Angry Robot

Guitar Hero III: Rage Within Righteousness

Oh there were single copies of the game but I was hunting for the bundle with the new wireless guitar for a friend’s birthday present since her guitar currently has a sticky yellow key. Anyway, I picked up the copy but was sorely displeased when all the stores had an abundance of PS2 copies – and even Wii copies! – but no 360.

My feelings on this are this: people want to play GH3 on console that has achievement points. That’s all I could think has I hunted for that bundle. Sure, I love the Wii but I don’t want to get a 200 note streak and not get credit for it with a mad awesome icon people can see. Yes, you can track your online status via a code that you put into the GH3 website and it shows your career and stuff but for me…not the same and also I’m not super interested in that.

Moving on to the play of the game! Love it, love it, love it! The friend previously mentioned had a birthday gathering on Saturday and I went over early so we could play. After playing Portal for a while we started the Mega Rockstar Simulator Cool-a-Tron and were greeted with the most glorious option ever: Co-op Career.

Out dreams and hopes answered we played for hours until my contacts were but a thin sheen of glue on my eyes and my hand was cramped so bad I thought I had unnecessarily caused super arthritis damage to my fingers. It was a great experience.

The next day I wanted to play it on my own console at home so I popped it in and was ready for a repeat of awesomeness. Not so. It appears that in an effort to try to make the game their own Neversoft decided to mess with the single player. Instead of the simple challenge of unlocking songs in sequence and feeling awesome for doing it they’ve introduced a wonderful little piece of crap called Beat Boss Battles.

Basically in each set of songs you have to beat 3 out of 4 to get the Encore song unlocked and move to the next set of songs. But after a few sets you are introduced not to an Encore song but to a pro guitarist avatar that you must beat in battle mode. Battle mode has you facing off against the pro and having to collect Battle Power (in place of Star Power) and using it against him in various ways to make him mess up his playing and then you win. You can do things like whammy, amp overload, increase difficulty, and a few other annoying when they happen to you moves.

The thing about thing mode that pisses me off is that it makes you feel stupid and lame if you can’t do it and for the first few tries you don’t know if you’ll be able to proceed or not if you don’t beat it and that causes one thing – RAGE! I was so pissed off that this was included because I was channeling all the casual players who just want to play the songs through to unlock them and pick it up to relax and play pretend. I know all the wee cyborgs out there have no problem picking up new and complex game modes so they would appreciate the flushing out of the Guitar Hero gameplay, but that’s what expert mode on super fast is for! I beat the first boss (Tom Morello) after two stabs at it and was extremely pumped afterwards but also still raging. I felt a righteous anger against Guitar Hero for subjecting me to a skill test when all I wanted to do was groove and pretend I was playing the guitar and unlock my songs so I could quickplay any ol’thing I wanted to at any time. I was also angry because it makes selling the game to certain people I know (D, Toku, my roommate) that much harder when something silly like this is included.

All in all I mastered that stupid game mode so I will continue on my quest to unlock songs this week. The graphics are nice except whenever the 50 Note Streak pops up in the middle of my screen it always makes me mess up. Very noisy to look at that 50 Note Streak thingy….very noisy indeed. It’s also nice to have the actual singers of the songs this time and not just generics, which just makes the mind reel at the production cost of that there vidiot game. I still love Guitar Hero but that sudden disruption to my smooth fret lovin irked me.

That’s all I have to say about that.