Reviews: This Isn't Good Bye, Guitar Hero 3, Technically

In general, I want to wait for a game or other source of review to be finished before I review. Technically, this is true for today's subjecgt. I did beat every single song on easy, and I did beat medium. I did not, however, beat all of the songs, and the infamous "bonus song" looks impossible even at this difficulty. As for hard and the expert levels, I'll have to pretend that fifth orange button is just a technical mistake for now.

When I got this game at Christmas, I didn't know how far I would go with it. I'm not usually the type to play through the same game multiple times just to clear all the difficulties, but it's not a very long game if you just play all the songs, either. My decision to more or less stop playing at this point, at least for now, came from a few things. For starters, it came from my desire to focus on Persona 3, a huge RPG I'll likely have to take over 100 hours to beat, so I can finish it before Smash Brothers Brawl comes out in about two weeks. But it also is because of which kinds of fun Guitar Hero 3 offers, and which ones I focus on.

Contrary to anything Raph Koster says, there are many kinds of fun that videogames offer. The first is the task of overcoming the challenges of the game, ranging from physical accomplishments to more logical puzzles. The Guitar Heroes are ultimately about these challenges. Winning the game requires increasingly precise and rapid finger motions, mental recognition spill, and incredible speed. Fun type #2 is fantasy fulfillment. Most videogames offer this by letting one become a superhero and save the world, or at least defeat evil. Guitar Hero, though, is no different, even if the role played is not inherently heroic and it exists in the real world. Nonetheless, the idea of being a rock star is incredibly appealing; one of the most glamrous and sought after jobs on the planet. There's the money, the ability to travel the world, the almost obligatory hedonism, but even without that point, there's the ability to be an artist, inspiring millions with your unmatched physical abilities. Plus, guitars are cool; we're not playing Pianist Hero for a reason.

Fun type #3 is the sense of wonder and exploration; seeing things you've never seen, hearing things you've never heard. You see a lot of this appeal in games like World of Warcraft, where the world is very large and full of strange, wondrous things to find. Type #4 is the same type of fun we get from watching an engrossing movie or television show; the fun of interesting characters, engrossing plots, and twists both horrifying and hilarious. For #5, there's the social aspect of games, and friends are made or simply enjoy each other's time in the game. Finally, fun type #6 is the customizable aspect, letting people make their own stories, or at least their own characters.

This is a scattered list, and it would make a good Rant blog at some point, but really I just needed to get some ideas out there for Guitar Hero to be evaluated on. How does it match up? Well, the customization options are pretty limited. You can pick your own characters and their costumes, but that's it, and options in that regard are limited. Social fun can be done online, but I haven't had much of a chance to figure that out in time. That will be part of the elements I will look into, but not yet. Otherwise, it requires a friend with his/her own fake guitar and the same time and interests to play the game as I do, which I do not have. Sense of wonder is not the focus, but it is not nonexistent. Most of the songs in this games are ones I never heard before or just never thought much about, and as a result there's a good dozen new bands I want to look into from the game, and a few new favorite songs. Of course, most of that sense of wonder ended as soon as I beat easy.

Plot and character are practically nonexistent in Guitar Hero 3, save for a few brief, barely animated cut scenes between areas, so that's out. That just leaves Guitar Hero 3's biggest strengths, the sense of escapism and fantasy and the excitement of puzzle solving. The former was still there, but the harder the game gets, the less you can enjoy that element. You go from rocking out to applause and 5-star reviews to struggling to even finish the songs while the music is often replaced by long strings of silence and the "you screwed up" plinking noise. That doesn't make me feel like a rock star, that makes me feel like the incompetent guitar player without a single iota of training that I actually am. And that leaves just the puzzle solving fun. The problem there is that while there are mental elements to the puzzles, most of it is simply getting your fingers to react fast enough to finish the song. This is just not a fun type that I get into. I did enough data entry for my jobs to say that I can't enjoy that element when taken by itself.

So, that's my justification for letting the game go for now. Of the six types of fun, three never were part of the game for me, two were really strong elements that faded as I finished medium, and one only partially appeals to me. Even so, .5 out of 6 is enough for me to return to the game. The thrill of a challenge is always a part of that desire to learn and win. And that social element is another thing to explore, when the time is right.

That's a lot of words about why I'm not playing a game, and not enough about what I thought about the game in the first place. Well, I liked it enough to play through it twice in a row. The sense of wonder of the music, the sheer thrill of being a rock star, the white knuckle, gripping, breathless emotion you get as you struggle to finish a tough song; these things are enough for me to recommend this game to nearly everyone. I never tried the earlier ones, at least not for more than a few minutes at a party, but I'm very glad I played this one. After all, one of the appeals of video games is to try new things, and I have saved the world as a superhero oh so many times. This, this was different. And so I'll be returning to the game, and happily so.

But it will probably be in smaller doses. If you stand up while you play, and you damn well should, it starts to hurt like hell after a while.