A quick note before we begin:
Guitar Hero 3 is available on numerous consoles, from Playstation 2, to the Wii. While this review focuses on the Wii version, I did have the chance to play the Playstation 3 version, while our own Rick Healey played the PS2 version and John Keefe played the Xbox 360 version. There has been much discussion of all versions on the Netjak Forums, and I've tried to bring mention to some of the discrepancies between versions as well as various observations across all platforms so this review can generally represent every version, but one guy just can't cover it all. You can find some second thoughts based on other versions at the bottom of this review, and check out the Guitar Hero 3 thread on the forums for more chatter about console-specific editions, as well.
The Basics
Guitar Hero 3 is the first game of the series without music-gaming master developer Harmonix behind the wheel. The series, which is now under ownership of Activision with Neversoft helming development, is the type of game that can benefit from this. The formula is simple enough and has been proven not just in the three games prior, but in Frequency and Amplitude, Harmonix titles using the same essential mechanics in its infancy. So the question isn't so much about the gameplay, unless the new developer really went off their rocker and changed it considerably, but about the content. Song selection, obviously, is the most important thing in a music game of any type. If the music sucks, no gameplay element can save it. But for the uninitiated, though, perhaps we should cover the basics first.
The series' gameplay consists of a guitar controller with five buttons on the fret bar. Notes fall on a scrolling bar onscreen and you hold the proper notes down while strumming as they pass a line on the bottom. It amounts to playing standard guitar tablature but with one string. As someone who played guitar for a little over a year and was fine with notes but failed at delicate picking, I have a special love for this title as I can excel at it in ways I never could in real life. But that is the essence of this series (and all games in general); being able to feel like a real life guitar god. As the difficulty climbs, you progress from using three fret buttons to all five, and the chords and notes begin to more and more accurately represent the real thing. A Rock Meter keeps track of how well you are doing, and if it goes all the way into the red, you will fail the song. Hitting multiple notes without missing builds your multiplier to increase your score. Hit a series of starred notes and you build up Star Power, which will double your multiplier and will raise your rock meter faster, making it a lifesaver if you are about to fail a song.
Something Old, Something New
As for progression from entry to entry, Guitar Hero 2 made it easier to use hammer-ons and pull-offs, where you play notes in succession without having to strum. Guitar Hero 3 makes it even easier, which seems like overkill at first, but once you are in the last tiers of songs in Hard and moving onto Expert, you'll bless Neversoft for making them more forgiving. Guitar Hero 2 also brought with it more complex chords, using three notes at a time. Guitar Hero 3 makes great use of them, and just like nailing long strings of two-note chords is more satisfying than one-note streams, many songs in Expert feature grinding series of three-noters that with practice, soon become to feel not only easy but a thrill to play. Another new, though small, addition is the combo meter. Once you hit 25 notes in a row, a small counter appears below your multiplier indicator, giving you an onscreen count of how many notes you have hit consecutively. This is a great addition, as before you had to wait until the song was over to see your longest combo. You are also alerted when hitting milestones like 100 notes or 400 notes in a row onscreen.
Neversoft brought more game modes and options into the mix, as well. You have your standard Career Mode where you unlock standard tracks and earn money to unlock new characters, costumes, guitars, and bonus tracks. There are many multiplayer options ranging from Face-Off, where you trade off playing notes, to Co-op Career, where you and a friend cooperate playing Lead, Rhythm, and Bass tracks. Pro-Face Off has you both playing the entire song, and the new Battle Mode, which is a love-hate situation. In Battle Mode, instead of Star Power you get Battle Power, power-ups like breaking a string, moving up the difficulty or number of notes, in an effort to get your competition to fail the song first. There is also the Practice mode from Guitar Hero 2, where you can practice any section of any song at variable speed settings, so you can learn to nail difficult solos and riffs. Guitar Hero 3 also introduces Online Play, where you can hop onto the internets and face off against friends, foes, and randoms. I had a lot of difficulty connecting to a game on the Playstation 3 version, however. I would constantly get a failed connection notice, and the game even froze on the character selection screen a few times. Hopefully I'm an exception, because Online Play is a ton of fun.
