The Guitar Hero III "I've actually played it" Thread

Games
21

CCZ has it right. Here is the full post for more context:

Post I quoted from

How did you get hold of a copy of the game out of interest?

Have some people at Activision been naughty?

I think you’re being real harsh. I work at Neversoft, but not on this title… I had far more fun playing through III than II. The first one though for me will still take some topping.

Our games are taking a real slagging from these boards… I’m disappointed in you all. ;)

EDIT: Oh, I see it’s been ‘released’ by nefarious sources on PS2. That version isn’t our work… Judge the game by the 360/PS3 versions.[/QUOTE]

22

Hm. Okay, played the first two songs. It’s crashed twice already but that’s probably entirely unrelated.

I have to say, I have some complaints of my own, but also some rejoinders. It feels really, really twitchy for some reason - HOPOs are far easier to pull off, but long notes seem really hard for some reason. It’s like the game is registering me as hitting them twice. And no, that’s not my guitar, as I was playing GH2 last night. You’re right; I do feel a bit more detatched from the game. The special effects are toned down considerably - the whammy bar no longer makes the note waggle around in a nice way but just changes it in a very static way.

On the other hand, I don’t get the framerate or character issues. Characters look fine, really; not half as detailed as the 360 screenshots but far sharper than the GH2 characters. Likewise, the framerate seemed remarkably smooth. I dunno; maybe it gets worse once you’re off the first area. I’m still enjoying it, but I’d enjoy it a lot less if it’d stop crashing. More impressions later.

EDIT: Okay, yeah. Playable characters look okay, everyone else in the band looks atrocious and has piss-poor animation. I take that back, at least.

23

I’ve seen a torrent of the 360 version going around too

Yeah, but good luck playing it. Microsoft did a much better job with security on the 360, after the fiasco that was the Xbox.

Anyway, by Sunday all this silliness will be over. Stupid inefficient distribution networks.

24

Also, I’m not sure where those criticisms about the tracklist are coming from. The GH3 tracklist is great. I haven’t quite played them all yet, but I’ve played enough to know that it is clearly better than GH2 in that area.

25

Anyone had a chance to play this on the Wii yet? I was planning on picking it up on the PS2 to avoid further plastic guitar purchases but if the PS2 version is crappy I may have to pick it up for my only other console, the Wii.

26

Has anyone seen this out in the wild yet? I know the release date is next tuesday but I wouldnt mind getting it a bit early.

27

The release date is Sunday, oddly enough.

28

Oh so it is. I was thinking the 28th was a tuesday for some reason.

29

The release date is Sunday, oddly enough.

I’m pretty sure they did this so they could have an excuse to fuck over direct orders in favor of the retail channel.

“Oh, your direct pre-order from RedOctane won’t arrive until Monday? What a shame… you could pick up a copy at your local Best Buy™ now!”

30

I don’t follow. Doesn’t the publisher set the release date? Why would they do that to encourage people to buy from a middleman rather than making sales directly?

31

I thought the shipping date was the 28th, meaning (most) stores won’t release it until the 29th.

32

I don’t think so. When I preordered yesterday, they said they would be selling it at 9 am sunday morning. A lot of stores are doing midnight sales also for 10/28.

33

Why would they intentionally choose to release on Sunday and fuck over their own direct pre-orders? Because they are competing with their own retail channel partners by selling the product themselves. This way they can give retail locations an exclusive lock during launch.

It’s a balancing act.

34

Apparently some Sears stores are selling the game already (non-bundle 360 version). I’ve seen some photos flying around.

35

Like Halo, this is a street dated title. Most stores will have it sitting in the back, and will sell it Sunday morning.

Our local “street date? what’s a street date?” store only has the ps2 version so far. :(

36

That means, since I ordered online, everyone else will get the damn game before I do.

Great, now I get to hear about how awesome it is by everyone a day or two before I’ll be able to play it.

37

Just get all your launch day info here. I’m sure the high level of acidity on this board will spit venom spray all over this title, and will keep your expectations low.

Hell, just look at the posts so far.

38

Ignoring all launch day discussion:

VAGUE SPOILER WARNINGS! If you do not wish to know about GH3 in some detail, don’t read this.

I’ve played awhile now, and yeah, if you have access to another version and it won’t put you out a huge amount (like, say, buying another 2 guitars) then go for a version that’s not PS2. It seems perfectly playable but it looks like shit. The main character models are fine, but every other character looks atrocious - textures are poor (I presume downscaled from the other versions?) and the animations are hilariously bad. The drummer, who looks very much like a gorilla with Down’s Syndrome, moves like one of those little monkey toys that clap cymbals together. He rotates woodenly on the spot and his arms move up and down. No hand movement, no other separate movement as far as I can tell; just those few points of articulation. That’s not a shot against those who suffer from Down’s Syndrome, by the way - I just can’t think of a better way to describe him. Likewise, the singer’s jaw only moves up and down, and it’s again extremely wooden.

