Free Candy For Everyone

Guitar Hero III came out today. I wasn’t really that excited for it, since it wasn’t made by Harmonix, the fine studio that crafted the first two games. Plus the song list wasn’t that impressive to me. The GH games have been trending towards super hardcore. Each title, the difficulty ratchets up a few notches. The song selection has been becoming a bit too metal for me too. But there’s still something about Guitar Hero.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but nothing compares to my excitement over Rock Band, the next music game out of Harmonix. It’s not just guitars, it’s also singing and drums! It just looks so awesome and it comes out in less than a month. But until then, we have GHIII. My boyfriend is much more of a die-hard GH fan than I am, so we headed over to Best Buy this morning to pick up a copy.

To our surprise, they had a demo of Rock Band! OMG! It was so fantastic! We played two songs in the store, the first was “Wanted Dead or Alive”, with me on vocals and my guy on the drums. It was just super fun. He’s a drummer for real, and he rocked out on the hardest difficulty level. He said it was pretty close to really drumming. We switched after that for Faith No More’s “Epic”, he played guitar and I tried out the drums (on easy! I’m no drummer!). It was so much fun! I was just grinning like a maniac. Rock Band is awesome, yes yes.

We considered staying there and playing all day but figured they might kick us out of the store eventually. And we had some GHIII to play. I have to say that Neversoft did a good job on GHIII. They had to write the game from scratch, they didn’t actually have the GH1/2 codebase. But it felt like Guitar Hero. There are some major complaints - the difficulty is a mess. The songs don’t get evenly harder as you play through them. They have a co-op career mode, which is quite cool. You can play through and unlock songs together. But the order of songs in co-op mode is completely different than it is in solo career mode and it really makes no sense. In either one, there are songs in much later brackets that are tons easier than the earlier ones. Very uneven. And overall, the game is much harder than GHII. I’d say that it’s as hard on Hard as GHII was on Expert, the next difficulty level up. I wouldn’t even want to begin to try this game on Expert. Hard was quite hard enough.

We played all the way through co-op career mode on Medium, then got about halfway through solo career mode on Hard (trading off songs). We tried out the multiplayer battle mode in between. The idea is that instead of trying to score points, you’re just trying to get the other player to fail. You get attack powerups at certain points in the song and can attack your opponent. Some of them are just a minor annoyance, like the “broken string” that makes you repeatedly tap a button until you “fix” the string. Some are just brutal, especially in combination. One attack temporarily increases the song’s difficulty level for a while. One makes the note indicators blink out, which can be really confusing if you’re not sure what notes you need to play. One turns on lefty flip so when it shows you hitting the right most button on the screen you really need to be hitting the left most button. That one really confused me.

If no one fails out of the song you go into sudden death overtime. The song starts over and the first person to miss any note loses. I don’t think either of us have ever played as perfectly as during those overtimes (and we got into them pretty much every time, we’re evenly matched, I guess!). In this mode, the only attack is this evil “drain” that is a floating icon that gets closer and closer to the bottom of the screen, eventually obscuring the notes you need to press and just making you fail. The battle mode was cool and creative. I remember reading about it ahead of time and not really thinking it was all that important, but we had a blast with it.

Overall, GHIII was a surprise to me. The gameplay felt solid and there was a lot of nice tweaks to the standard GH gameplay to make things better. The difficulty is a shame, and I wish they’d arranged the songs in a better order. But it was good enough to tide me over until Rock Band. But when that comes up, goodbye Guitar Hero! I will have a new gaming love.

Go check it out. I want to learn to play drums! Sounds sweet.

See people playing Rock Band! I can’t wait:

And the YouTube link if the embedded player didn’t work.

I doubt most people will look like such rockers while playing, but that looks wild. The drum kit is massive though. Can’t be cheap…

UPDATE: The movie has been removed from YouTube and the feature on Gamespot that talked about it is gone too. Someone got ahead of themselves.

Since we can never get enough Guitar Hero, Harmonix and Activision are releasing an 80s themed Guitar Hero game next month - Rocks the 80s. It’s only coming out for PS2, however. I’m hoping that the songs will be available for download on Xbox Live, since that’s the whole reason I bought the X360 version.

