Button Pusher February 8, 2008 permalink

Pity the PC gamer. While those of us with consoles have been rocking it up in Guitar Hero for two years, the lowly PC has had to get by with the vastly inferior Frets on Fire. And now, just when consolers are getting our groupie-magnet fantasies expanded to include drums and singing in Rock Band, the PC crowd finally gets a version of Guitar Hero--but it's Guitar Hero III. Talk about a sucker punch.

For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a game where you "play" a cheap, plastic, five-button guitar by holding down the coloured buttons and strumming along with the notes on the screen . It's kinda like Dance Dance Revolution or Simon applied to rock. And it's the greatest thing since Scarlett Johansson's breasts.

It may sound stupid--it may even be stupid--but that doesn't matter. What matters is that when you're ripping through some Scorpions or Judas Priest on your toy guitar and the crowd is cheering and clapping along (or in the case of Rock Band, singing along) you feel like a fucking god. And not some prissy Calvinist god, an ass-kicking God of Rock like Odin or Zeus with a bitchin' lightning bolt tattoo.

What people look like playing             What they look like in their minds

For those slightly less not in the know, the developer of the first two Guitar Hero games (Harmonix) went on to make Rock Band, while the publisher and maker of the guitar controllers (Red Octane) owned the name "Guitar Hero" and signed on a new developer to make Guitar Hero III. Which is why Rock Band is a great game with horrible controllers and Guitar Hero III is a horrible game with a great controller. Fortunately, you can use any of the Guitar Hero controllers with Rock Band. You can't do the reverse due to some legal shitfuckery, but why would you want to?

Perhaps in a few years Harmonix and Red Octane will play out the rest of the Behind the Music plotline and put their differences aside to reunite for the good of the fans. Although that's unlikely to happen until they're both old and worn out and nobody cares about them anymore.

As an aside, fake rock stardom is not for the faint of wallet, even by the standards of capitalist pigdog gamers. Guitar Hero III rings at a hefty $110 and Rock Band will set you back almost $200. To play Rock Band with a decent guitar controller you're talking about a combined price that could feed a family in Africa for seven years. But really, which is going to bring you more joy?

As an added bonus, non-gamers enjoy it too. Non-gamers such as girlfriends, who would never be interested in playing Gears of War or Crackdown in co-op, but may have tried to drag you out to karaoke in the past. She gets to indulge her inner idol while and you get points for Doing Something Together. Something that allows you accrue points with the SO while playing videogames is worth $200, in my opinion.

To anyone who didn't know about the sordid soap opera and just thought "Oh boy, more Guitar Hero," it's kind of like when your usually friendly and scritchable kitty cat starts biting and trying to disembowel your arm. Except that in the case of Guitar Hero it's permanent, so maybe it's more like when your adorable kitty gets rabies and has to be put down.

The flaws in Guitar Hero III are legion. Virtually every change between versions II and III was a decided step backward. Star power is now harder to get and doesn't last as long. Hammer-ons are restricted to specific notes and in some songs it appears they are used specifically to screw the player up.

The characters are uglier and, in the case of the women, whorier. The interface is busier and more confusing, and there are a number of things that pop up on the screen to remind you that you're some loser playing a game and not, in fact, a rock idol adored by millions. 

The XBox Live achievements are stupidly hard to get and stupidly stupid (so I guess in the case of PC gamers it's actually a blessing that they don't get achievements at all). Things like "Complete career lefty and righty", "Win 15 consecutive ranked matches online using a standard controller," and "Score 200k on Cult of Personality without Star Power." Who would do that? Why would they want you to?

But worst of all are three things that make the game virtually impossible to finish even for experienced guitar heroes. 

