Last night I stayed up half the night rocking out, crawled into bed with
aching fingers, slept through my alarm, and shuffled off to work as guitar riffs
played endlessly through my head. Thanks to Guitar Hero I had become a rock and
roll star. Well, minus the groupies and hangover that is.
Guitar Hero is basically a rhythm game that bears a very strong resemblance
to Amplitude, which is no surprise since the same developer is responsible for
both games. However neither Amplitude nor its predecessor Frequency came with a
guitar – a freakin’ guitar, man! OK, well it’s not exactly a real guitar, but
rather a guitar-shaped controller with five fret buttons (the handle part of a
guitar) and a “strum” switch where your fingers would stroke the strings of a
real guitar. It even comes with a whammy bar – the little stick on a guitar that
you can move to add a “wa-wa” sound to your notes. It’s not as big as an actual
guitar, but at least it’s bigger than a ukulele. To be honest, the first time I
played the game I felt like a dork standing in front of my TV strapped to a
plastic guitar. That changed pretty quickly as I was soon turned into a rock god
playing a sold out show in my living room…
The basics of the game are pretty straight forward. The center of the screen
is dominated by a fret bar viewed from the end. As the music plays, color-coded
notes come scrolling towards you down the fret bar. As the notes reach the
bottom of the screen they pass over little targets and your job is to hit the
strum switch just as the note hits the target while holding down the
correspondingly colored fret button. Time it right and you’ll play the note,
miss it and your disappointed audience will hear a wimpy plink instead of a
righteous riff.
Sounds simple enough, right? Well at first it’s not that hard. The game does
a great job of progressively increasing the difficulty so that beginners won’t
be frustrated and rock gods will be challenged. At first the songs will just
send notes that are one of three different colors to be played one at a time.
You’ll then progress to holding notes and even to playing two notes at a time to
produce chords. Then the fourth note color will begin to show up, and then the
fifth. Suddenly you have five notes to play and only four fingers with which to
press buttons, and that thumb that you’ve worked so hard to turn into a
game-controlling tool by using it while playing countless hours of games is
relegated to the new duty of simply holding the guitar. Yeah, it gets
challenging if you haven’t been playing a lot of games with your pinky lately –
or ever.
As you play the game, the controller will feel less and less like one and
more like a guitar. When the notes come quickly as they can during a
hard-rocking solo, your hand will be moving up and down the fret bar and you’ll
be stroking the strum bar as if it was six metal strings. It’s hard not to
really get into the act and start to gyrate with killer rock moves as you play.
I dare you to try and play the game while sitting motionless and slumped back
into your couch cushions.
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