Gameplay-wise… eh. It’s fun. There are some good songs in there. I’m not sure how much I like the new system, though. Star Power riffs go on for far, far too long, and I presume this is a balancing act to prevent the new easier HOPOs from making the game far, far easier than it should be. I’ve still got an odd problem with long notes where flicking the strum bar as I did in the previous titles seems to cause it to double strum, or something; I did it like that for ease of access to the whammy bar. It feels a bit unpolished in that respect, frankly.

HOPOs themselves are a bit odd too. They’re no longer calculated based on the time since the last note, whether it’s a chord or not, how fast the song is going etc. but they seem to be set deliberately by the developers. What this means is that if you got good with them in GH2, you’re going to get screwed when there aren’t HOPOs where you’d expect them, and HOPOs suddenly appearing where they wouldn’t before. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it lets long notes change fret without requiring you to strum again (replicating a slide, almost), but it’s a pain in the ass at first. To begin with it seemed as though they were done based on whether, when playing on actual guitar, you’d be able to HOPO it or not, but that goes out the window after about the second tier and they seem randomly assigned.

Difficulty-wise, it’s tough on Expert. First song I failed was on the final tier, but I finished GH2 without failing one, and some of them on this are bitch hard. The second-to-last tier (Tier 7?) is reminiscent of the last tier on GH2, and while some comments reckon there are no big bottlenecks, the Slipknot and Disturbed songs are not only some of the most ear-bleedingly dreadful “songs” ever made available to the public but incredibly difficult. I imagine those two may wind up as this game’s Freya/Institutionalised/Psychobilly Freakout (and they have elements of all three).

Yes, the final tier is hard. Very hard. For me, at least. Metallica’s One has some insane riffs in it, and Slayer’s Raining Blood is probably the hardest song in the game barring Devil Went Down to Georgia and Through the Fire and the Flames. Only had one attempt at each of them so they may be easier when my hands aren’t cramping from four tiers of constant play, but right now…

I can’t really judge the songs yet as I’ve been trying to unlock everything first, and I’ll play them more seriously later, but Knights of Cydonia and Cult of Personality were a nice refresher after the other shite in the semifinal tier. If you don’t like the songs then you’re probably not going to enjoy them, and it doesn’t seem as fun or accessible as GH2 for some reason - despite the new HOPOs it comes across as a fair bit more difficult than GH2 and that gives it a really weird difficulty feeling. It feels like they tried to be as EXTREME as they could with MONSTER RIFFS and constant, unnecessary three-note-chords (often switching back and forth from, say, GRB to GYB and then back again) and then realised no-one could actually finish any of the songs, so they had to make the system easier. In summary, it just feels a bit like amateurs got a hold of the devkit, so far.

I’m being harsh because I love the GH series so much, I guess, and it seems like a bit of a disappointment. It’s not bad and this really is a first impression - God knows I loathed GH2 at first - so if you like GH, you’ll probably get a good degree of fun out of this, and do bear in mind it’s a first impression from a few hours’ constant play on Expert. Just don’t go expecting the second coming.

For those who’re pissed at the co-op songs unlocking seperately, there’s a code online already which apparently unlocks everything, in every mode, on every difficulty, except for the boss songs - although it also saves the game once you do this so you may want to finish it at least once, first, to get the “completion” vibe.

Oh, and the loading screen comments are crap, but the little animations you get after finishing each tier are kinda neat.

Any questions?

EDIT: Oh, and I’m still inevitably going to buy this when it’s out in the UK, but then that was a sure thing anyway.

39

the little animations you get after finishing each tier are kinda neat.

Those animations are from the guy who animates Metalocalypse, and before that Home Movies. I saw him at the Guitar Player Magazine Guitar Hero '07 (real world) guitar competition– he was the emcee.

And he’s also a musician, evidently…

Small started learning guitar at 15, and graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1997 . During his music studies he concurrently took several writing and comedy classes at Emerson College … He has recently completed the Dethklok album entitled Dethalbum in which he collaborates with Gene Hoglan to deliver a genuinely melodic death metal sound while simultaneously retaining the light-hearted nature with which Small portrays the heavy metal sub-genre. The album debuted at #21 in the Billboard top 200 the week it was released.

40

This is exactly the impression that I got playing the demo, too.

The star power streaks being way too long is, I think, a huge design flaw in the game. The expert players might not remember this from their early days with the game, but the genius of the star power mechanic is that it serves two purposes. For players who aren’t that skilled, it’s mostly useful as a method of saving yourself from failing a song. Then, once you get better at playing, it becomes a way of boosting your score (it’s impossible to five-star most songs without a strategic deployment of star power).

The problem is, in order to be effective in the first role, star power has to be relatively easy to collect (it’s not a very useful aid to unskilled players if you can only collect it by being more skilled). And in the Harmonix GH games, it is. Most of the star power phrases in GHII, for instance, are short and pretty easy to nail. They will sometimes throw in one tougher SP streak in a song–maybe two, if it’s a long song–so that in order to get all of the star power, you have to be a pretty good player. But the majority of the start power is usually pretty easy to get. And I think it was a mistake to change that. It shows a pretty serious lack of understanding for one of the game’s core mechanics.

And speaking of star power, does anyone not hate the new star power meter? Way to take something that was simple (a single bar that fills up) and easy to read out of the corner of your eye and make it way more complicated than it needs to be.