Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Member Review for the Xbox360

This year for Christmas, I bought my father Guitar Hero 3. You see, he is old and therefore is only capable of playing Guitar Hero and Wii. Well, I’ve been playing it recently and I am really glad that my father has no idea what a quality video game is like, or I would find all my stuff out in a box.

Graphics or how I learned what a retarded Stephen Tyler/Arnold Schwarzenegger crossbreed would look like.

Guitar Hero 3 is shinier and better polished graphically than 1 and 2, I will admit that. However, it has lost the whole feel of the game. The whole game blasts shine into your eyeballs the entire time. The notes now also look really silly. For the hammer-ons, instead of looking like subtle little notes waiting to spring like the mother ****ers that they are, they shine superbloom back into your retinas, making them harder then before since you no longer can see them… or, well anything for that matter. And all the notes to activate starpower look like they were molded out of clay at the last second.

Speaking of starpower, all the new display areas for score and starpower look ridiculous. The starpower indicator is now six lightbulbs that light up when full. The problem is it is really hard to tell that it is full when it is close to the limit. Really that is nothing major, since it is like having six 10-ounce bottles instead of one 60-ounce jug. But whenever the multiplier counter now tells you what your current streak is as well. This alone would be fine, but they also have a giant pop-up indicator in the middle of the screen when you reach 50, 100, 150 etc., which is unnecessary. I mean, they could show me something more important, like, oh I don’t know, the notes maybe? It’s like that annoying Paperclip that everybody hates, except you can’t program your other people to kill it.

In the earlier games, when you finished a song it would give you a picker-upper and tell you that you rocked when you might have sucked through the whole song and only gotten 2 stars. What it would do is a splode the neck thingy the notes would fly down and tell you that you rocked. A little violent maybe, but it would encourage me to keep playing, because, you know, I rocked. But now what happens is the thingy explodes into a giant fireball, a lazer light show would go on with fireworks and jagged metal playing, followed by flashing lights and Benny Hill images. The whole ordeal takes about five minutes, but finally the words You Rock appear on screen. But after that craptastrophy, they should change the word “rock” to “just had a heart attack” or “better not have epilepsy.”

But even worse than that is the stuff happening in the back. The characters look fine and the locations are decent. But whenever you are rocking out it will randomly show the ugly-ass lead singer for long periods of a time. If you have not seen him, he has a monkey head that is not nearly proportional to the size of his body. He looks like a drug addict Bomberman or a baseball bat shoved into a watermelon with a face on it. And it will show him right up close on the screen.

I give 5 pluses for polish, but 15 minuses for monkey men, popup crap and seizure-matic endings.

Sound or how I found someone who could anally rape every good song.

In a rhythm game like this, the music is what is really important. GH3 has a decent song list. It isn’t good, it is decent. The problem is they hired what sounds like angry homeless people to do every single song as a cover. I was actually tempted to turn my sound off as I was playing the game. That’s how bad it is. If they were bad songs in the first place, I might forgive them. But when you make great songs like “Story of my Life” by Social D sound like a kitten genocide, it is simply unforgivable. And if you are thinking that “Story of my Life” is a bad song, then that’s only because you’ve heard the craptoberfest cover.

I give 4 pluses for a few good songs, but 27 minuses for making all the songs, good or bad, sound like crap.

Gameplay or how I sold my soul to the devil and got Rock Band.

The gameplay in 3 doesn’t change much from earlier installments. It is still press button, strum, win game. But now they added boss battles. I wonder how they came up with that. I’m sure there was a meeting where one person said, “We’ve successfully crapped up all the music and took away the best characters (by the way, they took out Clive Winston, the best character in the game). What else can we do to completely destroy not only the integrity of the Guitar Hero name, but hopefully all of video games?” Then he smacked another person over the head with one of the guitar controllers and the other person said, “We should put in bosses.” And now it has become official, boss battles are now officially dead. The only places where you can find decent ones are JRPGs and Action-Adventures, which take up about 1% in the gaming sea full of FPS’s and Party Games. And the boss battles themselves are Tom Morello and Slash, two people I didn’t know about before and don’t respect now. The third is the devil, which I found to be ironic since the boss battles shot the game straight to hell.

5 pluses for still being fun to play, but 30 minuses for boss battles, and an additional 10 minuses for the removal of Clive Winston

So all in all, GH3 can be summed up as follows. You are living happily with your mother (Harmonix) and your father (Activision). One day your mother gets thrown out or runs away or something. Your father quickly remarries (Neversoft). The new wife cleans up and makes everything look good. However, she forces you to listen to bad music and kills your favorite pet because you have another pet just like it and you don’t need two. She also signs you up for many different competitive sports and arts that you can’t do. Meanwhile, your mother went off and got remarried, and has a new child who is so much better, since he can also play the drums and sing.

Anyway, all in all it was very disappointing. I am sure I left a bunch of stuff out, but it is late, I’m tired and I don’t give a ****.