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Reviews » Guitar Hero [PS2]

I've never really been a fan of rhythm games. I have never felt any urge to shove quarters (or, more likely, dollars) into a 'Dance Dance Revolution' machine. Now, I'm not sure if Guitar Hero is the exception to the rule or the title that finally opens my eyes to the wonder and grandeur of rhythm games. Only time will tell. What I do know is that I had a hard time putting my toy guitar down for long enough to write this review.

Guitar Hero is the creation of a Harmonix, a developer dedicated to the pursuit of making the act of making music accessible to people who aren't otherwise musically talented. They're the crew responsible for previous PS2 music games like 'Amplitude', 'Frequency' and 'Karaoke Revolution'. Guitar Hero casts the player into the role of a rock guitarist. The player gets to name their own band, choose an avatar and then begin their rise to stardom. The game consists of your band booking and playing gigs at multiple venues, starting at a party in someone's basement and eventually progressing to a packed stadium event. During these gigs you have a set of progressivly more difficult songs to play, including Iron Man, Smoke on the Water, Ziggy Stardust, Thunderkiss 65, More Than a Feeling, and a good number of other classics spanning four decades of guitar rock. The songs are unfortunately not the originals due to licensing and technical issues, but they're very high-quality covers that are about as close to the originals as anyone could hope to get.

The gameplay will be familiar to fans of rhythm games. Basically, while your character is up on stage giving his performance to a sold-out crowd, you're holding onto your toy guitar playing the notes as they scroll towards the bottom of the screen. The mechanics of this are straightforward; You hold down a button on the fret of the guitar and you 'strum' the strum bar to play the note. You can also use the guitar's tilt sensor and whammy bar to score bonus-points and combos. The thing that differentiates this from other rhythm games is that in Guitar Hero the music is interactive. Now I don't mean to say that you could pick up your toy guitar and bang out any tune you like, what I mean is that the guitarist you're hearing plays good or horrible depending on how you're doing. If you skip a note you don't hear it, because you didn't play it. If you hit a wrong note you hear a ridiculously wrong note. All this works to make the player feel like he's responsible for the music he's hearing, creating a completely different experience from other rhythm games (Like 'DDR') where the player is simply responding to existing music.

No matter how good or bad software is, it always depends on good hardware. So let's look at the hardware first. Guitar Hero is available in two packages: the package with the toy guitar and the package without the toy guitar. If you want anything, you want the one with the toy guitar. In the past there have been other controllers styled after guitars, but as far as I could tell they were always cheaply built pieces of junk. By contrast the controller that comes with Guitar Hero (The "Guitar Hero SG Controller" as it's known to its friends) is solidly made and has features that no other guitar-shaped controller has ever had. I'm confident that I've logged well over 100 hours playing Guitar Hero and I'm not very delicate with my controllers. The only sign of wear and tear anywhere on my toy guitar is that the finish is starting to come off the strum bar. (By contrast, in the month and a half following the release of 'We Love Katamari', I managed to damage one official controller and one off-brand one.) The manual cautions that "excessive use of the Whammy Bar can cause it to break", but so far I've had no problems with mine. My one complaint with the hardware is that the strum bar does seem to make a slight clicking noise. However, this isn't a problem for those of us who prefer to rock out with our headphones on, or the volume cranked up dangerously loud, or both.

I brought up the controller first because it's an integral part of the gameplay. As I mentioned earlier the game casts you, the player, in the role of a rock star and it does it phenomenally well. When you're standing there, in front of your TV, with the crowd cheering it takes surprisingly little imagination to pretend that you're really playing the guitar and the audience is really cheering for you. For those of us who don't know how to play the guitar and don't really have the time or patience to learn, this game is a godsend. I can't stress enough how this game with its toy guitar makes me feel more like a rock star than any game has ever made me feel like a secret agent or soldier or space pilot or whatever. This gives the game a tremendous "replay value" because I'm not playing it to get to the end, I'm playing it to feel like a rock star.

Also adding to the game's replayability is the game's four well designed difficulty levels. ("Easy" "Medium" "Hard" and "Expert".) The difficulty levels ramp up quite nicely. On easier levels each 'note' you play may correspond to a few notes of the actual guitar track. The more you ramp up the difficulty the more the notes match the real thing and by the time you get to "expert" mode you'll be playing a note for each note real guitarist plays. As you can imagine this makes many of the faster solos extremely difficult. In addition The easier modes don't require you to use all the fret buttons while the higher levels would ideally be played by people with six fingers on their left hand. The game keeps track of all high scores and gives them all ratings up to five stars. (A score of three stars is required to pass.) So when you're tired of trying to "beat" songs on the hardest level you can drop back down a level and try to get a perfect score on songs you're good at.

Besides the solid game play and excellent assortment of tracks, another big part of what makes Guitar Hero so immersive is it's very consistent theme. Everything in this game is about Rocking out. From the characters, to the venues, to the menus and tutorials, everything is infused with the same rocker attitude that makes this game great. Even the loading screens feel like content. (At least until you've seen them all a dozen times.) This consistency of style even filtered down to the stickers that come with the guitar and the manual which looks like it was hand-written in a notebook with sketches and lyrics jotted down in the margins.

In conclusion I would recommend Guitar Hero to anyone who's ever wanted to be a rock star but isn't. Some people may feel a little silly buying a $70 toy guitar. If it helps you get over it any, trying telling the checkout clerk "It's for my nephew.". He'll understand. My complaints with the game tend to be minor: There are some occasional visual glitches in some of the venues, and in two player mode sometimes the two players' animations sync up in a strangely unnatural way.

This game is a bit pricey at $70, but with it's great intrinsic replay value, plus the replay value of all the unlockable features (hint: the movies wind up in the settings screen for some reason), I feel like this is well worth the investment. Especially since now that I own the controller, I would assume I'll be able to buy the upcoming sequel(s) in a cheaper, disc-only form.

Guitar Hero - PS2

Presentation

Consistent theme and presentation. The spirit of guitar rock is infused in every aspect of this title.

Gameplay

With an awesome controller with guitar-like gameplay make player interactions more 'authentic' than any game could ever achieve with a pair of analog sticks.

Replayability

I'll never stop wanting to feel like a rock star.

Value

Without the custom controller this game is awkward to play, with it it's the most expensive game you'll buy this year, But worth it.

Overall

It'll make you into a rock star without all that tedious learning how to play an instrument.