How many of you know how to play the guitar? I see a few hands raised across the room, so at least some of you know how to do it. Next question – how many of you have performed on stage with a guitar before? One? Two of you? Ok, what about playing in a band? No one? Ok, a shy guy there in the back is raising his hand. How many of you would want to play in a band? Wow, hang on... Ok, its fair to say nearly everybody present would have a go at rock stardom. In all fairness, only a few of you actually have a chance at that. The rest, my humble self included will have to satisfy our strumming needs elsewhere. With Guitar Hero 3 for example!


Before I forget
Game publishing is a business, so naturally the big publishers like EA and Activision operate accordingly. Put yourselves into the shoes of an executive working for one of these companies and imagine the following situation: a fairly unknown developer group approaches you with an idea about a guitar playing music game. Seeing the potential you fund the project and send the final product to the store shelves. Sales numbers skyrocket within days and cash is pouring in. What is your next logical step? Securing the franchise name and getting a sequel out of course!

This is exactly what happened with Guitar Hero. Activision saw the potential in the game (after several publishers dismissed the idea as a gimmick), published it and is even today reaping the benefits. But popular as a game might be, there comes a time when sales numbers drop enough to warrant a sequel. Again, Activision had Harmonix (the studio behind the game) come up with the follow up to their first big breakthrough. The game, released for the aging PS2 and later on the Xbox360 was a huge success, just like the original. At this point in time, still not having enough Activision ordered a 3rd installment, but by now Harmonix had enough and wanted to move on. They packed their bags and ran off to MTV (where they made Rock Band), leaving Activision with the Guitar Hero franchise in their hands, but no development studio with any Guitar Hero experience available.

Not willing to give up, they called in the boys (and gals) from Neversoft (the dudes and dudettes responsible for the Tony Hawk series) and tasked them with the ginormous task of creating Guitar Hero 3 from scratch. That’s right – Neversoft had to create the entire game without having access to the code of the previous two games. If that’s not a big enough reason for all series fans to panic, I’m not sure what is. So, did Neversoft manage to create a good Guitar Hero game? Failing that, is the game at least good by itself?


Hit me with your best shot
Well, Guitar Hero puritans might not like the minor changes that were made to the gameplay mechanics. I mean, at first glance nothing changed. You still hit the fret buttons on the guitar neck as they appear on the screen and use the strum bar to actually play them. And just like before you can use the whammy bar to change the pitch of the notes you play. But anyone who completed the previous two games on hard or expert will immediately notice subtle changes were made to the game. Playing a note is now a bit easier, thanks to the greater time frame available during which using the strum bar still counts. And (much to my relief), hammer-ons and pull-offs are now a bit easier to do, again thanks to the more relaxed timings.

Does that mean that anyone familiar with the previous Guitar Hero games will find themselves bored? Not at all. Sure, the first few stages (let’s say 8 songs or so) might come as a bit slow and relaxed, enough so to be beaten on hard in your first attempt. But (and this is as big a but as they come!), save for those first songs the game is actually a lot harder than its predecessors ever were. How can that be with the more newbie friendly controls? Well, the songs themselves are all but easy this time around. On hard you can expect countless hammer-ons and pull-offs done in quick succession in almost any song. I won’t even go into what the expert difficulty level will have you do, but know that unless you have lightning quick reflexes or a lot of time available to practice, you won’t get past the 1st or 2nd tier of songs.

So why play on higher difficulty levels and lose hair due to stress when you can just play it on easy and be an instant rock star? If you played Guitar Hero before, you know what the answer is. Albeit you are not playing an actual guitar, the way your button presses make music come out of the speakers (as opposed to screeching noises when you miss a note) is as close an approximation to the experience as you are likely to get without actually learning how to play one. Pulling off a long series of quick notes in a guitar solo feels great, and you will actually feel proud of your skills when you ace a song on hard or expert. That’s not all however – just like when playing a real instrument you’ll gradually get better with practice. At first you might not notice this, but when you return to play a song you had problems with early on and realize you can now do a crossword puzzle while nailing it down to the last note, you’ll be just a step away from grabbing the guitar and running to find the nearest stage (not recommended, crowds aren’t that appreciative of your virtual guitar skills).


Cult of personality
As with any Guitar Hero 3, there are obviously new tracks on the menu. But let’s leave those alone for now and instead concentrate on the new features the game offers. Career mode makes a return, but it comes equipped with a series of new features for you to enjoy. First of all, it now has a backstory, presented through very stylish cartoon animations. You get to see a 15 seconds or so long clip between each tier (4 songs + encore), meaning that you’ll see them just often enough to keep you on your toes about the next one. That said, as pretty as they are they convey hardly any story. To sum all of them up – you join a band, start out small, sign a contract, record a video, do a worldwide tour and battle the devil. How fighting the dark lord ties in with the rest of the story I’ll leave for you to discover, but you’re probably not interested in the game because of these clips anyway.

The second (and most important) new feature featured in the career mode is battle mode. Here you and another guitarist (2 high profile guitarists and the devil in our case) have a guitar duel, similar to the one seen in ‘Deliverance’. You and your (hopefully) soon to be defeated adversary trade riffs and series’ of notes of varying length, trying to keep the rock meter in the green. The key difference between regular songs is that there is no star power here. Instead, certain notes award you with power-ups, which you can use to distract the opponent. You can cut one of his strings, forcing him to repeatedly press the associated fret button to repair it, or you can make him unable to play until he uses the whammy bar enough to get back into the game. Then there is the overcharge power-up, which makes all of the markers on the guitar neck flash. This makes it incredibly hard to hit them at the right time, especially in the case of hammer-ons and pull-offs. When battling an actual opponent it is enough to “rock more” (have the rock meter higher than he does) by the end of the song, but in career mode you must make your opponent actually fail. With the dastardly means at your disposal that doesn’t sound that hard, but don’t forget your opponent can do the same to you, so you’ll be struggling to stay in the game yourself.

