Battle of the console rockers: Guitar Hero III vs. Rock Band (Part 1)
By Triston McIntyre
You’ve got an insatiable craving to get your rock on, but not enough to actually pick up and instrument and apply yourself to learning how to play it, right? No problem, as you have two great options for releasing your inner rock god: Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. In this meta-review, I’ll break down elements of each game, and hopefully give you a little more direction as to which rock package will best fit your inner rocker.
Let’s start with Guitar Hero III, available for all platforms. I got into Guitar Hero just this summer with Guitar Hero II, and though I was a fan, I didn’t get hooked until just a couple weeks ago with Guitar Hero III. I’m a playing and writing guitarist myself, and nothing gets me more hyped about playing guitar than time spent on Guitar Hero III, and vice versa.
Anyone that has played the game will know that what you get is a scrolling fretboard, very much in the style of scrolling Star Wars introduction text, surrounded by animated rockers on a stage, playing for a crowd. You choose your guitarist, outfit him with an axe (rocker lingo for guitar), and start your playlist.
Your own guitar controller (Explorer for GH II and Les Paul for GH III) is outfitted with five fret buttons of different colors. Those colors and buttons coincide with circular note indicators that don the visual fretboard, and as the notes scroll down the screen, the player must strike the “strings” (which in fact is a two way up and down bar where the pickups would be on a normal guitar) when specific notes reach the visual zones that indicate the notes should be struck.
Obviously, those notes coincide with the song’s guitar playing, so players can follow the game audibly as well as visually. At the easier difficulties (easy being the simplest, expert being the hardest of 4 settings), players don’t have to hit as many notes to successfully complete the songs.
Career is how you become a rock god. Choose your rocker, start playing with your band through the playlists. At the beginning of your career, you don’t have particularly difficult songs; as you progress they become more difficult.
Unlike Guitar Hero II, in addition to “encores” (in which at some point during a specific playlist, the user is asked to play a second song for the crowd that they must complete to go on to the next playlist), players duel popular rock icons (Slash and Tom Morello being 2 of them) in a game mode in which they must make the rock icon fail before the song ends. This involves earning weapons to use against the rock icon by hitting specific strings of notes in succession; this looks like shaking the opponent’s fretboard so the rocker can’t focus, or derailing the fretboard until the rocker strikes the whammy bar enough times to get back on track.
I have to say, I absolutely love the duels. I struggled for a short while to beat Morello on expert, but doing so was so satisfying, I was literally beaming as I played the encore of “Bulls on Parade” with him. This mode is a fantastic addition to Guitar Hero III after II.
As you progress through the career, each song you play earns you money to spend at the shop on new characters, guitars, songs, outfits, etc.
In addition to career mode, there is a co-op career mode; this is a lot of fun, however it doesn’t really compare to the face-off mode, in which you share a song with a competitor and take different sections of the song to play at each time, occasionally playing the same section with different notes. It really is a ton of fun.
Online play is fun as well; however, I prefer to spend time honing my feeble skills in the practice mode when I don’t physically have a friend to compete with in my house. If you struggle with a song, spend a few times practicing and slowing it down, and you’ll benefit greatly when its time to throw on the spandex and play like you’ve never played before.
One thing that slightly annoyed me was an occasional lag in the graphics of the song; I love the music, and the visuals really do come as an afterthought (and even if you wanted to, you can’t focus on the backdrops while you’re playing). That being said, I think revamping the cartoonish characters could only be a step forward for the franchise.
The music is fantastic; Metallica, Muse, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, and others are just some of the bands that make the soundtrack completely worth the purchase. I wasn’t a huge fan of some of the middle playlist songs of Guitar Hero II, but this soundtrack is really quite good. My favorite songs by far are Knights of Cydonia by Muse, and Through Fire and Flames by Dragonforce.
What, if anything, you should digest from this slightly jumbled review, is that Guitar Hero III is completely worth the money. I get excited about the possibility of battling my friends for guitar god supremacy any time I hear one of the songs from the playlist on the radio. This is a must buy for anyone who wants to get their rock on, or just have something fun to do with friends.
Keep your browsers tuned here for the second part, in which I will discuss my experience with another excellent game, Rock Band, and then compare the two so you can make the best decision to fit your needs.
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January 3rd, 2008
this sites makes me up to date. I bookmarked it
January 4th, 2008
Rock Band is so superior to GHIII that once I played it I can never play GH games again. Lightyears ahead.