I’m not much of a rhythm and music games fan, and I have never even held a guitar in my entire life. So what crossed my mind to want to play Guitar Hero? Simple: the music. There’s nothing like some good rock and metal soundtrack.
I was actually expecting to be a complete disaster, considering I am very rhythm-impaired. I mean, seriously, I never even managed to learn how to play the piano because I couldn’t coordinate both hands and now I’m trying to play a guitar game? “Let the humiliation begin” I thought as my husband handed me the guitar controller and I struggled figuring out how to hold it right. Oddly enough, my first attempt didn’t go half as bad as I would expect, aside from laughing at the weird sounds coming from the missed notes, causing even more missed notes.
The next day, my husband was at work so I started my own game, picked a character, a guitar, named my band and went through the tutorials. They’re very user friendly and will teach you the basics of that funky plastic guitar controller. There are five fret buttons, each with a different color, which correspond to the notes on the screen. To play a note, you move the strum bar up or down. To play a long note, you press the fret button and keep holding the strum bar until the note ends. Then there’s a whammy bar that you can use to alter how a note sounds.
The game mechanics are similar to any DDR or Karaoke Revolution game. The different colored notes come scrolling on the screen and you play them as they reach the bottom. Miss a note and you’ll hear “clunk” and “sproing” types of sounds, or nothing at all in the event you miss a long note. Hit the notes at the right time and you will get the crowd going. Hit several notes in a row and your bonus multiplier will start going up, giving you a higher score.
Another score boost is the Star Power. You accumulate Star Power by hitting notes shaped as stars or by using the whammy bar during long notes. Once you have enough Star Power, you can use it (by tilting the guitar up) to double your current multiplier and get a ton of points. While Star Power is active, the crowd goes crazy, the music echoes and all the notes turn blue.
The Career Mode is composed of five or six stages and it’s organized as if it were your band’s tour. You have five available songs per stage, and to advance to the next you must complete four of them (except on the last stage).
The soundtrack includes hits such as Iron Man, Smoke On The Water, I Love Rock & Roll, More Than A Feeling, Thunder Kiss 65, Symphony Of Destruction, Bark at the Moon and Take Me Out. You will have the chance to play a series of tunes by Queen, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, the Ramones and many others.
Completing a song will grant you a headline in the newspaper with a blurb about your band. As I named my band “Sania’s Melons”, those headlines were a real hoot.
I didn’t put that guitar controller down until I finished the Career Mode on Easy. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the crowd, maybe it was the ambition to do better, but I just kept going until the tour ended. By then, my eyes couldn’t even focus. It felt like the room was moving around me, a side effect of seeing notes and background moving in different directions, and my wrist was a little sore, but I was on my way to the Medium difficulty Career and felt really proud of myself.
That night, I never managed to sleep until after 6am. My brain kept playing I Love Rock And Roll over and over in my head and all I could see when I closed my eyes were the notes passing by. Talk about overstimulating the mind! Needless to say, I could barely function the next day.
It took me a couple of days to grab the controller again, just because of that disorienting feeling in my eyes. It also took me about four songs and a couple of tries each to get used to using my pinky finger on the blue fret button in Medium difficulty. Somehow, it feels like I can’t reach it properly, and I honestly have no clue how am I supposed to manage the higher difficulty levels when certain parts of the songs are becoming so complicated already. And I keep having a really hard time with Queen’s “Killer Queen”…
From Medium and up, completing songs will award you with prize money, which you use to purchase unlockable content: characters, guitars, guitar skins and an extra 17 songs.
Guitar Hero is just amazing, it really is. An innovative game concept that works, awsome soundtrack plus unlockable features make it a worthy addition to anyone who is into rhythm and music games, to anyone who is considering taking guitar lessons and to everyone who just loves rock and metal. For those who already know how to play the guitar they might be in for a surprise.
Granted, Guitar Hero is an expensive purchase, especially if you want a second controller for the multiplayer mode, but it’s an experience that won’t disappoint. But let me tell you, after you play Iron Man with that controller, you will definitely feel like a rock star. Guitar Hero rocks!