The Petty Fanboy Post

I admit it. I know I shouldn’t be enjoying this or taking any satisfaction from it, but I am. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is proving to be not as polished an affair as previous versions. There’s a little voice in my head that is gleefully whooping with joy over the fact that this proves that greed, avarice and an almost total disregard or interest in what you’re doing except for the money, is still no substitute for a genuine love of the art. The skaters that are Neversoft have unleashed their game on the masses and so far the results have not been equal to past efforts.

This is not to say that the game won’t make millions. It will. There’s no doubt in my mind that it will likely be the best-selling game this Christmas when you combine it over all the platforms of PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. But it won’t be as good as it could have been.

The game officially went on sale today, actually. Since then, people have been playing it, and obviously the gaming websites and magazines have had it even longer, and the results are finally starting to come in. The game is good, that’s not because of the new additions, that’s DESPITE them. Essentially, the only thing that keeps Guitar Hero III being fun is all the essential mechanics that were created by Harmonix anyway. All the new stuff retro-fitted onto it have been the negatives in most criticisms.

From a marketing perspective, there’s the little problem of bundles. It would seem that Activision failed to inform the public at large that in addition to the new wireless guitar that was going on sale (which they marketed the hell out of), there would also be bundles packing in the old guitar (which they hadn’t mentioned at all). This can definitely be blamed on the ignorance of people in too much of a hurry to check their purchase, but stores are now experiencing some returns as a result of people thinking they bought the new guitar (believing it to be the ONLY bundle) only to come home and realize this was the same guitar they already had lying around the house. Good job there, Activision…

An additional problem that falls under marketing is the use of advertising. I don’t actually have a problem with this myself, as I think it adds to the flavor of a game in certain ways. When used appropriately. Previous Guitar Hero games have actually had their authenticity enhanced through the presence of actual brand names in the manufacturing of music equipment like DW drums and VHT amplifiers. This makes sense to me. Unfortunately, Activision–perhaps in an attempt to be competitive with their rival–took this to Electronic Arts levels with this latest game, and players can now find themselves performing on a stage courtesy of… Pontiac. And if your playing stinks, then maybe it’s time to freshen it up with a manly smellin’ custom guitar brought to you by Axe Body Spray, so that your axe can also have the Axe Effect. This is about as subtle as Fight Night Round III where the game would boldly announce, “This round has been brought to you by BURGER KING!”

Over on the actual mechanical end of things… Well, the songlist is the songlist. This is strictly a matter of personal taste and can’t be argued. I actually like the songlist a lot. Tons of good stuff here. But one of the biggest mechanical problems seems to be an actual problem of mechanics. It would seem that there are problems with the new guitar that is being released for the game. This is not a big deal for PS2 owners that already have a controller. And it is not a big deal for Xbox 360 owners, who also will likely have an existing guitar. However, for Wii and PS3 owners, this is a VERY big deal. They have no choice but to buy these new, defective guitars simply because they don’t have “legacy controllers” from previous versions to fall back on.

The first and most serious problem seems to be the new construction of the controller. As a new feature for “added convenience” Red Octane has made these new guitars so that the neck can actually snap off from the base for easier storage. Unfortunately for some guitars, this has resulted in some cheap coating or adhesive that’s been applied to the joints where these two points meet, and this has actually interfered with the connection, making it impossible for the controller to be correctly read by the console. Some workarounds for this by desperate gamers have been to take an exacto knife and carefully scrape away at the contact points of the circuits to clean them up and make the proper connection as intended. Except of course that this kind of action voids your warranty, so you’re at risk if you take this course. Others have been having problems with the wireless system reading correctly with their console and there are already angry horror stories on the forums about some people on THEIR THIRD EXCHANGE OF THE DAY with still no luck on getting a functioning controller.

The other problem seems to be one of the buttons. Some people have reported that there seems to be a problem with the green button on the new guitar, in that it doesn’t always seem to know that it’s been pressed. There are already howls of rage on the Guitar Hero forum (or at least there were until it got shut down as the complaints mounted minute by minute) as people discovered that they were now failing songs as a result of the game telling them they were not pressing the button when they damn well knew they were.

