No, I still haven’t beaten “Green Grass and High Tides.” I’ve given up on that quest.

Instead, I’ve been busy yelling at my party members in “Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Rings of Fate” on Nintendo DS. These guys don’t know up from down.

The game’s predecessor, “Crystal Chronicles” on GameCube, was all about co-op play, but almost no one tried it because each player needed a Game Boy Advance and link cable to play. “Ring of Fates” sidesteps this game-killer with the option for wireless DS-to-DS multiplayer or solo play with A.I.-controlled partners.

My girlfriend wasn’t interested in popping my second copy of “Ring of Fates” into her DS and the wireless multiplayer doesn’t work across ’net, so I was stuck with A.I.

That wasn’t the smartest decision, it turns out.

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Fellow virtual guitar enthusiasts, can I get an Amen? I can’t be alone on this one.

The Outlaws‘ “Green Grass and High Tides” track in “Rock Band” is My Enemy This Week, an enemy that I don’t ever expect to defeat. It’s not worth the effort to try.

I’ve never cared for Xbox 360 Achievements before “Rock Band.” But “Rock Band” was going to present the first case of my gamerscore showing 1,000/1,000 points unlocked. Or so I thought. I tried drums and that dream quickly died. Still, I thought, I can blow through guitar on expert and feel like a champ.

Unfortunately, I’m not good enough for The Outlaws. “Green Grass and High Tides” is nearly 10 minutes long — nine minutes and 49 seconds, to be exact — and features two monstrous guitar solos in that time.

Unlike multiplayer, there are no “retries” if you fail playing solo. “Green Grass and High Tides” has made me fail — a lot. One person can only take getting six or seven minutes into a song before completely blowing it on a solo so many times.

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Readers, I need advice.

My girlfriend is wiping the floor with me at “Super Smash Bros. Brawl.”

I’ve been able to convert my girlfriend into digging most of my nerdy habits, be it “X-Files,” “Lost,” or comic books (she just finished Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”) — but not games. Yet she has an obsession with the “Super Smash Bros.” series. I had no idea this passion existed, but she counts the brawlers among her favorite games of all-time, right next to “Tetris.”

When I was in middle school, none of my friends were much into “Smash Bros.” “GoldenEye 007″ always dominated our time, so the N64 and GameCube “Smash” games mostly passed me by. Thanks to my girlfriend’s surprise interest, that’s changed with the Wii’s “Brawl.”

My girlfriend is a formidable opponent with the pink puffball of doom, also known as Kirby. Most of the time it seems like she doesn’t know what she’s actually doing, but there’s a method to her button smashing madness.

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I am the fourth-best assassin in the world, according to “No More Heroes.”

But that flattery will only get the game so far. It has been angering me, because it has been giving me problems.

Envision, if you will, a game drenched in the same themes of Otaku-mockery/flattery of “God Hand,” “Killer 7,” and “Super Paper Mario,” one in which the bosses are the now-cliched ninja schoolgirls, American cowboys and super-hero super-fans. And imagine this game has some of the best Wii combat controls on the market — a perfect blend of button and motion-based inputs that somehow feel both accurate and visceral.

Ah, but also imagine that this game — which thrives when it channels the player through ranked missions that will elevate him or her from 11th best assassin in the world to the best — also forces players into a “Grand Theft Auto“-lite open world and right into a bit of gameplay IGN outright called “stupid.” (They did.)

The problem are the game’s “Free Fight” missions and save system. How could something so wrong be part of something so right?

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Is there a part of a game that’s driving you crazy this week?

For me it’s Level 14-4 in “N+,” which is driving me up the wall for the simple fact that I cant… drive my character up a wall.

14-4 of my latest Xbox 360 download obsession involves is tricky. It throws the most frustrating curve ball in “N+’”s level design. To play the game you must bring a small ninja through some challenging platform stages.

The majority of the game’s obstacles involve avoiding carefully scattered mine fields, but occasionally the game’s development team, Metanet Software, throws a few heat-seeking missiles your way. In 14-4, there’s not one missile out to destroy you, there are two. The trick is getting said missiles to crash into a wall. Another missile spawns, but there’s a split-second to plan a new move.

Apparently, that split-second isn’t enough for me. In less than 20 minutes, 14-4 made me put the controller down.

That, or I simply need more practice.

So far in “N+,” I have been unable to perfect one of the more advanced techniques associated with the wall-jump. Bouncing back and forth a la “Super Mario 64″ is a breeze, but skillfully timed presses are required to wall-jump up a completely vertical slope, and coming to grips with that is crucial to my success.

We’ve all encountered brick walls and hated foes in video games, the kind we lose sleep over. Read on to learn how 14-4 has vexed me and how my desire to conquer Bungie’s Luke Smith is helping me get over it.

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