Much has been said about the battle for rhythm-action dominance between Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band this holiday season.  While the majority of people seem to think Rock Band will be the signature experience, my anticipation has been more for GH3.  I’m sure Rock Band will be the better party experience, but none of my roommates have shown any interest in the game - not much of a surprise considering two of them spend most of their time working on their real band.  A lot of people seem to have the idea that they’ll be playing on XBox Live, but I really have no interest in playing a party game with a bunch of strangers hundreds of miles away.  Then you have the issue of Rock Band only being available in the $170 bundle this year.  I really only have an interest in playing lead guitar.  Bass has always been boring in GH, I didn’t get a lot of fun out of the drumming in Drummania, and the less said about my singing ability the better.  I’m also less optimistic about Harmonix, considering the direction they had taken Guitar Hero 2 and 80’s.  At first I was tremulous about Neversoft taking over the development of Guitar Hero 3, but the guys at score hero gave the preview builds of Guitar Hero 3 glowing reviews, and the song list looked great…

I still wasn’t sure I wanted to buy it though, because I had to make the choice of either spending $100 to get the definitive version on the XBox 360, which isn’t even my console, or spend $50 to get it on PS2 and be able to use my two existing guitars, but miss out on the upgraded graphics, downloadable songs, online, and integration with scorehero.com.  I certainly have enough games to keep me busy for the rest of the year, but Guitar Hero games never drop in price, and I stores were offering pre-order bonuses.

I realized that I couldn’t make a decision without trying it first, so I downloaded a copy of GH3 for PS2, which had conveniently leaked to the web a few days before the official street date and played a few hours. Here are some impressions:

Even though it can’t have the same sort impact as the first game, I would tentatively say that it may be the best guitar game I’ve played (including GH1-2 and about 5 versions of Guitar Freaks at home and arcade).

The gameplay takes a bit of getting used to, compared to previous GH games. They are a little bit more lenient in judging timing on hammer-on/pull-offs, but that’s balanced by the fact that their solos require a lot more picking. In previous games, if you saw a string of tightly packed notes, you were pretty guaranteed to that you could pick the first one and hammer-on the rest. In GH3, you often have to pick again in the middle of strings, meaning that you need to pay more attention to the notes. It was a little tricky with the fuzzy graphics on PS2, but I expect it will be easier on the 360/PS3 versions.

The note charts are really a step up from GH2 (I’m playing on Expert). I’m a higher tier player, and usually it’s a real chore having to slog through the tedious songs in the first few tiers. In GH3, the difficulty seems a little more balanced; the early songs still offer complex charts, and moving on to the next tier doesn’t seem to be the big jump it could be in previous games - though I made it up through tier 4 or 5, so I’m not sure what the harder songs hold. The charts are generally pretty busy. You find your hands moving a lot, rather than just holding chords, though there is a lot of fast chord work and more instances of 3-string chords than in GH3. My Name is Jonas is probably my favorite chart so far.

The difficulty, thus far actually seems to be easier than previous games. I didn’t lose songs, other than my first duel against Tom Morello, when I didn’t really know what I was doing. I found myself getting 5 stars on songs that I didn’t think I deserved 5 stars on with the old GH metrics. I think that this is mainly because they make it a lot easier to get back into solo sections after messing up, since the hammer-on timing is looser. In GH1-2, if you messed up at the beginning of a big solo section, you were pretty fucked, but in GH3 you can usually get back in on the next line. It also makes the songs sound better, since you don’t muck up the entire solo if you miss the 2nd note.

Having master tracks definitely makes a big difference. Wavegroup did a good job in the past, but it’s just a lot more exciting to play along with the song and have it sound exactly like it does when you originally heard it years ago. There’s also a pretty nice variety in the style of music, though I haven’t found the GH3 equivalent of Texas Flood or Gemini yet.

The unlockables are pretty good too. Some of the secret characters are pretty funny, and a lot of the bonus songs are actually really good - good enough that you will actually want to play them as much as the normal campaign songs. I wanted to buy Through the Fire and Flames right away just so I could get my ass kicked, but it wasn’t available in the store. I’m guessing you have to unlock the ability to buy it by beating the game or something…?

The boss duels are a pretty cool concept, though the attacks are too powerful, and you don’t really get the sense of trying to play your part well, so much as trying to screw the other guy over. I really like that they had the “legend” guitarists create these duel solos themselves. If you can play with a friend and just have a gentleman’s agreement not to use any attacks, then they’re really great.

Anyway, in my eyes, Neversoft is redeemed. The game is also worth the extra $10 over GH2 since the quality of the songs (bonus songs in particular) is a lot higher.

End result: I ordered the XBox 360 version from RedOctane’s official store.  Hopefully I should have it by the end of the week.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Games, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.