In the order I feel like talking about them.
On Sunday, I bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is my first guitar game! It is in a sense a trial run for Rock Band, or rather Rock Band 2, because I won’t play Rock Band on a console that doesn’t give me downloadable content and we only have a Wii at present. It seems prudent to find out if I like the genre before getting all ambitious.
Aerosmith rather than the main game because again, I’d feel cheated out of downloadable content and also I happen to dig the Aerosmith a lot. I’m from Boston. Suck it up.
So it’s cool! It took me like an hour to figure out that Easy mode is dead boring, which is why I was getting bored. I went off and tried Medium mode and that was much, much better. The game cleverly makes you play through the opening bands first at each venue, so you don’t get to wallow in Aerosmith immediately. This works for me.
The narrative is pretty clever; this is completely a game for fans. You start out at their first show, a high school venue, then move on to Max’s Kansas City (where you play the song that refers to playing at Max’s Kansas City), and so on. Between each venue, there’s a video with band members talking about how their careers were progressing and so forth. I, um, skipped those.
Other than that it’s a guitar game and I’m the last one to this particular party. I do find myself wishing the guitar was more prominent in the mix, but moving to Medium helped there as well. Fun. If the fun persists, there will be Rock Band 2 someday.
2 Comments
Aha! I’ve been following the online comic Might Have Been, and thinking “this is really cool, but not something that’d appeal to everyone”. And then you make this post and… well… you’re exactly the sort of person who’d get a comic about a post apocalyptic world in which salvation is found through Guitar Hero:
http://www.mighthavebeen.net/
OK, I have to give that a try now. I’d been a bit wary of the Ferret — Home on the Strange didn’t do it for me — but that’s an awesomesauce description.