The number of unlockables has increased, as well, in Guitar Hero 3. There are many more guitars to buy, although a large number of them are more joke-y than others, I did appreciate the guitar that has a shark's head wrapped around it, biting the fret board. You can purchase different styles of guitars as well, so if you like your Les Paul in white rather than black, or your Corvus in woodgrain, you're very likely to find a guitar that suits you. There are new characters like Japanese pop sensation Midori, Elvis Impersonator Elroy Budvis, and robot-extrodinare Metalhead, complete with a Raygun Guitar.
And Oh, The Music!
Guitar Hero 3 boasts the largest soundtrack yet, a longer campaign career and a ton of bonus track that pushes the song list to over 70. Longtime requests like Metallica, Rolling Stones' Paint It Black, Foghat, The Who, Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins, and Slipknot have all finally made their way into the game. The game also brings the triumphant return of bands like Slayer, Queens of the Stone Age, Santana, ZZTop, Rage Against The Machine, Kiss, and Blue Oyster Cult. Since Harmonix is no longer the developer of the series, their trademark of using mostly Boston-based indie bands for the Bonus Tracks is no longer present, and we instead find tracks from Lacuna Coil, Bret Michaels, Killswitch Engage, and The Stone Roses. While it is sad to see this tradition uncontinued (and I'm sure it bothers Boston locals much more than the rest of the world), it is not surprising, and the scope of the Bonus Tracks is now much larger and overall, the quality of selection seems much improved, to the point where I spend much more time on the bonus songs than I did in previous editions of the series, and more time than the standard tracklist in general. The absence of the likes of Bang Camaro are missed though- I was really hoping to see another Camaro track in this entry. Overall, though, I think this really is the best songlist in the entire series, with every genre (even country) given its due and a much higher fun-factor. The quality of the song selection manages to outdo all three previous Guitar Hero games, though outdoing Rock the 80's doesn't take much.
Guitar Hero 2 started seeing tracks that were not covers, but were actually performed by the real band. This was great, and something I think everybody hoped would continue to grow as the series continued. As luck would have it, it seems that the music industry has really begun to recognize the Guitar Hero series and contribute their talents to the game, as the number of non-covers in Guitar Hero 3 is larger than ever. Even jerks-galore Metallica took time out from suing their fans to rip it up on One.
One odd note - for some reason, the Wii version is only in monaural. This is great if you're Brian Wilson, but terrible if you never lived a portion of your life over 300 pounds and bedridden. Or deaf in one ear.
The Controller
Like I said, the number one concern of a music-game is the songlist. The number two concern is the controller. Guitar Hero controllers in the past were kind of small, and felt and looked like toys. Guitar Hero 3 steps it up a notch, and makes the controller look slightly more respectable. Based on the famous Les Paul guitar, the Guitar Hero 3 controller is larger, studier, and prettier than previous versions. The fret buttons are no longer solid colors, but black with the note color bordering it. The Wii guitar has a good heft to it, and benefits from being wireless and utilizing the rumble feature of the Wiimote. It's also incredible gracious to battery life. Where playing Metroid Prime 3 or The Godfather would wear out the Wiimote's batteries in about 20 hours, I managed a good 25 hours of gameplay in Guitar Hero 3 before the charge indicator on the Home Menu showed just one bar missing. The Wii guitar opens in the back so you can slide the Wiimote into it, and has a little open spot to the side to hold the wrist strap. And in the greatest feature to ever grace the Guitar Hero guitars, the neck is detachable allowing for both easier storage and transport.Being able to shove my guitar controller into a backpack with room to spare is a blessing. The controller, once again, comes with two sheets of stickers allowing you to customize the look of your guitar. However, the sticker selection has not exactly improved. With all the different companies involved in the making of the game, half of the sheets are company logos. Who in the world wants to put an Activision sticker on their guitar? A huge Guns 'N Roses sticker is equally questionable, but at least that's something that might have some die-hard fans. I do welcome the return of the flame stickers, which have always adored the sides of the fretboard by the buttons, both indicating my flaming-fast fingers and a nod to the PC Guitar Hero clone, Frets on Fire. While playing the Playstation 3 version of the game, I was upset to find that the fret buttons felt less responsive. There's no way my friend had played THAT much Guitar Hero just three days into its release to start breaking the controller, and the buttons feeling soft with no tactile "click" to them made it difficult to feel if a note was appropriately pressed. They felt worse than my original Guitar Hero SG controller which, seeing me through the first two titles, has so much wear the whammy bar offers almost no resistance and the top layer of coating on the strum bar had actually begun to wear away. While I have not touched the 360 controller or the new PS2 one, I feel confident in saying that the Wii guitar is the best of the bunch, especially with the subtle rumble that hums in beat with the song while using Star Power.
