Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Activision, Nintendo Wii/Xbox 360/Playstation 2, 2007
It’s a safe assumption that almost nobody had heard of Harmonix before Guitar Hero. Despite almost a decade of music game development and widespread critical adoration of brutal beat-busting games Frequency and Amplitude, Harmonix had yet to develop a game that garnered mass appeal – and most importantly, solid sales figures. Finally, in November of 2005 Harmonix’s collaboration with peripheral maker RedOctane hit stores. Guitar Hero was born – and the rest is history.
Well, sort of. RedOctane and Harmonix were acquired by Activision and MTV Games, respectively – and with RedOctane went the Guitar Hero franchise. Harmonix was free to pursue the game it had always wanted to make: Rock Band, a plastic instrumentalist’s dream gig (due out November 20 on Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3.) Meanwhile, Activision passed the development duties for the next Guitar Hero iteration to Neversoft.
You know Neversoft. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, Tony Hawk’s… well, yeah. (And that Spider-man game on the Playstation, lest we forget!)
Guitar Hero II has sold millions of copies and continues to rank in the top 10 on the NPD reports, so it’s fair to say that Neversoft was presented with a daunting task in carrying on one of the most revered modern franchises in gaming. Did they succeed? Well, that’s a good question.
At best, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock looks like a very convincing reproduction of a Harmonix Guitar Hero game. The lengthy song list is there, most of the characters were retained (but why did Eddie Knox have to go!?) and the gameplay follows the same basic formula. But Guitar Hero III‘s biggest mistake is that it tried to modify the rock-solid mechanics of the previous Guitar Hero iterations – and almost invariably, those changes were to the game’s detriment.
The game engine was built from the ground up, allowing Neversoft to make some changes to gameplay. Hammer-ons and pull-offs (or hopos) are now much looser and easier to play. While this makes the technique a bit more accessible to newcomers, it makes the game feel downright sloppy on Hard and Expert. Additionally, Neversoft changed the formula for where hopos are placed – now they mimic when a string would actually be played on a real guitar. It sounds great on paper – tying the game’s admittedly un-guitar-like peripheral closer to the instrument of its inspiration – but in actuality it translates to arbitrary strumming in the middle of fast hopo sections. For a game where the actual feel is so essential to the experience, those sorts of changes are devastating to the game’s quality. Further, it illustrates just how much thought Harmonix put into the gameplay of Guitar Hero II, and why similar changes hadn’t occurred when the game was under their control.
The biggest disappointment will undoubtedly come to most in the art department. Characters that we knew from previous games have mostly returned, but with a mean streak. Casey Lynch went from grunge rocker to sex symbol. Johnny Napalm stepped out from SLC Punk and into Oz. And Judy Nails is…well, she’s got the breast physics of an early Dead Or Alive character. Harmonix’s character designs were hardly sexual or shallow – they were witty caricatures of the many faces of rock. Neversoft all but scrapped that design principle, leaving us with bouncing breasts and blank stares.
As a longtime rhythm gamer and hardcore Guitar Hero player (I even forced myself to five-star Jordan on Expert) perhaps Guitar Hero III‘s flaws stand out strongest to me. A casual gamer probably won’t notice the difference at first. But given some time with the set-list, most people will see right away that songs that are fun to listen to or well-known aren’t necessarily all that fun to play.
My advice? Wait a few weeks until Rock Band hits. At $170 on Xbox 360/PS3 and $160 on PS2, it’s not much more than the $100 Guitar Hero III bundle – and every song was painstakingly chosen, charted out, and playable with up to four people on drums, guitars and vocals. If you want the feel of Harmonix’s Guitar Hero games, look no further than Rock Band. But approach Guitar Hero III with serious caution.
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