Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
115 of 120 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastically Fun - but Hard on the Fingers, November 13, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I think I've hit one of the must-have games for any PS2 owner that enjoys rock music. You get a physical "guitar" controller with this game, and it's amazingly fun!
You hold the controller just like a real guitar, and it's switchable for left handed players. The neck of the guitar has 5 buttons on it that you play with your left hand. In the center of the guitar is a "strum" button that you hit to play the notes. There's even a metal bar to wiggle, to cause the notes to "bend" to give an extra crowd boost.
If you're not a big hard rock / metal fan, there's only a few songs to choose from. You get Ziggy Stardust, Crossroads, Killer Queen, Sharp Dressed Man, More than a Feeling and a few more. Those who like harder rock will be quite thrilled, though. There's Iron Man, I Wanna Be Sedated, Symphony of Destruction, You've Got Another Thing Comin' and much more.
There are four difficulty levels. You start with easy of course, where it's great fun to play along with your favorite songs and just have fun. When you crank up to the higher levels - moving through various venues and unlocking different characters and guitars - the keys get VERY difficult. Still, it's a blast hammering away at the notes, waving your guitar around in the air and having fun.
The sound is quite good, and you get a real boost from hearing the crowd cheer and yell for you. The visuals are reasonable - but really, this isn't a game about visuals. You just watch for the buttons to press, and press them. It's really about the music.
Now, I do have to mention some complaints. The first is the song list. I wish they'd offered more of a wide selection of song types. I suppose that new games will come out soon with more song options, which I'll look forward to.
Next is the key layout. I really love the strum bar. But the buttons up on the neck of the guitar are AWFUL. They have 5 wide buttons all in a straight line. The buttons have to be pressed straight in to work well. Human fingers simply don't work that way. They should have put the buttons at an angle - both angled a bit diagonally the way a hand holds a guitar neck, and also angled up-down so that your fingers press into them at an angle. As it is now, the buttons tend to stick and jam. When you fail at a really complex song because the keys have stuck, it's very frustrating.
That being said, you can usually get through an hour or two before your fingers really start to kill you. If you play with a group of friends, passing the guitar around between songs, that means an afternoon can go by before all of you end up with finger pain. I suppose it's a built in way to ensure that you don't play video games all day long :)
|
|
|
72 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An impeccable idea, charmingly executed. Great fun., November 26, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally, a PS2 game that deserves five stars. Guitar Hero is one of those high-concept games with such a great premise that many people will buy it without having seen a single screen capture. And the cincher is, it fully lives up to its promise.
Pros:
- Addictive gameplay. The customized guitar-shaped controller gives an added cute factor over other simulation games of this type.
- Terrific graphics, backgrounds, and characters. Their in-game activities and details are very endearing.
- Fortunately, they didn't forget the guitar-loving gals and included two female characters you can choose from. There's also a terrific Donnas song ("Take It Off") you can play along to, plus that perennial air-guitar classic, Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll". They could've gone even farther with the gender balance -- imagine trying to play something by Sleater-Kinney, with those twisty Carrie Brownstein guitar lines -- but at least they tried.
- Good songs with diversity. I hadn't expected to see "Godzilla" on here -- Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser is a grossly underrated guitarist, and playing this song might make you appreciate him much more. "Bark at the Moon" and "You Got Another Thing Comin'" are classic metal; "Texas Flood" and "Crossroads" represent the blues spectrum; "Higher Ground" supplies the funk; "Stellar" and "No One Knows" represent modern alternative rock. "Cowboys from Hell" is an apt tribute to the late, great Dimebag Darrell, and Megadeth's crushing "Symphony of Destruction" is my favourite song selection. The songs aren't their original versions (imagine the licensing fees), but they are great-sounding recreations of the recordings.
- I had originally been skeptical about the SG guitar controller's ability to respond to lightning-fast notes, but it turns out to be quite sharp.
- Rock-star dreams. Who wouldn't get a kick out of this?
Cons:
- While there's a good diversity in the song choices, like Stevie Ray Vaughan ("Texas Flood"), Edgar Winter Group ("Frankenstein") and Queen ("Killer Queen"), at a certain point, it still ain't quite enough. Given the huge pantheon of rock/blues/jazz music out there, of course there'll be omissions, and licensing problems probably added to the limitations in song choices. No Led Zeppelin, no Nirvana or Pearl Jam, no Guns N' Roses, no AC/DC, no Allman Brothers Band, no Joe Satriani, no Van Halen, no Santana, no The Band, no Bruce Springsteen, no U2, no Neil Young and Crazy Horse, no Metallica, no Evanescence, no Aerosmith, no Living Colour, no Bon Jovi, no Dream Theater. And where are "Hotel California" and "Layla"? Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb"? Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover"?
- While some of the unlockable bonus songs are fun to play -- Freezepop's "Get Ready 2 Rokk" is just fabulously weird, and Artillery's "The Breaking Wheel" is challenging, twisty fun -- some of them are trite, and some are downright annoying, including only because a certain member of the band is on the Harmonix design team. The Acro-Brats, The Slip, Made in Mexico, Count Zero and Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives are especially irritating -- bad music, repetitive and overlong. And there's way too much skater punk-pop in general.
- Having Gibson Guitars' endorsement means you get to play some genuine Gibson guitar designs. Hey, I play one myself and I love them. But not being able to use classic designs like the Stratocaster, the Ibanez R-type, the Telecaster, the Rickenbacker and the Jackson Rhoads is conspicuous, to say the least.
- Remember to rest your hands...the SG controller has what we'd call a "baseball bat" neck, thicker than any electric guitar I can think of, and playing this thing can be even more tiring than playing a real guitar...this coming from a guy who plays acoustic 12-string.
There are already plenty of wishlists on the web for songs that haven't been included, and I can only hope there will be a Guitar Hero 2. Terrific fun.
|
|
|
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Guitar Hero will rock your socks off., November 7, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
You may have seen it in arcades, an undersized plastic "guitar" with 5 colorful buttons on its bridge, but balked at the $2.00 it costs to play the thing. Well for only $70.00 you can now get the game for your PS2 and play it over and over and over again.
And that's exactly what'll happen if you buy it.
One stipulation:
You better at least like rock music. And by Rock, I don't mean Sheryl Crowe, I mean Head-thrashing, Fingers-shredding, Bite-the-head-off-bats rock. Oh sure, there's the occasional genre buster, they've got a modest Queen piece, and Texas Flood, a slinging blues piece. But the meat of the playlist comes from bands with guitarists who have one-word nicknames. From punk to classic to metal to some of the bands on the radio today, the common denominator is that the songs rock.
Still, it's ridiculously addicting, like a Dance Dance Revolution for the hair-band crowd, and while there are a limited number of songs (around 30 once everything's unlocked), it's a testament to the quality of the game that even if there were 50 songs, you'd probably still want more. The difficulty is high enough that finishing the game on Expert level would leave you with enough skills to pick up an actual guitar and play some extremely easy tab. That's not to say it's a music-teaching tool, it's not by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly wouldn't hurt your eye-hand coordination or your rhythmic sensibility.
The hardware itself is a miniature SG-style sturdy piece of plastic. There's even a whammy bar which, while it's not integrated into gameplay, is available for all your pitch bending needs.
Given the right environment, it's the kind of game that you could lose sleep over the first few nights you got it. It's good for either a party-environment, or rocking out yourself in career mode. Two thumbs, two index fingers and two pinkies up!
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
