Guitar Hero (PS2): OMG

Cafe Society
1

I am in music gamer heaven. I picked up Guitar Hero last night from Adequate Buy.

I love music games in general, and I’ve worn out the DVDs for every game Harmonix has produced, so this one was a no brainer for me, and the reviews only made it more of a must buy. Gamespot and IGN both put it in the 9’s, and 1up said they could only give it a 10 cause their scale doesn’t go any higher. Several write-ups I’ve seen call it the best music game ever. They may be right.

If you haven’t heard of it - Guitar Freaks is a clone of the “Guitar Freaks” arcade games. I haven’t played one of those in a long long time so I can’t really make any comparisons between the two. It’s also pretty remniscent of Frequency and Amplitude (two of my favorite games ever), using a guitar controller instead of the dualshock to hit the notes as they scroll in front of you on the screen (you can use the dualshock for this game, but it’s hard as hell).

The gameplay is just awesome. Depending on the song, you’ll either be carefully picking your way through solos or banging out rapid fire chords. The music is great, as usual. Harmonix really knows what it’s doing with cover songs, and like the karaoke games (Karaoke Revolution 1, 2, and 3), the music in GH is almost indistinguishable from the original recordings. I’m hooked on a few in particular:

  • “Killer Queen” by Queen
  • “Infected” by Bad Religion
  • “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand

I wasn’t familiar with any of the above, but they’re all a blast to play, especially on the hardest difficulty. The full main playlist is here. There are also a number of songs you can purchase with money earned for your performances. They’re mostly unknowns and/or local acts from the Boston area from what I’ve seen, but a few are quite good.

Speaking of difficulty, I’m working my way through “Hard” at the moment after finishing off “Medium” last night. I made it though medium without any failures but I’ve crashed and burned a few times so far in “Hard.” As the difficulty increases you have to move your hand (not just your fingers) a lot more and it gets really tricky.

The guitar controller is pretty cool. It’s plastic, so it feels like it weighs about a 1/2 pound (decide for yourself if that’s good or bad), and it’s about 3/4 the size of a real guitar - it’s about 27 inches long (my Ovation is about 40 inches long). My only complaint with it is that it’s pretty loud to use, and unless you’re using a good pair of headphones or really have your speakers cranked up to 11, the experience will be dominated with the sound of you pounding on the keys and the strum bar - especially as you get to the tougher difficulty levels. Also, even if you have a good pair of headphones and your wife is trying to read nearby, plan on getting hit in the head with a book.

I’m curious whether real guitarists will have an easier time with the game (I’m just a self-taught chord man - I don’t play any electric stuff). Hammer-ons and pull-offs are both built in to the game to make it possible to play some killer solos at the highest difficult levels, so I’d think someone familiar with playing that style of music would be at an advantage, but of course it’s a little different with a plastic controller with five buttons instead of a real guitar.

Anyway, there really isn’t much missing from the game. There are even surprises for fans of Frequency and Amplitude. :smiley: It was definitely a good purchase for me, even though between Quake 4, this, and The Movies next week I’m officially broke for a while. It’s $70 by the way, thanks to the custom controller (which apparently costs $40 by itself). Oh noes, Christmas is cancelled! :eek:

Anyone else pick it up yet? If you’re on the fence, and you’re a music game fan, take my word (and the word of about every reviewer on the internets) for it - get it now. :smiley:

2

No one else diggin it? :smiley:

For the curious, you can watch a video of the game at their Myspace page here:

http://www.myspace.com/guitarhero666

You can see people using the controllers (and getting into a little too much), and the gameplay. Good stuff. :smiley:

3

I LOVE Guitar Hero. I can’t believe this thread only has ONE reply! You guys don’t know what you’re missing. This game is actually worth buying a PS2 for! If you actually already HAVE a PS2 and fingers, then you need to own this game now now now! I’m telling ya!

Nuff’ said.

And if that’s not enough for you, this game totally shreds!

Take it from me, What happened here is that Harmonix took awesomeness, peeled it, took the little awesomeness core inside it, squeezed it and took the juice of awesomeness out. Then they boiled that juice to extract the essence of awesomeness which they filtrered to remove all the little particles of unawesomeness in there, the resulting pure, unadultered, concentrated essence of awesomeness was then cooled down and molded to resemble a ps2 dvd, put into a package with a guitar and then shipped to stores all over the U.S

It is still there waiting to be purchased by YOU.

I barely even play videogames nowadays, even AAA titles like B&W 2, F.E.A.R, shadow of the colossus, etc. get ignored after one or 2 hours of play.

