Guitar Hero 3

The newest genre to video games over the pat couple years has been music and rhythm games. Probably the most beloved franchise in this genre is Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero 3 was release a little while ago(10/28/07) by Neversoft. This had many fans of the series worried because the guitar hero license was always handled by Harmonix Music, but they went off to produce Rock Band. Can Neversoft & Red Octane pick up where Harmonix left off and continue this great series? Well...yes they do, to a certain extent...

Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock does a good job and sticking to a formula that works. Nothing much has changed between Guitar Hero 2 and 3. You still have your guitar with five fret buttons and a strum bar, and notes still wiz down the screen as you try to play in time with the guitar track of the song. What has changed is of course the song lists. And for the most pat Guitar Hero 3 has one of the strongest play lists in the entire series to date with a good mix of old and new rock. The mix consists of bands such as Santana, The Rolling Stones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sex Pistols, Pearl Jam, Social Distortion, the list goes on and on.

When playing your choice song from the excellent list provided, you will have the opportunity to pick from four difficulty settings, easy, medium, hard and expert. As in the other guitar heroes easy and medium are a great place for beginners to start from. Medium is just a little bit tougher then other guitar heroes but still provides a good learning ground for the evolving player. It is in hard and expert that the game really starts to get ridiculous especially in expert. Hard and expert are pumped way up compared to Guitar Hero 2. Expert should only be attempted by those who have unbelievable shredding skills.

The venues that you play your performances in all have a distinct look to them with good variation in-between. Unfortunately the crowds that you play in front of are not as great. The crowd usually consists of four or five people duplicated a dozen times, all doing one or two animations. It just really takes away from the experience when the camera goes out to the crowd and you see a group of twenty people doing the exact same animation side by side. Aside from that the guitar player’s animations and the lip syncing from the lead singer are just fantastic. The only draw back from the band is the drummer, whose motions seem choppy and dull.

The career mode in GH3 does something that the previous guitar heroes didn’t, tell a story. This may look like a great idea on paper, but when it was instituted into the game the result is very poor. The story is told through cartoonish cut scenes where there is absolutely no voice acting besides a series of grunts made by the characters. Almost every played will be compelled to skip of the cut scenes because no matter what happens in the story, it does not affect how you play the game in anyway. The only thing that changes as you progress though the career is the venues you play in, but you’re too busy trying to hit the notes that most of the time you don’t even notice the changes to the venues. As you progress through the campaign, you will recognize why they called it Legends of Rock, because every now and then you will be challenged by a rock legend such as Slash, Tom Morello and, and, and I guess that’s actually it. For a game that is called Legends of Rock to only have two actual legends is very disappointing. If you don’t feel like doing the career by yourself you can always have a friend join you and play through the co-op career. The co-op career tells a different story, which is still weak at best, but enables you to unlock different songs then you would in the single player career. A downside to the co-op career is that you cannot do it over Xbox Live or and such service. It would have be a great addition to be able to play career with a friend over Xbox Live.

Besides the career mode, Guitar Hero 3 offers up new styles of play, one of which is battle mode. Battle mode is a two person mode that essentially enables you to battle your friends with certain attack variations. To gain an attack you must hit a certain labels notes in order. Once you have acquired the attack, you activate it in a similar shaking of the guitar you would normal do to use star power. The effect of these attacks ranges from things like double the notes, upping the difficulty, or having the player tap a button repeatedly missing notes in the process. There is one problem with this mode. If one of the two players is any less skilled then the other, the battle can be over within a matter of thirty seconds, because chances are they will not be able to recover from the attacks quickly enough. Having said that though, if you do have two evenly matched opponents battle mode can be a lot of fun. Battle mode is also used in the boss battles you encounter in the career mode, which really makes you feel like you are having it out with them in a superb shredding contest.

New to the series is the ability to play online with your friends. As stated earlier you can not play career mode online but you can still play the other modes such as battle and face-off mode. The game holds its frame rate very well over Xbox Live with only minor slow downs or glitches.

So overall, Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock takes the approach of if it aint broke don’t fix it. The game play remains the same from Guitar Hero 2 to 3 which is still great game play. The career mode makes an attempt but does little to changes the standard tiered unlocking of songs and there are some other things like online play and battle mode thrown in there. In the end Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is still a great game with one of the best song lists in the series, but it is starting to get to the point where it feels like we keep hitting the same nail on the head. Guitar Hero 3 is a no brainer for fans of the series and new fans, but for those of you looking for something more out of this installment, you maybe disappointed in the same formula presented to you before.