Besides that the core singleplayer experience hasn’t changed. The multiplayer has however. You can still play co-op with a friend, but unlike before the co-operative mode (where one of you plays the lead and the other the base guitar) is tied in into a separate career. In theory this is a nice touch, as there are different cutscenes and the song selection is a bit different here. But, for those of us that don’t have a friend at hand 24/7 this also means you can’t just play a song with him when he comes over, but you instead have to work your way to it. On the Xbox360 this issue was addressed shortly after the game hit the shelves, while on the Wii, PS3 and PC the issue is still present.

The rest of the features includes quickplay (play any of the songs you have unlocked), co-op quickplay (only on the 360 with the patch installed), practice mode (very useful when you need that extra edge for beating a specific song) which can now be accessed during any song directly from the pause menu and online. Here you can play co-op or battle it out with random opponents, or invite a friend for a match. This only works on the 360 (via Live!) and Wii (friend codes). On the PS3 you can only play random folk, as the PS3 friend list isn’t tied in directly into the game. The PS2 version is without online features, but that is to be expected with the age of the console.


Same old song and dance
Time to finally discuss the track list. This is obviously my personal opinion, but the track compilation in Guitar Hero 3 is without doubt the best one yet. Starting out slow with songs like "Story Of My Life" by Social Distortion and "School's Out" by Alice Cooper and then moving into more fast paced stuff like "The Seeker" by The Who and "Anarchy in the U.K." by The Sex Pistols, the songs you’ll play come from all possible rock/metal genres. Santana is on the list, as is ZZ Top and even Eric Johnson. The biggest names in Guitar Hero 3 are however Guns’n’Roses with “Welcome to the Jungle” and Metallica with “One”. The later song is especially a big surprise, considering how hostile Metallica are against digital media.

All of the songs play out great, and I would go as far as to say that Neversoft outdid Harmonix when it comes to imitating the melodies on the 5 fret buttons. I am an amateur guitar player (though I unfortunately rarely get the time to actually play it) and one of the songs I know how to play is One. I won’t say that I know all the tabs by heart, but I know them well enough to have recognized the fret button presses in GH3.

On the Xbox 360, the PS3 and (supposedly) Wii you can download new songs from the respectable online stores. Right now there isn’t much to choose from, but if Neversoft keep at it the extra library should keep growing for at least the next year or so.  Most of the downloadable (or rather purchasable) songs are pretty hard, as they don’t follow the linear difficulty progression of the career songs, so leaving them up for when you are done with the rest of the game might be a sound idea.


The Metal
From a technical standpoint the game is nothing special really. Visually the band looks good and the singer’s mouth mimics the lyrics surprisingly well. But, the rest of the band doesn’t do nearly as good a job as he does. The drummer is the worse – he closely resembles one of those battery powered drumming monkeys. Yes, he is that bad. And the lead guitar player (you) isn’t much better either. Banging his head when playing Black Magic Woman as if it was a heavy metal tune simply can’t be overlooked in a game like this. The rest of the visuals are thankfully pretty good. The character models all look good, with a very peculiar style to them and the stages (prison, parking lot, middle of the desert, hell, etc.) as well.
But whereas graphics matter in most games, it is the sound that makes or breaks Guitar Hero 3. And when it comes to sound, GH 3 is… *drumroll* excellent. The songs themselves are mostly original recordings, meaning you won’t have to listen to decent knockoff covers like before. Welcome to the Jungle just isn’t the same if Axle isn’t singing it, so fans of Slash and the rest of Guns will be glad to hear that this song and the majority of the others as well all use the original masters. The Sex Pistols song was even recorded anew with the surviving members of the band (supposedly due to the fact that the master recordings are lost)!


Conclusion
If you played a Guitar Hero game before most of this review was stating the obvious. I apologize for that, but with only you in mind the review would have sounded something like “Same as before, minor changes to timings, new online features, battle mode, good track list, downloadable songs”. Speaking of which, that sums up the game fairly well! That leaves us with the question if you should pay for the game or get Rock Band instead. Well, if you are a loner or only have another player willing to rock it out with you, Guitar Hero 3 is the game for you. Rock Band can be enjoyed on your own as well, but Guitar Hero 3 with its superb songs, challenging solos and proven gameplay offers more to the solo musician-to-be.

Gameplay	88/100	It’s almost the same as before, but comes with plenty of new modes to sate your thirst.
Graphics	83/100	Looks good, but the animations sometimes break the illusion… The drummer could do with a complete rewrite.
Sound	93/100	Original recordings are the key here, but even the few covers sound good. Rock on!
Value	88/100	Beating the career on expert is near impossible. Playing a song without a single mistake on expert is absolutely impossible. Practice hard, young padawan!
Multiplayer	83/100	Co-op and guitar battle offer a nice change from solo playing, but Rock Band offers more.
Overall (not an average)	86/100	Whether you don’t have the time to learn how to play guitar or you simply don’t have what it takes, GH3 is your remedy. Be a rock star today!