You hold the controller just like a real guitar, and it's switchable for left handed players. The neck of the guitar has 5 buttons on it that you play with your left hand. In the center of the guitar is a "strum" button that you hit to play the notes. There's even a metal bar to wiggle, to cause the notes to "bend" to give an extra crowd boost.
If you're not a big hard rock / metal fan, there's only a few songs to choose from. You get Ziggy Stardust, Crossroads, Killer Queen, Sharp Dressed Man, More than a Feeling and a few more. Those who like harder rock will be quite thrilled, though. There's Iron Man, I Wanna Be Sedated, Symphony of Destruction, You've Got Another Thing Comin' and much more.
There are four difficulty levels. You start with easy of course, where it's great fun to play along with your favorite songs and just have fun. When you crank up to the higher levels moving through various venues and unlocking different characters and guitars the keys get VERY difficult. Still, it's a blast hammering away at the notes, waving your guitar around in the air and having fun.
The sound is quite good, and you get a real boost from hearing the crowd cheer and yell for you. The visuals are reasonable but really, this isn't a game about visuals. You just watch for the buttons to press, and press them. It's really about the music.
Now, I do have to mention some complaints. The first is the song list. I wish they'd offered more of a wide selection of song types. I suppose that new games will come out soon with more song options, which I'll look forward to.
Next is the key layout. I really love the strum bar. But the buttons up on the neck of the guitar are AWFUL. They have 5 wide buttons all in a straight line. The buttons have to be pressed straight in to work well. Human fingers simply don't work that way. They should have put the buttons at an angle both angled a bit diagonally the way a hand holds a guitar neck, and also angled up-down so that your fingers press into them at an angle. As it is now, the buttons tend to stick and jam. When you fail at a really complex song because the keys have stuck, it's very frustrating.
That being said, you can usually get through an hour or two before your fingers really start to kill you. If you play with a group of friends, passing the guitar around between songs, that means an afternoon can go by before all of you end up with finger pain. I suppose it's a built in way to ensure that you don't play video games all day long :)
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Finally, a PS2 game that deserves five stars. Guitar Hero is one of those high-concept games with such a great premise that many people will buy it without having seen a single screen capture. And the cincher is, it fully lives up to its promise.Pros:
Addictive gameplay. The customized guitar-shaped controller gives an added cute factor over other simulation games of this type.
Terrific graphics, backgrounds, and characters. Their in-game activities and details are very endearing.
Fortunately, they didn't forget the guitar-loving gals and included two female characters you can choose from. There's also a terrific Donnas song ("Take It Off") you can play along to, plus that perennial air-guitar classic, Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll". They could've gone even farther with the gender balance -imagine trying to play something by Sleater-Kinney, with those twisty Carrie Brownstein guitar lines -but at least they tried.
Good songs with diversity. I hadn't expected to see "Godzilla" on here -Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser is a grossly underrated guitarist, and playing this song might make you appreciate him much more. "Bark at the Moon" and "You Got Another Thing Comin'" are classic metal; "Texas Flood" and "Crossroads" represent the blues spectrum; "Higher Ground" supplies the funk; "Stellar" and "No One Knows" represent modern alternative rock. "Cowboys from Hell" is an apt tribute to the late, great Dimebag Darrell, and Megadeth's crushing "Symphony of Destruction" is my favourite song selection. The songs aren't their original versions (imagine the licensing fees), but they are great-sounding recreations of the recordings.
I had originally been skeptical about the SG guitar controller's ability to respond to lightning-fast notes, but it turns out to be quite sharp.
Rock-star dreams. Who wouldn't get a kick out of this?
Cons:
While there's a good diversity in the song choices, like Stevie Ray Vaughan ("Texas Flood"), Edgar Winter Group ("Frankenstein") and Queen ("Killer Queen"), at a certain point, it still ain't quite enough. Given the huge pantheon of rock/blues/jazz music out there, of course there'll be omissions, and licensing problems probably added to the limitations in song choices. No Led Zeppelin, no Nirvana or Pearl Jam, no Guns N' Roses, no AC/DC, no Allman Brothers Band, no Joe Satriani, no Van Halen, no Santana, no The Band, no Bruce Springsteen, no U2, no Neil Young and Crazy Horse, no Metallica, no Evanescence, no Aerosmith, no Living Colour, no Bon Jovi, no Dream Theater. And where are "Hotel California" and "Layla"? Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb"? Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover"?
While some of the unlockable bonus songs are fun to play -Freezepop's "Get Ready 2 Rokk" is just fabulously weird, and Artillery's "The Breaking Wheel" is challenging, twisty fun -some of them are trite, and some are downright annoying, included only because a certain member of the band is on the Harmonix design team. The Acro-Brats, The Slip, Made in Mexico, Count Zero and Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives are especially irritating -bad music, repetitive and overlong. And there's way too much skater punk-pop in general.
Having Gibson Guitars' endorsement means you get to play some genuine Gibson guitar designs. Hey, I play one myself and I love them. But not being able to use classic designs like the Stratocaster, the Ibanez R-type, the Telecaster, the Rickenbacker and the Jackson Rhoads is conspicuous, to say the least.
Remember to rest your hands...the SG controller has what we'd call a "baseball bat" neck, thicker than any electric guitar I can think of, and playing this thing can be even more tiring than playing a real guitar...this coming from a guy who plays acoustic 12-string.
There are already plenty of wishlists on the web for songs that haven't been included, and I can only hope there will be a Guitar Hero 2. Terrific fun.
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You may have seen it in arcades, an undersized plastic "guitar" with 5 colorful buttons on its bridge, but balked at the $2.00 it costs to play the thing. Well for only $70.00 you can now get the game for your PS2 and play it over and over and over again.And that's exactly what'll happen if you buy it.