This is also compounded by a problem with Star Power. The new guitars are a little too sensitive in the “tilt” department, and there have been reports of star power being engaged without actually tilting the guitar to a fully vertical position. It seem that there are plenty of angles at which Star Power Is A Go, and that’s been interfering with the process of playing for some. Another is a surprise defect in the code of the game itself; lag. Every review of the game from a major website has cited that, regardless of version, when Star Power is kicked in, there’s a small chance that the game will actually begin to slow down, as if the sudden application of Star Power was a surprise the game itself wasn’t expecting, which can cause the frame rate to drop, throwing it momentarily out of synch with the sound, and causing whatever streak you had going to break. Again, this isn’t a big deal for people that aren’t serious about the game, for the “score whore” who is concerned getting 5 stars, or just keeping a good multiplier going and capitalizing on the bonus points from a judicious use of Star Power, this is annoying in the extreme.

And then there is the new “boss battle” system and this is the one that is universally getting picked on by everyone. No one seems to like it, particularly at the Hard and Expert levels, because it now takes the skill out of the game,
and puts advancement squarely in the realm of luck. The boss battles are mandatory for advancing through the game, there’s no way to avoid them. The way they work is much like Tetris, or Puzzle Fighter or any other competitive multi-player game you might have played in the past where players are given “weapons” that can be used to interfere with the progress of the other player. In GHIII, this comes in the form of collecting Star Power and having it converted to a special attack that can do everything from bumping the difficulty up to Expert (if you’re not already playing at that level) to initiating a “lefty flip” (that is reversing the order of the buttons so that left handed people can play the guitar “upside down,” to “breaking a string” so that a button will no longer work until the whammy bar has been jiggled enough to cancel out the effect. At Hard and Expert level, many are complaining that the final boss has an unfair advantage in that he gets his special attacks before you do, and if you don’t get just the right combination of special attacks yourself–which is randomly determined–this is practically a guarantee that you will not win and should simply start again. While I know that there will be a certain competitive mindset that relishes this kind of more traditional “game-y, PvP” experience, I think this pretty much runs counter to the original spirit of the game, and it looks like many people are not liking it.

On top of this, there are problems with the network. This is probably more attributable to “labor pains” since it’s the first day the game is out, but people on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 have been having enormous trouble getting online to play against each other. In both cases, it’s the same thing; people attempt to connect to the network, get a message indicating that the game is attempting to connect to another player to begin the co-op/versus session, and then a few minutes later the connection just times out.

And of course, there is the “new and improved” hammer on/pull off system, which has made these things easier in one sense. Hammer ons and such are easier to to do now that the timing is less precise, but at the same time, there seems to have been an overall loss in precision generally. Apparently Activision has said that this is a matter that is being looked into and there may be a patch to address it on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. I have no idea if this will hold true for the PS2 version and if it does, what, if anything, PS2 owners can do about since they can’t just download a patch to correct the problem.

And finally, there is that little matter of over-complicating songs at the higher levels of difficulty simply because Neversoft couldn’t think of any other way to make the songs harder. Most reports agree that the songs at the highest tiers of Hard and Expert are much, MUCH harder than previous games, and that is because the game is asking you to push buttons where there are no notes even being played, and to hit three button chords even though a single note is being played. While no one is going to argue that these will make a song more challenging, you can still make a case for this actually lessening the feel of “playing” the song and merely melting your hands off trying to hit the crazy configurations Neversoft’s team (which was hired for the project, since Neversoft didn’t have any musicians in their company, they had to outsource to “music experts” to generate the note charts for them) dreamed up in order to challenge players.

As a result of the barrage of complaints coming in to the forums for GHIII the forums were actually shut down for a few hours.

There’s a part of me that would like to think that this is simply karma. This is what happens when you take something that began with pure intentions, and try and turn it into a cold, soulless business opportunity with no love for the product, only the profits it can generate.

Of course there’s also a part of me that dearly hopes that Rock Band will not be plagued by these same issues when it finally goes on sale. At this point, while I’m quite happy with the prototype peripherals I’ve gotten a chance to mess with, as GHIII has proven today, there can be quite a bit of variance between carefully constructed prototypes and the final, mass manufactured product. I can only hope that karma works both ways, and if this is the universe trying to punish Neversoft and Activision for trying to kill the spirit of Rock in favor of the lure of Big Money, then that same universe will look kindly on Harmonix for trying to bring the joy of music to the people.