Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

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Fun: My friends and I have now spent a few hours playing the PS2 version of this, and my overall take is: don't spend money on it. While there are some really good songs in the lineup (Black Magic Woman, La Grange, Holiday In Cambodia), overall the sound is mushy, making it often very difficult to follow the music. I've only played a handful of the tunes on Hard so far, but several of the Medium-difficulty guitar and bass parts don't match the rhythm of the music well at all (the mushy sound could be a factor here). That's pretty much the worst of it: low-fi sound and poorly-synced guitar parts. But in general, this feels like even more of a toss-off than the "Rocks The 80's" version did. Somewhat less importantly, the avatar and venue animations are goofy (Midori... GACK), and feel cheap and sloppy compared to previous versions, which is a low bar to begin with. The biggest lose here is that the hammer-ons and pull-offs are for some reason SUPER BRIGHT compared to the other notes on the fretboard, which confused me at first. It might be just that the PS2 port is crappy, possibly deliberately so. Another clue here is that GHIII takes at least twice as long to do an auto-save than any of the previous versions, and its memory footprint is about the same, so it's not like it's doing any more. I know that the gaming world is even more aggressive about forced obsolescence than the PC or consumer electronics worlds, but this seems like killing the golden goose, especially considering the unprecedented appeal of this game outside of the typical gameboy demographic. Sadly, the suckage doesn't end there. The Bonus tunes, rather than being chosen by a contest, or the personal friendships and/or quirky tastes of the developers, are transparently driven by promotional considerations alone, which turns out about as you'd expect. In prior versions, I've really enjoyed discovering songs I liked from unknown acts like Shaimus, Brian Kahanek, and Bang Camaro. There's nothing like that in GHIII. All of the bonus songs I listened to were bland and forgettable ("Hey! These guys sound just like Nickelback!"). The development team clearly threw a lot of time and effort into the new "Battle" mode, but it's just not any fun to play. I watched a friend take multiple stabs at beating Tom Morello, but I couldn't really even comprehend the game, let alone devise a strategy for winning it. Overall, it feels like they added a bunch of dumb, useless features; screwed up the ones that made the game fun in the first place; and somehow also managed to punish me for not buying a new console. I've spent $50 before now on something I enjoyed less, certainly, but I won't be buying any more Neversoft GH games. Since they're most likely abandoning the PS2 platform from here out anyway, it may be moot. Comments (6) | Permalink | (Report this)

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Updated on 6-7-2008.