Technically the Mott the Hoople song is really a David Bowie song, so that’s most of the reason why it’s liquid awesome.
You do that and you’ve defeated the point of it being first and foremost a music game.
Or, as I like to call it, “Guitar Hero III”.
As others have said many many times, the difficulty on GH3 feels completely arbitrary and totally dissociated from the music. The rampant skill inflation in the series (GH1 -> GH2 -> GH3) is almost comical, and clearly driven by an arbitrary desire to “make it more harderer” and not “make it feel more like playing the actual song”. It’s incredibly misguided.
but people who can do it successfully shouldn’t be rewarded with achievements is ridiculous.
Is it? What achievement, exactly, did that guy unlock for getting a perfect score on Through The Fire and Flames?
What you said is that they should make a level harder than expert but not assign any achievements to it.
You’re the one that brought up achievements and ascribes some significance to them (since you think it’s important that they all be attainable by… you, I guess?).
The guy that did that got the satisfaction of doing it successfully and bragging rights to his friends. That used to be considered a perfectly reasonable way to be rewarded for accomplishing things. I’m not saying that all the achievements should be saved for people who play on super-expert. I’m saying that the achievements don’t fucking matter and you taking a shot at Neversoft for their distribution of achievements is silly.
Not what I said. I meant the normal completion of the game, unlocks, typical achievements, etcetera.
I suspect Neversoft would make “pro” mode somehow mandatory to have a full single player experience.
In other words, like the guy who perfected TTFAF. Should that be part of the campaign mode? Once you play at that level do achievements, campaign stuff, and unlocks really matter any more? It’s all competitive human vs. human.
There’s no question the Achievements in GH3 were retarded. I’ve completed Expert with 100% on 40 songs and can 5-star Cliffs of Dover with the guitar behind my head, and barely think I have 500/1000 points. It’s silly.
They addressed this a little in GH:A, but not fully – if you complete Expert, you get the Achievements for completing the other difficulties. But in order to buy all the guitars, outfits, etc, 5-starring all of Expert won’t do it, you still have to play through lower difficulties.
I’ve basically been arguing for no reason. I’m sure we all agree that GH3’s charts aren’t as good as Rock Band’s, that GH3’s difficulty curve is stupid, and that GH3’s achievements are ludicrous.
I was trying to nit-pick a throw-away sentence in wumpus’s post, and it got blown out of proportion.
Good to hear, I’ve been thinking about maybe renting it. How does the difficulty compare to Rock Band and GH2? I’m currently stuck on GG&HT and Psychobilly Freakout on Expert, so I expect I’ll have to play GH:A on Hard if I want the achievments in a week.
Interesting…
Explanation found…
I don’t think there’s anythings as hard as Psychobilly Freakout or GG&HT in GH Aerosmith. The only really difficult things in GH Aerosmith are a few of the solos in the later tiers, which, if you save some star power, can be faked through. Even with a short rental, I was OK with using practice mode to get a few solos down. God, I remember hating Psychobilly Freakout because of all those tremolos. I don’t think there is a single tremolo in GH Aerosmith, if I remember correctly.
Hmm. We played through the first 2 tiers of GH:Aerosmith on Hard/Expert and I gotta say, if this is “pussy” difficulty then I’m, uh… glad. It is no cakewalk.
Out of curiosity, what song(s) in the first two sets did you think were tough? Was it a case where you were close to failing, or that it was just hard to get 5 stars?
sluggo – I can’t recall ATM, but the difficulty seems to be all over the map even in the first two tiers. Nothing was fail level, but certainly went from pretty-bad 3 stars to easy 5 stars in the same tier, which is always odd.
As you may recall, even Harmonix doesn’t do well with difficulty tier categorization. Remember how much the song skill tiers changed in the Xbox 360 release of GH2? Some real boners of tier miscategorization in the original GH2 release. Same with GH3 and RB!
They ought to patch in song difficulty category readjustments over time, because they NEVER get it right for the release. There’s always a significant # of songs that are so very clearly in the wrong difficulty tier.
For sure, the tiers are an absolute mess in GH:A, at least on Expert. I think it’s more because the entire game seems to hover in a low-to-middle-difficulty range. There’s a number of songs as easy as Slow Ride, but they rarely get harder than, say, Even Flow. So it’s like trying to organize 30 songs that would all rate about a 5 or 6 on the Rock Band scale.
But at the end of the day, yeah, they turned the difficulty way low. There’s nothing here even in the same zip code as the Disturbed or Slayer songs from GH3. And what really bothers me is that there are spots in the Expert note charts where they’ve clearly ignored notes in solos, which tells me they’re taking a cue from the Rock Band camp and making Expert more accessible (something I could easily write several pages about, but won’t today).
Finished the game today! As others have said, this is probably only worth getting if you a) like Aerosmith and b) get it cheap. I got it for $35 shipped, and I do like Aerosmith, so… I enjoyed it.
Sluggo is right. GH:Aerosmith is probably the easiest Guitar Hero game to finish on Expert since Guitar Hero I. Personally, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I still can’t quite get past Play With Me in GH: 80s, for example, and it’s not endearing me to that expansion. How can 80s be harder than GH2, which I finished on Expert? There is a skill level progression towards the end of GH: Aerosmith but it’s an awfully gentle, low slope, and somewhat erratic at that. They might have gone a little too far in the other direction. They could have used a few more Train Kept a Rollin’ difficulty level songs in the very last tier, for sure.
The one boss battle at the end was practically nonexistant, it was so easy. Fine by me since boss battles were a terrible idea. I still have flashbacks to the Lou battle on Hard in GH3. And not the good kind, but the “so unfun it almost ruins the genre” kind.
At least they SEEM to be listening, since so many people complained about they hyper-absurd level of GH3 difficulty and the boss battles. I wasn’t going to buy this game if it repeated those critical GH3 mistakes, and it didn’t, so I’m happy about that.
Did you guys notice they added “crowd sings with you when you’re doing well” soundtracks to many of the songs, like Rock Band? I also enjoyed the many little Aerosmith-specific tweaks, like the way they bring out the crazy slide guitar and voice thingie for Sweet Emotion, the band gets older as you progress, Run DMC, song-specific guitars we’ve seen in videos, etc. They didn’t totally phone it in like they did on GH: 80s, thank goodness.
It is incredibly cheesy that you have to go back on Hard difficulty to rack up enough cash to buy all the items – yet you get the easy/medium/hard competion Achievements when you complete Expert. Why not award easy+medium+hard cash when you finish a song on expert, too?
Well, here’s hoping they clean up a lot more of the rough edges on the series in GH: World Tour. I’m cautiously optimistic based on what I’ve read so far about it, plus my GH:A experience:
- basically zero boss battles
- achievements that make some goddamn sense for once
- no longer absurdly difficult in the main campaign
I also refuse to replay Easy/Medium/Hard to rack up cash, but since I’m now trying to get 100%'s on all the songs on Expert – which means I replay them 5-10x – I simply created a bunch of new profiles so I get cash for beating songs every time.
They should just give you more cash every time you beat a song regardless of it’s the first time or not.
I rented the game and finished it in three days. I did go back and play on Hard to get the $50,000 achievement, but didn’t keep going after that.
Playing all those Aerosmith songs really drilled home how repetetive and boring they are. I hadn’t noticed from just listening on the radio or playing Train Kept Rollin’ in RB. Aerosmith really sucks! I had no idea!
The only songs I wish were in RB were Joan Jett and The Cult. Even Dream On, while a good song to listen to, really wasn’t something I wanted to play a second time. This is definitely a rental, not worth buying unless you love Aerosmith.