Guitar Hero III : Legends of Rock [Xbox 360]

"Finally!

Unlike Mario, when I got this game, I started playing almost immediately. I tried starting with medium, and it worked out. Of course with Guitar Hero, it's all about the songs, not much can be improved to the actual single player game. So not much has been improved. I liked how they added in a note-count. You can now see how big your notestreak is, and be distracted by it, and fail your notestreak! How cool is that :P It's pretty good. Also the stuff that happens in the background is more fun. When you play in single player mode, you have a singer in your band, and they aced the lipsync on the guy/girl. It really appears he or she is singing the song, which all adds to the overall experience. It makes it more fun to watch when you're with another person.

What makes it more fun with another person, is grabbing your GH2 controller (or buy another GH3 wireless controller) and start doing some 2-player stuff. There is more to do for 2 players than in any previous Guitar Hero game, so let's see. First would be the cool option to do a co-op career mode. No battling between yourselves, just playing together through the whole game, earning money, and unlocking new songs. I noticed (well at least I think I did) that some songs can only be unlocked by playing co-op career mode. If you don't have a second guitar, you can go on Live and co-op career with someone there. You'll be able to do it.

Yes, this GH can go on-line. You can co-op, battle, face-off and pro-face-off with ranked matches or 'just for fun' matches. Quick-join a game, or create your own custom match. Single song, best out of 3/5/etc. I played one song on medium and went on-line right away (I got myself the song pack from the Foo Fighters which I recommend getting!) to compete against other players. I won, of course as I am a real Guitar Hero, and played some ranked matches. I then found out I could pair my live account with the Guitar Hero site by copying the code from my game to the site. There is a huge community there with great matches and music fans. You can join a group and tour the country for instance. It keeps track of which character you play with the most, the guitar you use the most, and of course the tracks you play the most. It keeps track of a lot of things, go check it out when you have the game.

Anyway I continued playing single player career mode, and couldn't stop. Then after a short while I encountered my first boss. In case you have been living in a cave, or simply aren't a big Guitar Hero fan (or a soon to be first-timer), this is new to Guitar Hero. Boss battles. You play against a well known guitarist and instead of starpower-notes (okay I'm not going to explain everything, but normally you hit these to double your score for a little while) you hit battle-power-notes. When you hit all the battle-power-notes, you get a - who would've thought - battle-power. You then tilt your guitar to fire the battle-power on your opponent (by the way you can play this mode on-line or in 2 player mode as well). He can hit you too, in which case you have to defend yourself 'cause it will be harder (or impossible to hit notes). Your string could be broken, you may have to whammy a lot to fix your guitar, the mode gets set higher or well.. there are some more. Sounds like fun, and it is, playing against a friend, but the boss battles aren't that easy. Especially the last one which is just extremely hard. I didn't know why the difficulty went up that high all of a sudden. Still, I did complete the song. This unlocks the last song on medium, which is an extremely hard song on medium (compared to ALL the other songs) - and this annoyed me a LOT.

Why?
Well, this means there is one medium song which is extremely hard. So.. when I play a ranked match against someone who can hit just about every note I can, and he picks the 5th song in a best-out-of-5 face-off, and he picks that particular song (maybe he has practiced it, I know I didn't cause I just don't want to play it), I'm screwed. That sucks. It's just a 5x harder song than the normal ones in medium. I have to say by the way, that overall this game is a bit harder than the previous installments. I do think that's alright. When you're new to it all, easy is still very do-able and will provide you with a challenge from time to time. Just do the tutorial, and learn those hammer-ons and pull-offs!! They will work wonders when you got them down.

Ah well. I still love this game. I bought all the songs that are included in the game with my 'play-money' and I'm keeping an eye out for regular song updates on-line. I will be a bit pickier choosing songs than I was with GH2, and I hope I can, cause the song-updates for GH2 on Live were just sad (as in, not so many). I'm giving it an 8.5. I want to give it a nine, but I'm afraid Rock Band will soon be taking that place. "