The Gaming Experiment

This week, it will be a little different. I wasn’t able to finish a game. The game I tried to play was Guitar Hero 5. I picked it up after work on Tuesday, and played a bit of it each day. This weekend I had some things to do, but played it again at night, I tried.

The last GH game I played was the 3rd in the series, Legends of Rock, and I only played if for a little bit. That was the same year that Rock Band debuted, and I was all about the drums (Guitar Hero World Tour was the first GH game to have drumming and a mic). Now let me put it out there, I had been a fan of the original GH on the PS2, and Guitar Hero 2, but once Rock Band came on the scene, I changed camps and was a Rock Band guy. However, after reading the reviews, I was definitely excited to pick up GH5 and hopefully that would reinvigorate my love of the series.

Let me start off by saying that the presentation of GH5 is fantastic. The game doesn’t start off like past iterations have, with a menu, but rather has a band playing one of the 85 songs on the disc. But the most interesting thing is that by pressing the yellow button on whichever instrument you choose, and the game track drops down, and you can play. GH5 calls this party mode. A more casual pick up and play experience. When you miss a series of notes, then the note track disappears. I think that this feature alone is a genre changing one.

When Rock Band 2 was first announced, there was supposed to be a ‘Jukebox Mode’ that allowed the player to listen to the songs that are in the game and have been downloaded through DLC. This never came to fruition, and GH5 beat them to the punch.

I started a Career, my bands name is Abernathy, I’m not sure why, but that’s our name. I created a character, which had a lot of different options, and he is close to how I look. I was never a real rock star, but I am one in the game.

Like previous iterations, there are venues that you play in, encore songs and more venue unlocks. That’s totally fine with me, though I did enjoy the Rock Band model of have fans and becoming more popular in a tangible sense with your fan count, though in RB, there is a lot of song repetition that artificially increases the replayability of it. Each song in career mode has a challenge that needs to be completed by either a specific instrument or more than one player. I really thought that this added a new dimension to playing the songs. Plus if you got 100% on a song, you gained another star. It helped me stick around a bit longer.

I was also able to play some multiplayer, but finding a game wasn’t always an easy proposition. I was often waiting for five to ten minutes just to find a game, and was never able to find a full band vs band battle. However, the little that I played was fun, with different modes like most points and most accurate.

As you can tell so far, the presentation of the game, and its features are great, top notch really, and especially with the added party mode, it bring rhythm games to a new level of a group or party experience. But why wasn’t I able to finish the game this weekend? The track listing. The Achilles heal of any music/rhythm game. I tried to push through, playing one song after another that I had really not heard of before. Ok, so I admit it, I might not be the most up to date person when it comes to the new music the young kids listen to nowadays (I’m 25). But one thing that I always remembered about the first couple GH games was that, even though I didn’t know all the bands, the note tracking was fun. In GH5, I think that it lacks that rocking feeling.

I tried to play though the career, I really did. But I lost that feeling of feeling like a rock star and became frustrated and bored. I would recommend the game to people who like the track list, the features are fantastic, the presentation, though it isn’t as good as Rock Band, still is a huge improvement over previous iterations. The biggest added feature is the party mode with the jump in and jump out capability, I stand by my statement that that feature is truly a genre changer.

For me, this game is a pass, but only because of the, in my opinion, weak track list. I found myself going back to the handful of songs that I really enjoyed, and didn’t mess with the rest. However, if the soundtrack is up your musical alley, I don’t understand why you are still on the computer, go out and pick it up now.