Guitar Hero III
You know, I’ve always gotten a voyeuristic thrill out of rhythm based games. I lack any and all musical coordination so spending quarters on them would be a waste, although I love watching a skilled Dance Dance Revolution or Pump it Up player. Guitar hero on the other hand did catch my eye since the player is not expected to be a good dancer (which I am not) but instead they must excel at rocking out. Still the first two releases were console only and I stick dutifully to my PC.
Lucky for me Activision contacted Aspyr to port Guitar Hero 3 to computers everywhere and I decided to finally cave in, purchasing one of those cute plastic guitars. Since I have never played any of the prior games I cannot tell you how this sequel compares to them, but I have heard that the difficulty has been slowly progressing meaning that I’ve landed face first into the toughest Guitar Hero game to date. This doesn’t mean that the game is inaccessible, but the learning curve is quite steep. For example I breezed through the easy career mode just to find myself stuck on the first song when I switched to medium. Now that I’m used to medium versions of songs I’m having a difficult time seeing myself pumping up the difficulty some more just to play all the same songs again with one more finger. Then again that’s not the game designers fault so much as my own, I crave unique experiences and lack the patience to grind for levels in MMORPG’s and I’m certainly not going to play “Slow Ride” 100 times until I can master it with the guitar behind my back on the hardest setting. Still all it takes is one trip into the buggy online arena to find a true fanatic.
Either way I am quite enamored with the song selection, which does a great job of representing rock and even indulges me with such metal classics such as The Number of The Beast, Raining Blood and One. And if you go into the bonus material you can find tracks by Lacuna Coil, Kill Switch Engage and even Heroes del Silencio, a staple of my Spanish rock youth. Particularly cool is a progressive metal track called Impulse by Endless Sporadic.
On the other hand the game is not completely flawless. While the graphics are wonderfully stylized and quite impressive, they tend to take a toll on most PC’s causing them to stutter and lock up for a few seconds. Also their list of legends of rock for you to duel against is pretty limited, elevating only Slash and Tom Morello. At least the game does give credit to one of the most important influences to guitar players, that being Satan who makes a cameo dueling you at the end.
This dueling system is a lot of fun whenever it doesn’t completely cripple the other player from the beginning. Still it feels a little more balanced than regular dueling, given the fact that an amateur can take out a pro if he is clever enough (something I proved online). This is currently my favorite casual/party game and I can’t wait to that bright, distant future in which the designers FINALLY provide downloadable content since Talk Dirty to Me is starting to get a little stale.
