Guitar Hero 3 is Fun and Addictive!
The Guitar Hero series is a series of rhythm based video games that are both extremely fun and insanely difficult. It uses a plastic controller designed to look like a genuine guitar with colored fret buttons and a strum bar to simulate the real deal. Though the general idea may be simple, it is much more challenging than it seems. Guitar Hero 3 is quite possibly the hardest game in the series to complete so far.
The core gameplay found in the first two main games stays true in the fact that you still hit buttons scrolling down the screen, you still get start power for bonus points, and a bad performance will still get you booed off stage. In this game though, it's arguably much harder to hit all the notes, and much easier to get sent packing. The game includes four difficulties, those being easy, medium, hard, and expert. Easy is for your average beginner, as it only features the first three fret buttons and the fretboard moves at an extremely slow pace. Medium ups the ante a bit by including a fourth fret and going a tad faster. Hard is where most people tend to trip up as the difficulty takes a sharp spike upward and it introduces the deadly 5th fret into the fray. The final difficulty, expert, is a doozy to say the least. It differs from hard in that it goes tons faster and features a whole slew of more notes and insane chord changes. Only the best of the best players are proficient at this level of play.
The career mode of the game is separated into eight different tiers of progressing difficulty with four songs and an a special encore song included in each one. Each tier is played at a specific venue and you will unlock more venues as you progress through it. There are also three special boss "guitar battles" at the end of certain setlists. These battles are against Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, Slash of Guns N Roses and Velvet Revolver, and a special fight against the devil himself. These battles feature special powerups used to sabotage your opponents playing in hopes of making them fail, which is the only way the player can win. The songs used for these battles are original compositions created by Tom and Slash specifically for the game.
The setlist features several songs from many famous artists such as The Who, Santana, Pearl Jam, and Dragonforce whose song "Through the Fire and Flames" is hailed by many as the hardest song ever featured in Guitar Hero. Unlike previous installments, the majority of these songs are not covers but the master recordings from the actual artists. The songs "Anarchy in the U.K." by The Sex Pistols and "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour were actually re-recorded by the artists themselves for the purpose of the game.
The Wii version of the game has a special guitar where the Wii remote is actual inserted inside the body. This allows the speaker inside the remote to emit a noise whenever a note is missed and use it's rumble capability right after star power is used. Wii and PS2 players are also treated to two exclusive characters in Elroy Budvis and Metalhead. They can be bought in the store in career mode.
Guitar Hero 3 is a very diverse and enjoyable game that is deceptively addictive. A gem of the rhythm genre. It is something everyone can get into and have fun doing and is a definitive step forward in the series that will be remembered for some time, or at least until the next game comes out.
