Free Candy For Everyone

I’m a big fan of just about all the games that Harmonix has made. They continue to make really great music games that are unlike anything else. Everyone at work has been all abuzz about their latest, Guitar Hero. I was reluctant to pick it up for several reasons, the biggest being that I have too many games to play and too little time. But it has been getting such rave reviews from the gaming press and everyone that I know who’s tried it that I couldn’t resist.

Guitar Hero is a game for the Playstation2 that let’s you feel like a rock star. It comes with a custom guitar controller, which puts the price of the package at $70. Not too bad, considering the controller is a hefty piece of equipment. It’s about three feet long, has five fret buttons, a strum bar, a whammy bar, and a start and select button for navigation. Here’s a picture of the stuff:

Let me qualify all this by saying that I play guitar. I’ve been playing for about 15 years, and I’m certainly not a rock star, but I’m comfortable with the instrument, I have a good sense of rhythm and I do alright. I still had an awesome time playing this game. My co-workers who were playing it are not musicians. So I was sorta like, “well, maybe it’s fun for you, but I can actually play the guitar for real, why would I want to pretend?” Well, because you have a whole band playing and flashing lights and score cards and cheering crowds, that’s why!

I played through about 15 songs this afternoon on the easy level. I wanted to get my confidence up (and make sure I unlock everything possible!) It was a blast. The first song up was “I Love Rock & Roll” ,and I quote the game here, “As Made Famous by Joan Jett”. Harmonix also makes the very enjoyable Karaoke Revolution series of games. In these games, you sing along to popular hits performed by musicians to mimic the originals as closely as possible. This was done for licensing reasons, I would assume. It’s a lot cheaper to license the song than the song and its performance by someone famous. So in those games, they don’t even tell you who originally did it, and it’s sort of a bummer. It’s nice to know who did the song originally - sometimes I like to even track it down and buy it, so come on, it’s good business. Anyway, they tell us who did the original in Guitar Hero, and that’s a good thing.

What can I say about the gameplay? It reminds me a lot of Harmonix’s earlier games, Frequency and Amplitude. In all these games, there’s a visual path that you are on. Indicators appear to show you which buttons to press at what time. In Guitar Hero, those buttons just happen to be “fret” buttons on the guitar instead of normal buttons on your controller. The feel of playing the game is a lot like playing a musical instrument, however. You start to learn particular riffs and memorize what to do when they come up again. I found myself starting to head bob and rock out a bit. It was really quite awesome.

Interestingly, some of my favorite songs were the least fun to play. And some songs by bands I couldn’t imagine myself listening to were the most awesome. Basically, on the easy mode you aren’t playing all the notes. And that was actually a bit confusing for me. Instead of just listening and grooving, I had to intently watch the visual indicator to see when to play, and it doesn’t always correspond to the notes you’re hearing. The best times are when you play a note and then you hear a note. You really feel like you are jamming. So ultimately I preferred the songs with the best riffs, not the ones I necessarily like to listen to the most.

I haven’t tried it at the harder difficulty settings yet, but I expect it gets quite complicated. There are five fret buttons, and at the easiest level it only seems to use three of them (sensibly, since we only have four fingers for fret playing, it’s much easier if you don’t have to move your hand. and pinkies are weak, we don’t want to use them. no no). Also, they have “chords” where you play hold down more than one fret button at at time. On the easy level, those are few and far between. I expect they’ll step those up a bunch.

If you like music, this is the game for you. If you feel like you have no ability to play an instrument and you want to feel like you can, this is the game for you. If you can play an instrument and you want to feel like you can play a video game, this game is for you. Ok. This game is for everyone, except for those weird people who don’t enjoy rock music. But I can’t imagine a person like that.