Graphics
Now, everyone knows that graphics aren't everything, and that they are barely anything in a music game. While the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions have an impressive coating of graphics over the game, the Wii seems to have gotten the short end of the stick. PS2-level textures with Wii-level light bloom best describes it. Playing the PS3 version, I noticed that realistic hair and clothing movement gave the characters a little more realism. This is absent in the Wii version. While it seems nitpicky to bring up the way hair moves for a title like this, I do have a point: It's clear that the developers took the PS2 version, added some light bloom, and called it a day for the Wii version. I know the Wii isn't as powerful as the other two next-gen consoles, but aside from HD resolutions, I never saw anything in the PS3 version that the Wii couldn't do, and I felt a little cheated that the easy way out was taken with the Wii version, graphically. It's a problem all too apparently on Wii games across the board, and just once I'd like to see a company besides Nintendo really make an effort to take advantage of the graphics the Wii is capable of. Looking at this game alongside Metroid Prime 3 or Super Mario Galaxy is a joke.
A problem across the board in Guitar Hero 3 is the venues. Venues like the sweet Red Octane stage are gone, and replaced with generally boring ones. Crowds are even less varied than previous versions, which is quite a feat. Instead of the same five people repeated in a crowd, it's the same three, and they are so spread out that it never feels like you are playing to a very large group, even in later stages. Crowd noise is also strangely absent, except for canned cheering at the end of a song. I would've loved to hear some whooping during solos, cheers during breaks, and the ever-classic sea of lighters that appeared at appropriate moments in Guitar Hero 2. The only new thing the venues add is a single crowd-diver that reappears at times, and that's not exactly impressive.
Character models are more complex in Guitar Hero 3, but they also seem uglier. Generic Male Lead Singer's Jay Leno chin is not only ridiculous, but creepy. Totally Awesome Hippie Bass Guy is hardly given his due, and Bored Drummer leaves me speechless. He never looks like he's into the song, just the same vacant stare the entire time, and he plays like a freaking robot, with quick motions that match the song, but never, ever, ever look like a real drummer. Meanwhile, it seems like too much time was spent getting Generic Male Lead Singer's lips to sync accurately to the vocals. That's appreciated, but considering the shortcuts pulled with other animations like the drummer, it just doesn't cut it. The animations are, quite simply, awful and cringe-worthy. Star Power moves are also duller, which is almost unforgivable. One of Casey Lynch's Star Power moves involves her dropping to her knees. That's it, Neversoft? THAT'S the best you could come up with. Give me a break. Sigh.
In The End
With Rock Band on the horizon, it bears asking whether or not Guitar Hero will fade into obscurity when you can now assemble an entire group of friends to play every part of the song, not just guitar. With the cost of instruments and the necessity of four friends who want to "be in a band," I think there's plenty of room for a game that focuses only on the guitar for the budget-minded or maybe just the isolationist.
In my second thought on Netjak's Guitar Hero 2 review, I mentioned how the series teaches music and guitar appreciation. Replicating chords and complicated solos isn't just fun, but ever since the series began, I've found myself thinking about music in terms of Guitar Hero, visualizing solos whenever I listen to music. I played air guitar to Queens of the Stone Age's 3s and 7s for months before it appeared in this game, and I found that what I imagined turned out to be pretty accurate. Guitar Hero can make you think about music a little differently, and I have wound up appreciating and respecting bands even when I didn't like their songs, simply because I had a better idea of the kind of talent being represented. I'm not sure any other series can lay claim to accomplishments like that. And, as always, Guitar Hero 3 has introduced me to many bands I haven't heard of that I now greatly enjoy, such as Muse.
Despite it's flaws, Guitar Hero 3 has it where it counts, which is a quality-and-quantity song list, tons of unlockables, challenge, and online play. It seems that every other day I am discovering a new "OMG, this is my favorite song!" track. Guitar Hero itself is a full-blown addiction, and it really pleases me to say that it's never been more fun than it is here. The stuff that really matters is done right and overshadows the nitpicking issues. The only downside to the Wii version is the lackluster graphics and no downloadable tracks (which we can still cross our fingers on being rectified). Other than that, Guitar Hero Wii (see what I did there?) represents the best of the bunch.