Guitar Hero 3 Trailer

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OVERALL: 7.9/10

Game Play: 8.0/10
Graphics: 7.2/10
Sound: 9.0/10
Presentation: 8.5/10
Value: 8.0/10

Written by GatheringofGamers.com Member: The Antagonist

Guitar Hero 3 - SONG LIST

Tier 1: Starting Out Small
1. Slow Ride (as made famous by Foghat)
2. Talk Dirty to Me (by Poison)
3. Hit Me with Your Best Shot (as made famous by Pat Benetar)
4. Story of My Life (as made famous by Social Distortion)
5. Encore: Rock and Roll All Nite (as made famous by Kiss)
6. Co-op Encore: Sabotage (by Beastie Boys)

Tier 2: Your First Real Gig
7. Mississippi Queen (as made famous by Mountain)
8. School's Out (as made famous by Alice Cooper)
9. Sunshine of Your Love (as made famous by Cream)
10. Barracuda (as made famous by Heart)
11. Boss: Tom Morello's Original Boss Battle Recording
12. Encore: Bulls on Parade (by Rage Against The Machine)
13. Co-op Encore: Reptillia (by The Strokes)

Tier 3: Making The Video
14. When You Were Young (by The Killers)
15. Miss Murder (by AFI)
16. The Seeker (as made famous by The Who)
17. Lay Down (by Priestess)
18. Encore: Paint It Black (by The Rolling Stones)
19. Co-op Encore: Suck My Kiss (by Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Tier 4: European Invasion
20. Paranoid (as made famous by Black Sabbath)
21. Anarchy in the U.K. (by The Sex Pistols)
22. Kool Thing (by Sonic Youth)
23. My Name is Jonas (by Weezer)
24. Encore: Even Flow (by Pearl Jam)
25. Co-op Encore: Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll (as made famous by Blue Oyster Cult)Tier 5: Bighouse Blues
26. Holiday in Cambodia (as made famous by Dead Kennedys)
27. Rock You Like a Hurricane (as made famous by Scorpions)
28. Same Old Song and Dance (by Aerosmith)
29. La Grange (as made famous by ZZ Top)
30. Boss: Slash's Original Boss Battle Recording
31. Encore: Welcome to The Jungle (by Guns N' Roses)
32. Co-op Encore: Helicopter (by Bloc Party)

Tier 6: The Hottest Band On Earth
33. Black Magic Woman (as made famous by Santana)
34. Cherub Rock (by Smashing Pumpkins)
35. Black Sunshine (as made famous by White Zombie)
36. The Metal (by Tenacious D)
37. Encore: Pride and Joy (as made famous by Stevie Ray Vaughn)
38. Co-op Encore: Monsters (by Matchbook Romance)

Tier 7: Live In Japan
39. Before I Forget (by Slipknot)
40. Stricken (by Disturbed)
41. 3's and 7's (by Queens of the Stone Age)
42. Knights of Cydonia (by Muse)
43. Encore: Cult of Personality (by Living Colour, Re-recorded)

Tier 8: Battle For Your Soul
44. Raining Blood (by Slayer)
45. Cliffs of Dover (as made famous by Eric Johnson)
46. Number of the Beast (by Iron Maiden)
47. One (by Metallica)
48. Boss: Lou (The Devil) Boss Battle Recording
49. Encore: Devil Went Down to Georgia (as made famous by Charlie Daniels Band, Steve Oumiette rendition)Bonus Tracks:
50. Avalancha (by Hiroes del Silencio)
51. Can't Be Saved (by Senses Fail)
52. Close (by Lacuna Coil)
53. Don't Hold Back (by The Sleeping)
54. Down n' Dirty (by LA Slum Lords)
55. F.C.P. Remix (by The Fall of Troy)
56. Generation Rock (by Revolverheld)
57. Go That Far (by Bret Michaels Band)
58. Hier Kommt Alex (by Die Toten Hosen)
59. I'm in the Band (by The Hellacopters)
60. Impulse (by An Endless Sporadic)
61. In Love (by Scouts of St. Sebastian)
62. In the Belly of a Shark (by Gallows)
63. Mauvais Gargon (by Naast)
64. Metal Heavy Lady (by Lions)
65. Minus Celsius (by Backyard Babies)
66. My Curse (by Killswitch Engage)
67. Nothing for Me Here (by Dope)
68. Prayer of the Refugee (by Rise Against)
69. Radio Song (by Superbus)
70. Ruby (by Kaiser Chiefs)
71. She Bangs the Drums (by The Stone Roses)
72. Take This Life (by In Flames)
73. The Way It Ends (by Prototype)
74. Through the Fire and Flames (by DragonForce)