But guitar hero? No sir! I catch myself moving my fingers around to make them more supple, I just LOVE the songs in there and I keep whistling bits and pieces as I go along. And I haven’t even started to master Expert mode yet. They say that when you do, it’s a whole other layer of fun. And I believe them because at that point, you would be actually playing pretty much every note you hear. Ah the satisfaction in that! I just can’t wait! And after I master that, I’ll have to try to make a fool out of myself WITHOUT missing notes, rockstar style. I’ll have to practice my one-legged walks, guitar moves and other show-off moves

Get the game, I guarantee you will thank me heartily after you play it for about 30 min. And you will start preaching after you play it for 10 hours.

The 30 licensed songs are:
Motorhead - “Ace of Spades”

Ozzie Osbourne - “Bark at the Moon”

Audioslave - “Cochise”

Pantera - “Cowboys From Hell”

Cream - “Crossroads”

Sum 41 - “Fat Lip”

Edgar Winter Group - “Frankenstein”

Blue Oyster Cult - “Godzilla”

Burning Brides - “Heart Full of Black”

The Exies - “Hey You”

Red Hot Chili Peppers - “Higher Ground”

Joann Jett - “I Love Rock and Roll”

The Ramones - “I Wanna Be Sedated”

Bad Religion - “Infected”

Black Sabbath - “Iron Man”

Queen - “Killer Queen”

Boston - “More Than A Feeling”

Queens of the Stone Age - “No One Knows”

ZZ Top - “Sharp Dressed Man”

Deep Purple - “Smoke on the Water”

Jimi Hendrix - “Spanish Castle Magic”

Incubus - “Stellar”

Megadeth - “Symphony of Destruction”

The Donnas - “Take It Off”

Franz Ferdinand - “Take Me Out”

Stevie Ray Vaughn - “Texas Flood”

White Zombie - “Thunderkiss 65”

Helmet - “Unsung”

Judas Priest - “You Got Another Thing Comin”

David Bowie - “Ziggy Stardust”

In addition, there will be 17 unlockable tracks from Indie Rock bands, which include the likes of:
Acro-Brats - “Call Out”

Anarchy Club - “Behind the Mask”

Artillery - “The Breaking Wheel”

Black Label Society - “Fire It Up”

Count Zero - “Sail Your Ship By”

Din - “Fly on the Wall”

Drist - “Decontrol”

Freezepop - “Get Ready 2 Rock”

Graveyard BBQ - “Cheat on the Church”

Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives - “Hey”

Made in Mexico - “Farewell Myth”

Monkey Steal the Peach - “Theme from Guitar Hero”

The Bags - “Caveman Rejoice”

The Model Sons - “The Story of my Love”

The Slip - “Even Rats”

The Upper Crust - “Eureka! I Found Love”

Shaimus - “All of This”

You can listen to 30 second samples of the songs HERE. I guarantee you will recognize a whole lot of them.

I’ve never endorsed any product as heartily as I do this game for you. I really, really hope at least one of you decides i might be on to something and tries the game out.

4

Are there any games like this for keyboards? Like, something that would work with a USB MIDI controler or something? Cause that would be cool.

5

Hmm, not quite. Konami’s Beatmania series is the closest thing I can think of.

More info about those HERE
also, Guitar Hero Rawks! I am appalled at the lack of answers in this thread. :shakes head sadly:

I shall now go and play some more.

6

I plead ignorance. How does one “play” this game?

7

Do you know who did the cover recordings for this game? They do a pretty remarkable job of imitating the real thing… “Infected,” in particular, nails Bad Religion’s trademark gravelly vocals and oozin’ ahhs and stomping punk rock guitar tones, and the guy who sings “Take Me Out” does a fair Franz Ferdinand imitation.

All that aside, I reeeeally need to play this now. Does the controller add a lot to the price?

8

Ah, HERE is a video that should help you grasp the concept. Click the “Watch” button in the small “video review” frame. The video is also a review of the game and that can’t hurt :slight_smile:

9

Their name is WaveGroup. I’m not familiar with the originals so I couldn’t tell how good a job they do personally (though I thought the singers sound fantastic) but everybody else is raving about what a great job they did.

The game costs $70 and includes a guitar. That’s $20 more than a regular game and yet a total bargain for the sheer amount of fun this game is.

The multiplayer pack includes two guitars and will set you back $110 but you’d have to order it online because I haven’t seen it anywhere so far.

Of course, you can always buy the game with one guitar and spend 40 bucks later on a second guitar if necessary (that’s what I would suggest).

10

Did I mention how awesome this game is?

Just checking…

11

So how far along are you Gozu? I finished up Hard after a few days of playing and I’m slowly working my way through Expert. I’m stuck on Symphony of Destruction at the moment. I need to get better at the solos so I’m working on getting 5-star reviews on more of the Hard songs now.

