by:	November 18, 2007

Neversoft, creators of the Tony Hawk games, has been given the reigns of the most popular music title out there, ever since the original developer, Harmonix has gone to develop a new all-in-one music title appropriately named Rock Band, and despite the absence of the originators, Guitar Hero 3 still shred some new notes into the series. The game looks sharp, sounds great, has plenty of great music, with the covers even sounding remarkably close to the original tracks, plenty of online goodness, but despite all these new additions that builds on the strong foundation of the past two games there are still a few bad wires to be found here.

If you don’t know how Guitar Hero titles work, it is pretty simple; you are given five frets (which you use less or more of depending on the difficulty you put it on) and as notes scroll down the screen to the line, you hold in the appropriate fret button and “strum” a string accordingly. When there are long held notes, you can use a whammy bar, and there are times when if you get certain “star notes” perfectly, you build up “star power”. When you cock your guitar controller a certain way, you activate the star power, letting you get even more points as you play. You can of course fail a song, and are given a meter to tell if you are rocking out or bombing.

If you are a newcomer to the series like me, the game has a pretty through tutorial of the ins and outs, and even gives you great tutorials on advanced tricks, even allowing you to practice songs by slowing them down if you choose. That is good to, because the game can be incredibly difficult even on the medium difficulty. Playing with my own veteran Guitar Hero friends, they even admit the game is all around far more difficult than in the past, although I along with inexperienced friends and family have still been able to enjoy the game quite thoroughly together. If you have never played a Guitar Hero title before, heed this warning; it will hurt your hands like no other title has before. This became especially apparent for me when playing Metallica’s “One”, on any difficulty really. While it is definitely a great song, and it is rewarding when you complete it thanks to how lengthy it is, your hands won’t like it one bit. The game also keeps track of how big of note streaks you get, with certain number streaks in the various modes counting for achievements. Speaking of achievements though, they are considerably harder than last year. The achievements range from beating a certain difficulty, perfecting a song, buying all the guitars, characters, and with a at least two focused on the unlockable and incredibly intense “Through the Flames and Fire” by Dragonforce. I can’t stress enough how incredibly hard, intense, and catchy this song it.

The Career is pretty straightforward; you are given a venue per set of songs that normally match a certain theme, like British music, simple beginner songs, or hand-destroying metal. After clear enough for one venue, like last year you are asked to perform an encore, which basically lets you progress to the next set of songs. Songs like “Rock and Roll All Nite” by Kiss, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam and so on.

A new addition to the Guitar Hero series, now every few sets instead of one song you have a “boss battle” against rock legends Slash from Guns n’ Roses/ Velvet Revolver fame, and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine/ Audioslave fame. When you do these battles, instead of star power, you are given “power-ups” that you inflict upon the opposing player to basically screw them up and win the battle. Each of the songs are actually written by the opposing forces real-life counterparts, and sound more like jam sessions in the beginning than an actual battle, but they are still pretty interesting. The power-ups you can inflict onto your opponent range from screwing notes up so that the whammy bar must be hit to keep playing, breaking a string (which requires you to rapidly push the corresponding button to fix it), creating double notes, and so on. Whoever screws up enough or gets outplayed, will lose the match. Since I am not all that great at the game in the first place, a lot of times the song would last to the very end, but you are allowed to have three power-ups stored at a time, and if you unleash all three at once chances are you will win. This battle concept carries on to multiplayer play, both online and offline and while it is very interesting, depending on the skills of either player it is practically a useless addition. It has the potential to be lots of fun though, so here is hoping they fine-tune it well for the next Guitar Hero title. The Career battles have you doing another encore after defeating your opponent, allowing you to play a memorable song from each bosses band, such as Guns n’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”, and of course they each person’s songs are the master tracks.