But then again, the song selection isn’t all that exciting to me. I thought I was a big fan of 80s music. I love my cheesy a-ha with the best of them. But I guess I have a limited view into what is 80s music because I don’t remember a lot of the songs that they’ve announced. At least not all that fondly. The list as culled from Gamespot:

“Round and Round” by Ratt, “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, “Metal Health” by Quiet Riot, “Holy Diver” by Ronnie James Dio, and “Heat of the Moment” by Asia. Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” and “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister. Skid Row’s “18 and Life,” Faster Pussycat’s “Bathroom Wall,” Billy Squier’s “Lonely is the Night,” Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time,” Extreme’s “Play With Me,” Eddie Money’s “Shakin’,” and “Synchronicity II” by the Police.

I love the Police, so Synchronicity II is a welcome song, but where’s “Africa”, “Take On Me”, “Come on Eileen”, and anything by Pat Benatar? Maybe those aren’t guitar songs, I guess, but they’re my idea of the 80s! Sadness.

It took me a good long while, but I finally managed to get a working copy of Guitar Hero 2 this week and have been slowly but surely making my way through the game. I was a huge fan of the first GH (note my rave review and all my other posts about the game) but I didn’t immediately buy GH2 when it came out. They’d announced an Xbox 360 version was in the works so I decided to hold off.

I’m not new to the Harmonix fan-dom. I have lots of their earlier games, including the Karaoke Revolution series. And what happened with those is that I bought the first few versions for the PS2, but then they had all the previous songs downloadable on the Xbox so not only did I go out and buy the new version on the Xbox, I re-purchased all the old songs again so I could sing any song without having to swap disks. Lesson learned, I was buying GH2 on Xbox 360 since I knew there would be downloads of songs.

The wait seemed long, but I got a bit of time in at work when people brought in their PS2 copies of the game and we played over lunch or after hours. But when the release date was set, I hopped on over to Red Octane to look for more info and was pleased to see they had a store! So I pre-ordered there because they offered free shipping and a nifty bag to carry my controller. Big mistake. Big.

My game showed up about 2 days after the launch date, which wasn’t too bad. But my buddies had all run over to the local Best Buy and just picked up copies on launch day. Oh well, what’s a few days, right? Wrong. I rush home after work and load up my game. First up, you have to enter a name for your band. I seemed to be having a ridiculous amount of difficulty accomplishing this. I’d hit the strum bar to select a letter and it would overshoot my target or keep going even when I wasn’t pushing anything. Weird, I thought. But I soldiered on and got my band name in there. But then I tried to play the first song and I realized the controller was completely broken.

Strumming downwards didn’t work. And if I shook the controller, it thought I was strumming. Something was broken in there, and this wasn’t good. I was sooo sad. I immediately went over to the Red Octane website to find out how to get a refund and return this stinker. But there was no email address and no phone number to call anywhere! They had a web form, so I filled it out saying I wanted to return the thing. My thinking was, they mailed this out once and it was broken, I don’t want an exchange where they’ll just send might just send me another broken unit. It could go on for months like that.

A week goes by and I hear crickets. Finally, I get an email with a refund id and instructions to ship it back at my own cost and the information that I’ll be charged a 15% restocking fee. At this point I go a little crazy. They expect me to pay them for the privilege of returning their defective product??? That’s not right. In lieu of being able to chew someone out over the phone, I have to settle for another angry message into their form system. I go off on how this is not proper customer support, and the fact that they’re having known quality issues with their product means they shouldn’t charge their customers for having to deal with their problems. And blah blah blah, rant rant. I don’t hear anything at all back.

So I give up on Red Octane. They may manufacture the controllers, but they don’t know how to run a store. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT purchase anything directly from their store. Customer service doesn’t appear to be something they’ve invested in.

I decided to take advantage of the large corporation known as Best Buy. Operation Hoodwink underway. I purchased a new copy of GH at my local BB. Hallelujah, it works! I’ve been playing all week and I’m so glad. Now to get rid of that old controller… I’ll leave the rest of my plan up to your imagination.