1. It's just plain harder, across the board. They throw three-note chords into songs in the first tier on Hard. Right when you're trying to cope with the fifth fret. Not to mention bitchingly hard solos thrown randomly into all tiers. If I wanted to practice I wouldn't've quit high school band. 
2. The song Raining Blood by Slayer is (in addition to a really shitty song) ridiculously hard to play. I've heard that if you use your star power just right and hammer the buttons you can cheese through the tough part, but there's no point because of
3. Boss battles. I don't particularly like boss battles in regular games, because they're usually stupid and insulting. Like in Gun, when the final boss was wearing a metal chest protector and therefore was immune to shotgun blasts to the face. In a music game, they're even stupider and insultinger. I don't know anyone who started playing guitar because they wanted to use "attack powers" to beat opponents. Guitar Hero needs a final boss like a snake needs a push-up bra. Yet another glaring indication that It is not being fucking Gotten.

Harmonix, who made Guitar Hero 1 & 2 and Rock Band, are mostly musicians who wanted to make games that allow non-musicians to experience the joy of playing music. Neversoft, who made Guitar Hero 3, are not. They apparently want to allow non-musicians to experience the frustration and (literal, hand-cramping) pain of not being dextrous enough to play Slayer. And they think that since boss battles were such a great idea in Golden Axe, they belong in every game. And they apparently watch a lot of really trashy porn, because there's no other explanation for giving a wholly virtual woman bad collagen injections.

Seriously, WTF?

Conversely, Rock Band has a very customizable character creation system and most of the characters you end up with look good. And once you play the game a bit you can get new clothes and haircuts to dress up your on-screen dolly. You can make it look as similar or dissimilar to your meatself as you want.

'sup

The only flaw is that the weight slider only goes from anorexic-heroin-addict to Hollywood-fat. You can choose from four varieties of skinny but if you want to play someone with a little jiggle in their wiggle you're SOL. But maybe that's for added realism because there haven't been any fatties in the music industry since Mamma Cass died.

Back in the day, Guitar Hero II claimed to have the most downloadable content (DLC) of any 360 game, and while that may have been true at the time it was more because of a lack of competition than any great spigot spraying songs across the internet. Especially when you consider that half of it was just repacked songs from Guitar Hero I.

Rock Band has taken a different tack. Rather than pledging to put out more songs than Halo 3 had map packs, they promised three new songs every single week. And thus far they've made good on that promise.

What this means to gamers is that there is always something new to play, should you get bored with the songs you already have. What this means to the developers is that they get more money, every week. It's what business knobs call recurring revenue, and they love that shit more than their own children. And in this context when I say "children" I of course mean vested stock options.

To date there have been 50 extra songs released, which means a true Rock Band junkie could binge to the tune of over $100 (feeding the afore-mentioned African family for an additional two years or so depending on birthrates and AIDS). Guitar Hero III has less than half that, which could be good or bad depending on how much liberal guilt you have.

But lest you think me a total jisming fanboi for Rock Band, I will point out a few of its flaws. First of all, I don't like the songlist that much. Some people do, but those people are idiots. To me it looks like something assembled by a music critic rather than a music fan. Way too heavy on the Rush and Radiohead and not nearly enough stuff that doesn't suck. Plus, having a game entitled Rock Band that doesn't include any AC/DC should, quite frankly, be illegal.

There is no way to flag songs as omitted from your World Tour setlist, so if you want to play Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld, all the filler songs you have to play to get to it get unlocked as well. And if you bought the Metallica songpack you may randomly be forced to play Metallica's Black-- Rock Band's answer to Raining Blood--which may eat away at the good will the game has earned you from your girlfriend.

But by far the biggest problem with Rock Band is the PS2 version. It's missing so many features that it's not just crippled, it's a quintuple amputee. First off, there is no money to earn because there is no shopping and dress-up because there is no character creation because all the videos are pre-rendered. There is no online mode, you need to do some complex wiring to get all four instruments plugged in, the Band World Tour has been neutered, and practice mode is limited to two speeds (one of which is crippled). And there is no DLC. Which may in fact explain all the other flaws, as they not-so-subtly try to force players onto a platform that allows them to stick their siphon hose in your change purse.

Of course, any PS2 gamers who don't have the money for a 360 (14 years of Africa-family-feed) are still better off than PC owners. A limbless, headless Rock Band is still better than the jungle rape camp that is Guitar Hero 3.