At this point in its career Guitar Hero has to do little more than show up and it is guaranteed to be the best selling game of the week. Neversoft, the people who took over the franchise when Harmonix left, have made needed improvement in the way of boss battles and original master recordings of songs, but the game still has the major drawbacks of the same basic play mechanics, an high store price, and terribly priced downloadable content.
Guitar Hero has only been about one thing, music to rock your face off. With the advent of Guitar Hero 3 that factor is represented stronger than ever as the track list is the best of any of the games yet. From Rage Against the Machine to The Charlie Daniel’s Band (a remix of “The Devil went down to Georgia”) the track list is in greater shape than it ever has been before. This year’s additions have finally stepped out of the realm of music that most people kind of know to songs everyone should know all the words to. This is much improved over Guitar Hero 2’s approach of making a track list that sits well with everyone, as it tended to not impress anyone.
Guitar Hero 3 finally presents master recordings of several songs instead of the regular cover band recordings. For most hardened Guitar Hero players this is a welcome change as most songs require repeated play through expert difficulty, and in pervious Guitar Hero’s each pass of the songs would sound less and less like the original band. The Sex Pistols seemed willing to take this theory one step further as they
produced a new recording of one of “Anarchy in the U.K.” just for Guitar Hero 3.
Sadly many of the songs in the game still have cover bands performing them, namely the guy who covered Ozzy Osborne, instead of the master recordings of the songs. Even though they are possibly the best of any of the games several of the songs come off as almost painful renditions of once loved songs. While on the first several play-throughs the covers do manage to be amusingly bad – mastery of them quickly becomes painful enough to scream at friends when they attempt to play the once loved songs.
When friends do come over it is rather nice that the PS3 version does have a wireless controller, so when everyone slowly enjoys more and more adult beverages you don’t have to worry about anyone tripping over cords. This does add the problem of the PS3 dropping connectivity to the controller about once every other hour, a problem that seems to be able to be duplicated even on wired controllers. While a fault of the system can’t really be blamed on the game itself, it does manage to be enough to tip a song that is about to be failed over the edge, or drop an awesomely awesome streak down to merely average. The hidden advantage of the guitar on the PS3 is devoted fans that only upgraded to a PS3 will finally be able to play Guitar Hero 1 and 2 with a guitar and not the Sixxas controller.
The downside of all the next generation hype is that the downloadable content is still over priced for a small selection, normally three, of song packs that are “supposed” to be updated twice a month. At over six dollars for three songs the price can become very steep very quickly. While Guitar Hero 2 seemed designed to have song packs with something for everyone, the third game does seem to have more directed clumps of
music. Although it does seem odd that the original promise of spacing out the full retail games more and working harder on downloadable content does seem to be all but forgotten it is a nice concept to think that Guitar Hero does allow you to almost fine tune the experience with the expensive extras.
The price of entry to the game does seem to be happily set at 100 dollars for next gen. consoles, which is interestingly enough the same price as buying a real guitar. With the amount of time and money that needs to be invested in the game it quickly becomes a constant thought that while playing this game one could be learning to play the song on a real instrument instead. While a real guitar isn’t as much fun to pull out with a group of friends around, it does need to be brought up that the game is quickly approaching the same difficulty level on expert play.
Cost aside the main disadvantage is that the game is slowly falling into the same trap that DDR has firmly become stuck in, it changes very little from year to year and runs the risk of only the most devoted followers appreciating the differences. The addition of boss battles with real rock stars is interesting and fun, it doesn’t change the core game play that much from the year before. Online multiplayer is also a nice addition, but it is a feature that seems to have been needed since the first game.
With steep pricing and expensive content Guitar Hero begins to show its age this year. The additions of online multiplayer across all systems and boss battles with the masters of the axe this is the first time that Guitar Hero manages to feel like a fully fleshed out game instead of just an interesting program designed around a guitar looking controller. For fans of the series this is simply a continuation of form, while everyone else will easily find something to love it is hard not to be shocked at the price.
