Amazon.com: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

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3.9 out of 5 stars (37 customer reviews)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still the same Guitar Hero, but with some great additions., November 1, 2007

By	Harvey H. Meeker (Shelton, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

Guitar Hero 3 (GH3) is the fourth iteration in this series of games despite it being labeled the third, though for most people the 80s edition that was the actual third game was a bit of a footnote since it only came out on PS2 and had very little in it that differed from Guitar Hero 2 other than the songs.

GH3 continues with the same basic formula as the previous games which will keep fans of the series happy, but at the same time adds some welcome new features. One of the best additions is that of online play so that you can now do co-op, face-off, pro face-off and battle mode with a friend over the Live network.

The battle mode is a change up from the normal face-off modes in that instead of gaining star power you acquire attacks from playing certain sequences of notes. Then when you turn the guitar up as if you were going to use star power it instead launches an attack at your opponent. The attacks vary in their nastiness and while I was skeptical of this new aspect of the game it's actually a nice twist for those more competitive players.

Another addition is the co-op career mode, but unfortunately you can't play this mode online which means you'll have to get a friend over with their guitar to experience this mode.

Speaking of the guitar the new wireless Gibson Les Paul style guitar controller is a welcome change from the original 360 GH2 controller. Overall it just feels a lot more solid, especially the whammy bar. Not being wired makes a big difference in terms of convenience. There are GH3 bundles out there with the original GH2 controller in them and I would recommend passing on those in favor of the wireless bundle.

The career mode remains mostly the same as in the previous games. There are now little animated vignettes between each set that don't add much to the overall experience, but certainly are a welcome change from the old bus driving across the country scenes in the previous games. The other addition to career mode is that at the end of certain sets you have to enter battle mode with another guitarist. By now most people know that Tom Morello and Slash are the two real guitarists who you battle against in the game. Both contributed original guitar compositions for their battle sections and can be unlocked as avatars in the game.

The playing experience itself is much the same, though it seems the game is even more forgiving in the timing of when you play notes than even GH2 was and hammer-ons and pull-offs are also very easy to do. For experienced players this will obviously make the game easier in some respects, but at the same time the note structure has been mixed up a bit and the later songs are pretty challenging on Hard and Expert.

While the multiplayer aspect adds a lot more playability to the game at the same time the core of the experience remains the songs and for this game there are even more original songs than before and the song list is pretty great.

Overall GH3 rocks the house in much the same way as the previous games, but with the addition of some new features it doesn't feel like more of the same. Multiplayer adds a new aspect that should give the game a lot more life overall between those times when you get your friends over to the house.

Here is the list of tracks by the original artists (or in the case of Talk Dirty to Me, original vocalist) used in the game. This doesn't include the bonus tracks by the less well known artists.

"Talk Dirty to Me" - Poison (Vocals re-recorded by Bret Michaels)
"Bulls on Parade" - Rage Against the Machine
"When You Were Young" - The Killers
"Miss Murder" - AFI
"Lay Down" - Priestess
"Paint It, Black" - The Rolling Stones
"Anarchy in the U.K." - Sex Pistols (re-recorded)
"Kool Thing" - Sonic Youth
"My Name Is Jonas" - Weezer
"Even Flow" - Pearl Jam
"Same Old Song and Dance" - Aerosmith
"Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns N' Roses
"Cherub Rock" - The Smashing Pumpkins
"The Metal" - Tenacious D
"Before I Forget" - Slipknot
"Stricken" - Disturbed
"3's & 7's" - Queens of the Stone Age
"Knights of Cydonia" - Muse
"Cult of Personality" - Living Colour (re-recorded)
"Raining Blood" - Slayer
"The Number of the Beast" - Iron Maiden
"One" - Metallica

--Co-Op Campaign--

"Sabotage" - Beastie Boys
"Reptilia" - The Strokes
"Suck My Kiss" - Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Helicopter" - Bloc Party
"Monsters" - Matchbook Romance

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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Fun - Addictive and Vastly Replayable, October 28, 2007

By	Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

I adore the Guitar Hero series. It is incredibly fun, can be played co-op, and exposes players to all sorts of great music. Guitar Hero III ups the ante with even more fantastic songs plus a new battle mode for fun head to head gameplay!

Once again you're a small time band starting off in your garage - or make that, your back yard. As you play through songs on your guitar controller, your career begins to take off. You make videos, play larger arenas, and earn money. The money lets you buy yourself new outfits and guitars. As you battle special players, you unlock their characters - like Slash from Guns 'N Roses.

In every Guitar Hero game there have been songs I've liked and other songs I haven't liked. That's going to be true pretty much no matter who you are. They try their very best to provide a wide range of music to suit all guitar tastes, and they do an excellent job at it. Some of the songs are SUPER in this set and got me up off the couch dancing around while I played along.

The new battle mode is a ton of fun. Before, you'd get a simple encore at the end of each set. This time you occasionally have to fight a newcomer for guitar supremacy. In battle mode you earn "attacks" that you can then lob at your opponent. These do things like break strings, make you play double notes, make your screen shake, and much more. It is super fun. Near the end of the game when you're down in "Hades", you have to battle the devil himself playing ... Devil went down to Georgia!

There are of course the extras to unlock by doing things like playing 100 notes in a row, the ability to play against friends head to head locally, plus the new ability to play against others online! Talk about a true challenge! It was always scary enough looking at XBox Live and seeing how amazingly high some of those scores were. Imagine trying to play those people live?

