A Hero Tarnished

Guitar Hero III has now been available for a week. I've had enough to time to play with it to really figure out what I think about it.

In the plus column, the music in this one is really excellent. The "Legends of Rock" subtitle for this game isn't superfluous, it really does contain a large number of classic rock songs -- far more than the earlier Guitar Hero games. There's considerably less assault-on-the-ears metal here than there was in Guitar Hero II, and much of what is there is actually relegated to the "bonus tracks." This is all great to me.

There are a few truly inspired elements added into the game. In one of the venues, you'll occasionally see a spectator climb up on stage and dive into the crowd. The career mode "storyline" of cut scenes tells a cute and fun story of the rise and fall of your band. The idea of a final guitar battle with the Devil himself, to a rocked-up guitar version of The Devil Went Down to Georgia, is absolutely kickass.

Unfortunately, that's about it for what can firmly go in the plus column. The new developer, Neversoft, got a lot of little tiny things just slightly wrong, things that the previous developer, Harmonix, had working great in the earlier installments. For example, the load times are ridiculously long now, as though no efforts to optimize the resource usage were made.

Star Power animations, which used to make watching people play Guitar Hero almost as fun as playing yourself, are now non-existent. Characters used to propeller their guitars around their necks, ride them like bucking broncos, toss them 30 feet into the air, and more. Now, they simply don't do anything at all. Star Power turns the notes blue and makes the crowd start clapping just like before. But the characters keep on doing the same boring movements they do all the rest of the time.

Co-op Mode now no longer allows the play of single songs; you can only play in a Coop Career Mode. When playing Co-op, it used to be that if one player missed a note, only his side of the screen would shake. Now, both players get the "you messed up" treatment. And then, at the end of the song, stats on accuracy that used to be calculated individually are now only displayed for the pair combined.

But that's not the worst thing they did with Co-op Play. That mode now requires both players to play at a high level to be able to unlock maximum content in the game. In Guitar Hero II, you and a buddy could pair up, one on Expert and one on Medium, and still manage 5 star ratings that would unlock every extra the game had to offer. Now, in your career, you unlock only at the level of the player on the lowest setting, which means that to get at everything in the game, you need two players who can both hack it on Expert -- pretty rare.

Not that even players who used to be able to play on Expert can do so now. They've significantly increased the difficulty of the game even over Guitar Hero II, which was widely thought to be a rather big step up from the original. Mostly, this jump in difficulty is achieved through note patterns far more complicated than the earlier games, but once or twice it is a result of bad synch with the music. I was happy that the song Barracuda by Heart was finally added to a Guitar Hero game -- until I played it a few times and realized that no, it's not me that's off... their programming of when to expect the strum input is mis-synched.

There are a few new additions to the game that, while sounding good in principle, turn out not to be in practice. As I mentioned, the idea of an epic guitar battle with the Devil sounds awesome, as do battles against Tom Morello and Slash. But the actual implementation of them sucks. The console-controlled adversary plays perfectly unless you've deployed one of the "weapons" against him -- perfectly enough to always have a full Rock Meter. The only way to win a battle is to save up three "weapons" (the maximum allowed), then deploy them all at once during a stretch where your computer opponent has a lot of notes to play. Nothing else works.

The game has added a streak counter that flashes notices on the screen when you reach a streak of 50 notes, 100 notes, 200 notes, and so forth. DDR has been doing this for years, so it seems like a natural addition to Guitar Hero. But the little sound effect it plays when this happens is almost identical to the "you just screwed up and missed a note" sound effect. The result is that when you reach a long streak, your "reward" is to think you've screwed up, which disrupts your rhythm and then causes you to actually screw up.

The articulation of the lead singer is at an all-time high in this game. When you see close-ups of the singer, he really looks like he's singing the words to the songs now. Which would be incredible, except that in the character re-design done for this game, they made him look like some ghastly offspring of a Muppet and Mickey Roarke's character from Sin City. This guy is fugly.

The thing is, though, Guitar Hero is ultimately about the music. So even with this long list of problems (and more I could go on about), the fact is that the first thing I mentioned probably balances them all out. I'll say it again: this has the best song selection of any Guitar Hero game. Still, I have to wonder if down the road, when some of the luster of the songs has faded through playing them again and again, if all that will be left are these abundant flaws. If so, than this game will be ultimately come to be a real disappointment -- the point where a good thing turned sour.

In all, while I am enjoying Guitar Hero III, more than anything it makes me look forward to Rock Band. That game, from Harmonix (the original developers of Guitar Hero) also looks to have a kick-ass soundtrack and lots of master recordings (as opposed to lots of cover versions). And they'll likely not screw up all the little things that Neversoft couldn't seem to get right.