Be a legendary rock star in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

By Alex Villafania, hackenslash Reporter
INQUIRER.net

I’M an air guitarist, that is I strum my fingers without a real guitar. Actually, I don’t know how to play the guitar nor will I have the patience to learn how to. I just use my imagination like most non-guitarists. But Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PlayStation 2) just about made me wan to pick up a real guitar and learn how to pluck chords.

This is the very first time I’ve played a game from the Guitar Hero series, which has been getting more and more popular and gave PS2 owners a reason to actually keep their PS2s for quite a while. This is not a game about graphics and as such players will not be concerned or distracted by the 3D background, which I would say is nominally good in some sense. All the players will be concerned about are the five colored notes from the top of a screen coming down along a virtual guitar neck and the player will have to press the corresponding fret button on their guitar controller. It’s also important that every time a fret button is pressed the strum bar has to be pressed down as well. As in a real guitar, there is also a whammy bar for hammer-on and pull-offs for rapid, consecutive notes.

First-time players like me will find playing the game difficult to start with, especially when having to press five buttons with only four left fingers (the left thumb is at the back of the guitar neck). Most of the time, the index finger will be used to press two buttons as it is the most movable finger among the four. Still, it takes quite some time to learn what to press and can be daunting even with the easy mode. The concept is similar to the arcade Dance Dance Revolution wherein the player has to time their button press when the notes hit the empty colored buttons at the bottom of the screen. Missing a note will cause some points and the Rock Meter to be shaved off. The Rock Meter serves as the player’s health and when it drops to zero it will cause the music to stop. Not missing for a while will give special bonus points to the player. Bonus points become harder to achieve as the levels increases. Getting in the “groove,” that is, being able to completely following the buttons on screen would take at least 1 hour. But once the buttons are mastered, it’ll be hard for anyone to let go of the controller.

If just following the buttons is fun enough, there are little touches in the game that makes playing Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock even more fun. One is the use of the Star Power Meter. This is a special meter that has to be filled first by correctly pressing notes with stars. Its main use is to double the points earned during gameplay. When filled, the player can activate the Star Power Meter in two ways: either by slamming the whammy bar near the strum bar or raising the guitar vertically. The latter is more fun especially if the guitar has that gyro-type function (mine does!) and it makes you feel like a real rock star.

Another feature to Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the two-player game, either in cooperative mode or battle mode. For the cooperative mode, one plays the lead guitar while the other plays either a rhythm or bass guitar. Meanwhile, battle mode has you compete against another player. Technically, I didn’t have a second controller and my companion had to use the standard PS2 controller. Nevertheless it was still fun.

Veterans of the Guitar Hero series will be familiar with some of the in-game characters such as Johnny Napalm, Axel Steel and Izzy Sparks who will be strutting their stuff. But rock music fans will be familiar with real rock stars Tom Morello, Slash, and Bret Michaels who will make appearances as boss stages in the career mode.

Of course, what’s Guitar Hero if not for the playlist? While this is the very first time I’ve played a Guitar Hero game I could say that it the latest version has a very good playlist that gave me days of fun. It’s also one of the very few times that I’ve actually stood up for at least 2 hours playing the game if only to listen closely to the music (the constant tapping on the fret buttons could sometimes be distracting). As the name implies, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is all about the big-hair musicians of the early 70s, 80s and 90s, with a few new bands that play classic rock music. Among the legends here are Kiss, Alice Cooper, Cream, The Who, Rolling Stones, Metallica, Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedy, Scorpion, Aerosmith, Guns ‘N Roses, Black Sabbath, among others. Newer bands include Rage Against the Machine, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, The Killers and Beastie Boys. There are at least 150 songs in the game. Take note, half of the songs here are not easy to strum.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is available on all of the game consoles (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3) as well as PC and Mac, but the PS2 is already so much fun for both newbie players and veterans of the series and has a lot of replayability and can be fun for a group of music fanatics. It would be easy to say that this game becomes a legend of its own.

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