for awhile last night, got bored, and then went upstairs to read.

I envied her disinterest.