The graphics are great. Each location is fleshed out in fantastic detail, from the flickering flames of Hades to the glowing red lanterns of your back yard. The audience always seems a little robotic, but heck, how much do you want from a guitar game?

Many of the songs are now original band-sung songs - including a Living Color song that the band re-recorded specifically for this game! There are still a collection of songs that are "in the style of" - some are good, some are really not so good. The Stevie Ray Vaughn song stands out as the not-so-good reproduction. Still, what can you do. Why aren't those bands giving the Guitar Hero guys permission to use their real tracks? Don't they know how immensely popular this game is?

We do have the wireless guitar controller and it's worked pretty flawlessly so far. We've noticed a tiny amount of 'misses' with the red button, but that may be us getting used to it, we'll have to see.

Highly, highly recommended. It was so much fun that my boyfriend, a guitar player, would occasionally try to play the "real notes" rather than the Guitar Hero game notes. It really is absorbing!

Make sure you get TWO guitars to go with it, so you can play with a friend!

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48 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Step Backward, November 4, 2007

By	Brian Seiler (Tomball, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

A note to any official Amazon guys - you might want to merge this review set with the bundle on 360.

Okay. Now, I'm a fan of the franchise. I own a lot of it. All of it, actually, and twice on 360 and PS2 for the immediate predecessor of this installment. So, hopefully you will trust me when I say that I am a fan of the gameplay and the franchise in general in this preface.

It's kind of baffling what's happened with this game. Neversoft has certainly recognized some of the shortcomings of its predecessor, but have somehow managed to not solve even one of those issues, and have, in fact, introduced new problems to be addressed. I'll do this as a sort of point-by-point thing, to keep it organized:

1. Medium-to-Hard. In Guitar Hero 2, the jump from Medium to Hard was only slightly more enjoyable than stepping in front of a speeding bus. The main reason this was such a problem was that the game was very, very poorly designed for getting players over that average-to-hard hump. For one thing, the initial two difficulty settings compel you to adapt your grip on the fretboard to leave your index finger on the green button, pinky on the blue button, and keep each assigned to its place. With the introduction of the orange button, that's no longer really a viable strategy if you want to avoid crippling the weaker side of your hand. Additionally, in 2, upon reaching hard difficulty, the speed of the notes down the fretboard doubled, the fifth button was introduced, and chords and note orders increased in complexity. Those three things were enough to make hard a no-go for a lot of people in principle where a gentler slope would have taken care of that.

In response, Neversoft has tried to reduce the impact of the change in difficulty by making the Medium notes move just about as fast as the Hard difficulty ones. Unfortunately, instead of making the Medium to Hard transition easier (still very difficult because of the whole hand-training thing), it just makes the Easy to Medium transition much more jarring. Hard is still so hard that I barely want to try it at all.

2. Uncomfortable Play - I swear, the designers have put some of these songs together specifically to be painful for me. Seriously - playing Knights of Cydonia I thought I was going to cripple myself. On Medium. These guys really need to get some bad players into the office to see if they're not making something dangerous. I should not find out that I'm bad at a game by giving myself a repetitive motion injury.

3. Guitar Battles - This is a new problem for the single player. Guitar battles in multiplayer might be a good idea. I don't honestly know. Seems more interesting than a score-off to me. Unfortunately, in single player, because of the way the attacks are set up, they're really just an exercise in coin flipping. Some of the attacks are utterly crippling to the computer player while others, in addition to having a large delay before they become effective, essentially have no impact whatsoever. If you get the good attacks while you're trying to play, you'll win. If you don't, you lose. Whether you're any good or not is really not of much relevance. That's bad. Guitar battles in single player, for me, tended toward exercises in frustration at the computer not giving me the tools I needed to succeed and not having any other recourse to win. They need retooling.

4. Cooperative Campaign - This is a wonderful idea. It really is. But what half-brain decided that there should be exclusive tracks squirreled away in it that I cannot get to? That's right - I am totally unable to unlock those tracks, because I cannot play the cooperative campaign online. I'll confess - I'm old. My friends are married and have families. The only time I'm going to have somebody with another guitar at my house is if I throw a party, and I'm not really a party kind of guy. That's not a good reason to keep me from playing frigging Sabotage if I want to. I will grant that they have made the songs themselves available in online coop play, but nothing I do online seems to unlock anything for me to practice (and I SERIOUSLY need to practice Helicopter before I try THAT again). Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I'm going to assume I know what I'm doing.

5. Song List - Guitar Hero 2 was pretty good in this regard. It had a good sampling from a broad spectrum of rock (maybe a little light on new stuff). Guitar Hero 3 seems to be making a point of digging in the dustbins of rock history. It's not that the songs are bad, but many of them are outside of my experience, and that puts me off. I'm a child of the 90s. This game seems to be a schizophrenic effort to appeal to younger people than me and to older people than me. Some of the songs also puzzle me. Kool Thing? Really, guys? I can't even tell what I'm supposed to be doing there. It's barely a song. There's better Sonic Youth. There's a distressing number of songs where the lead guitar is nearly invisible, and that makes it kind of hard to play. The number of master tracks is also disappointingly small, compared to its soon-to-be-released competitor, Rock Band.

Don't get me wrong - the game is fun for what it is, but there's just so much here that could have been done better. Should have, really. I hope Neversoft takes some time on the next installment, puts in a fifth difficulty level (between Normal and Hard), and works out the kinks in their new stuff.