Guitar Hero III First Musings
Played just a little bit of Guitar Hero III last night. Played it unlocking stuff on easy (wife wanted to play, and her wrist is still not up to 100% from her surgery), so your mileage may vary.
The new wireless guitar is awesome. It feels good, it’s responsive, and has the most accurate ’star power’ detection since the first guitar from the first game. So at least in this one area, it’s an improvement. The song list is also mostly good, although there is one tier where it seems your entire song list is 70s songs I could care less about.
Things I didn’t like:
1) Whoever thought it was acceptable to ship a rhythm game where activating star power causes a notable framerate hitch, throwing off your rhythm, needs to be taken out back and pummelled.
2) I was expecting to be shocked and disgusted by the ’strip club’ level - or at least be forced to pretend to be so for my wife’s benefit. Turns out, I got one entirely clothed dancer who … danced bored. Really, we’re playing Rage Against the Machine, and she’s dancing like she just downed a bottle of valium. I was actually insulted - because I could have sworn my rocking deserved better than that.
3) I think my wife counted 15 fonts used in different places. It felt like a bad MySpace page. Somewhere, an art director needs to be hit with a clue stick.
4) They replaced my beloved Pandora with a Japanese schoolgirl? Are you kidding me? God, she was awful.
And then we get to the boss fights. It turns out they are exactly as non-fun as I thought. Even worse, they are anti-fun. If these boss battles ever came into contact with actual fun, the universe would fold onto itself. This is a clear example of a place where design should have iterated on the idea, and then afterwards gone to a bar and shared a beer while talking about how collossally bad a game design decision it turned out to be. Instead, they shipped it.
Hah, nice little review honestly. I just had a chance to dig into the game last night myself. Though I’m very happy with the way the new devs approached the game and gave it a different feel and look, some of the things you mention like the multiple fonts was a little much.
1. Agree with you fully.
2. Teen rated game, they don’t even say slight “bad” words in some of the songs, no way they would let other things like strippers grinding on poles in the game.
3. Already agreed.
4. Pandora def has a different feel to her, and a dif over all look. Just the same if you take a look at Axel, it looks more like a tribute to Dimebag then anything else.
The boss battles themselves could have been done alot better, but I think the battle mode system all in all is outstanding and a great addition that will hook people to this game even more. It gives the hardcore players something that will continue to challenge them seeing as their opponents will be capable of learning as opposed to a standard AI for different difficulty levels.
Just my two cents on that, but either or, hope you keep on with it and enjoy your time gaming it up.
Comment by Uriel — October 31, 2007 @ 11:33 amI agree with you on those boss fights. They are not really that fun and they really break my groove when I’ve been rocking a few songs in a row.
Comment by Jigsaw hc — October 31, 2007 @ 12:26 pmThere’s only 3 boss fights. The first two are, as you say, completely retarded. But the final fight changed my mind on the subject. It takes place in hell, you’re battling the devil himself, and the song is The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Maybe it’s my nostalgic love for the song, but I thought the final fight was genius.
Comment by SecretLemur — October 31, 2007 @ 12:36 pmOff-topic: just wanted to draw some attention to a very funny interview of Erik Wolpaw (co-writer of Psychonauts and Portal, not to mention “one half of that Old Man Murray thing”):
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=518
His answer to the last question is priceless!
Comment by moo — November 1, 2007 @ 12:16 pmNicely said. You touched on most of the same points that I had, and I agree that the boss battles were a remarkably bad idea. Songs in Guitar Hero have always pitted the player against his/her self; the song is presented, unchanging, and the player’s goal is to develop the skills necessary to play it. Throwing in boss battles is like having the letters in Scrabble decide that they no longer want to be played. Anti-fun? Quite. It would have been excellent as a purely multiplayer mechanic, but some genius decided it was better to include it on the critical path. Any designer worth his salt should have known better.
It’s too bad about Pandora; she was the avatar I used as well. Fortunately, the redesigned Casey Lynch is quite similar to a featherless Pandora so she made a suitable replacement (for me, at least).
In response to one of the above comments, I have to say that the last boss battle struck me as the worst of the three. You play through a quarter of a lengthy song before the first battle gems appear, and even then they appear on the opponent’s side first; just in time for him to hit you as you strike up a major solo (and making it extremely difficult to hit the first of our own battle gems). In FPS terms, that’s akin to putting the player in a room with no cover, no weapon, and sending in the hostiles. As both a designer and a player, I find that wholly offensive.
Fortunately, Guitar Hero 3 has enough upsides that I’m willing to overlook most of these issues. The cooperative campaign is a lot of fun and the songs in generally get me to rock out a little harder than the previous titles.
All complaints aside, I enjoy the title quite a bit. I just want to stab somebody in the face for implementing boss battles on the crit path. =)
Comment by James H — November 2, 2007 @ 2:37 pm[…] thing to happen to Guitar Hero (the first being the Harmonix split). They are horrible and stupid. Zen of Design sums it up nicely, along with some other points I agree with. I could write an essay about why the Boss Battles are […]
Pingback by the-inbetween.com [ Guitar Hero 3] — November 2, 2007 @ 11:49 pmHeya. Agree quite a bit on the points. The dancing girls seem to be the worst of all possible worlds all at once… they’re exploitative without being titillating; drab corporatized eye candy with no enthusiasm. Animatronic Disney “rock show dancing girl” statues.
And the boss battles… the approach of dueling guitar solos is one that I was honestly pretty excited about… but the game mechanic they chose for actualizing it was awful, and a huge side effect of it is that you don’t listen to, enjoy, or rock out to the songs you’re playing in those battles. It takes the game away from the music, which is honestly something Harmonix would NEVER have done.
Comment by Greg — November 8, 2007 @ 2:06 pm[…] list) if I’m going to be forced to engage in battle mode during it. I am pleased to note that Damion has equally strong feelings about the crapness of boss […]
Pingback by The Forge · Recent Games Roundup — November 12, 2007 @ 1:56 pm[…] fonts. Damion mentioned this and I have to agree. There are like 2,398,084 different fonts and they all look so clusterf*ck […]
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