I’m loving some of the bonus tracks too. Just a great game overall. :smiley:

12

Well, I’ve finished up easy and normal and I have about 5 songs left on hard (not counting the extra songs) and about half of the expert ones.

Skill-wise, My scores for the expert songs and the majority of hard songs are in the 70s range. I can usually wing my way through the repetitive parts and I use whatever star power i’ve managed to accumulate to survive the solos.

My pinky still isn’t fully functional and Moving my hand up and down tends to make me hit the wrong keys pretty consistently so that needs a lot of work too. I still can’t do hammer-ons (let alone pullofs…) 9 times out of 10 and while I sometimes am able to strum both up and down in the very fast passages that really taxing on the wrist, if I concentrate on that, I can’t hit the right notes whenever a change occurs.

If only I didn’t have to take so many breaks in between songs :slight_smile: .My wrists really hurt after 5 or 6 songs now.

13

I’ve just cleared Hard and I’m stuck in expert with 7 songs to go. I clear 80% on “Crossroads” and 70% on “No one knows” and I’m hoping to beat those two sometime today.

Of course, I should mention that I have not cleared any of the unlicensed songs on either hard so I’ll have to take care of that at some point. For now, I want to finish the game first, then start getting 5 stars on everything starting with normal mode (Easy mode is just too easy at this point. Not enough notes to hit, I get bored and lose the rhythm :slight_smile:

For those of you who are reading this thread for the first time: Guitar Hero Rocks!

14

It sounds great. I may be getting a PS2 solely for this and the DDR series. Does this game translate to using an actual electric guitar?

15

It’ll definitely make you feel like you’ll be able to pick one up and start shredding. :wink:

Realistically, I don’t think much will translate aside from learing how to “hammer-on” and “pull off.” Will certainly loosen up your fingers though. :smiley:

16

Oh yes, It will definitely loosen up your fingers. You’ll discover muscles you didn’t know you had and you’ll do it the hard way :wink:

There is another thing about playing with a guitar with over 4 chords. You either must posess an extremely fast, elastic and responsive pinky or you will have to change the way your brain work. Let me explain. When you play the game at first, you learn to associate one color and position (that’s what differentiates each note in the game) with one finger. You will not use the 5th note until Hard mode. By the time you reach Hard mode, however, you will have to be able to play the 5th note and it involves either moving your whole hand down one button or alternating your pinky between the 4th and 5th note.

The problem with the second solution is that pinkys are not that flexible and responsive. Much less so than index fingers for example so doing this move reliably is very hard. It is made more so because when you move your pinky sideways, it takes your ring finger with it! This has the effect of shifting your ring finger one note as well. Suffice to say that managing all this is challenge of mythical proportions.

So one has to revert to shifting the hand by one note when required and reshifting it back to its inital position when the notes you play will have it so. When doing this, ALL the fingers are shifted which means that the notes they USED to hit will be shifted as well. THe problem is that our muscle memory tends to associate one color and one position with ONE finger, not “2 depending on how the hand is shifted”.

So what we must do is slowly and painfull retrain our brain to associate colors and positions with the buttons of the guitar instead of the fingers. Furthermore, we must create a secondary association between the 2 possible positions of the hand and the notes each finger produces. If this sounds very complicated, be assured, it’s not when you are actually playing as you will experience the problem first hand.

Nonetheless! Any half-way decent guitar player has to go through this process (and worse things!) and we all know how ,given many guitar players there are, most people can accomplish that task. Are you still with me? The only reason I’m offering this complex explanation of a subject that most of you don’t give a lama’s dung about is because my brain’s chemistry has been slightly changed but the presence of THC molecules willfully absorbed through the lungs and resulting from the necessary incineration of questionnably pure chunks of cannabis buds. This is, of course, only to make the guitar hero experience more authentic :wink:

I hope that whatever issue I intended to address when I began writing this oh-so-long post has been at least partially covered by it :slight_smile:

RAWK ONNNNNN!

17

I have a feeling I already know the answer to this, but do they happen to make a lefty controller? Or would it not matter?

18

It has a “Lefty Flip” mode so you can use the regular controller. You’ll have to reach around the whammy bar a little but I think it’d be OK.

19

There is an option to do a “Lefty Flip” and then all the notes on the screen will also flip so that it’s easier for you. Pretty cool stuff. The only problem is that the whammy bar will now be ontop of your left hand but I’ve been told that it’s not hard to get used to.

My roommate who’s a lefty started playing lefthanded and later switched to righthanded and she’s not doing bad either way so that’s also an option.

20

The Penny arcade guys like the game. They made comic about it. Also in traditional Penny Arcade style they have a
post about it.