One stipulation:
You better at least like rock music. And by Rock, I don't mean Sheryl Crowe, I mean Head-thrashing, Fingers-shredding, Bite-the-head-off-bats rock. Oh sure, there's the occasional genre buster, they've got a modest Queen piece, and Texas Flood, a slinging blues piece. But the meat of the playlist comes from bands with guitarists who have one-word nicknames. From punk to classic to metal to some of the bands on the radio today, the common denominator is that the songs rock.
Still, it's ridiculously addicting, like a Dance Dance Revolution for the hair-band crowd, and while there are a limited number of songs (around 30 once everything's unlocked), it's a testament to the quality of the game that even if there were 50 songs, you'd probably still want more. The difficulty is high enough that finishing the game on Expert level would leave you with enough skills to pick up an actual guitar and play some extremely easy tab. That's not to say it's a music-teaching tool, it's not by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly wouldn't hurt your eye-hand coordination or your rhythmic sensibility.
The hardware itself is a miniature SG-style sturdy piece of plastic. There's even a whammy bar which, while it's not integrated into gameplay, is available for all your pitch bending needs.
Given the right environment, it's the kind of game that you could lose sleep over the first few nights you got it. It's good for either a party-environment, or rocking out yourself in career mode. Two thumbs, two index fingers and two pinkies up!
Honest reviews on Guitar Hero (Bundle with Guitar)
I think I've hit one of the must-have games for any PS2 owner that enjoys rock music. You get a physical "guitar" controller with this game, and it's amazingly fun!You hold the controller just like a real guitar, and it's switchable for left handed players. The neck of the guitar has 5 buttons on it that you play with your left hand. In the center of the guitar is a "strum" button that you hit to play the notes. There's even a metal bar to wiggle, to cause the notes to "bend" to give an extra crowd boost.
If you're not a big hard rock / metal fan, there's only a few songs to choose from. You get Ziggy Stardust, Crossroads, Killer Queen, Sharp Dressed Man, More than a Feeling and a few more. Those who like harder rock will be quite thrilled, though. There's Iron Man, I Wanna Be Sedated, Symphony of Destruction, You've Got Another Thing Comin' and much more.
There are four difficulty levels. You start with easy of course, where it's great fun to play along with your favorite songs and just have fun. When you crank up to the higher levels moving through various venues and unlocking different characters and guitars the keys get VERY difficult. Still, it's a blast hammering away at the notes, waving your guitar around in the air and having fun.
The sound is quite good, and you get a real boost from hearing the crowd cheer and yell for you. The visuals are reasonable but really, this isn't a game about visuals. You just watch for the buttons to press, and press them. It's really about the music.
Now, I do have to mention some complaints. The first is the song list. I wish they'd offered more of a wide selection of song types. I suppose that new games will come out soon with more song options, which I'll look forward to.
Next is the key layout. I really love the strum bar. But the buttons up on the neck of the guitar are AWFUL. They have 5 wide buttons all in a straight line. The buttons have to be pressed straight in to work well. Human fingers simply don't work that way. They should have put the buttons at an angle both angled a bit diagonally the way a hand holds a guitar neck, and also angled up-down so that your fingers press into them at an angle. As it is now, the buttons tend to stick and jam. When you fail at a really complex song because the keys have stuck, it's very frustrating.
That being said, you can usually get through an hour or two before your fingers really start to kill you. If you play with a group of friends, passing the guitar around between songs, that means an afternoon can go by before all of you end up with finger pain. I suppose it's a built in way to ensure that you don't play video games all day long :)
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Guitar Hero is that rare product that gets a five star rating from nearly every person who uses it, and with good reason. It succeeds on every level. It's an incredibly audacious game. Everything in it, it seems, is turned up to eleven.What the game does is play cover songs that sound astoundingly close to the originals, with the guitar parts broken down note-by-note, so that each note only sounds when you press the indicated button on the fretboard while "picking" with a two-way rocker switch on the guitar controller. If you miss a note, that note doesn't sound (or you get a slight "error" type noise), and the results are pretty funny. With a real guitar you can fudge your way through a smokin' heavy metal solo by playing random distorted notes as fast as you can. Only other guitarists will know the difference. But here, it becomes painfully obvious to everyone around when you blow a note--the guitar silence is deafening, the audience shows its disapproval with boos, and the animated character hangs his or her head in shame. But when you nail it, you are rewarded with praise from the audience, "Star Power", and the character even smashes the guitar or sets it on fire in celebration. This game is pure entertainment. Even the fonts for your name are "fun", and just wait until you see what happens when you enter your name into the high scores!
Oh, and don't forget to look closely at the financial statements after each show. Just like real life, the artist who does all the work gets the smallest piece of the pie, while the "businessmen" get 90% of the artists' earnings. The only thing missing is the RIAA suing your grandmother, your children, or your dog, for music piracy.
There is a Quick Play mode, which allows you to jump right in and play any unlocked song at any difficulty level. The Career mode is where you unlock most of the 30 well-known songs, and earn the money you'll need to unlock songs, guitars, characters, skins, and even special feature videos on how the game was made. I went straight to the Medium difficulty mode and could unlock all the songs quickly without struggling through the Expert difficulty first.
The Expert mode is very difficult because you already have your four fingers on the "frets", and then they add a fifth fret, so you must move your pinky or shift your entire hand over one fret. It's not easy! The guitar controller looks like a cheesy toy, but it's actually a solid product. Be sure to plug it in to your first controller slot before booting up your PS2 though--it wasn't exactly plug-n-play for me when the game was already running and I plugged it into the second controller slot.
The only way Guitar Hero could be better is if you could use a real guitar with real strings. Some day in the future I'm sure we'll be able to use a MIDI guitar to do just that. Until then, Guitar Hero has got to be one of the most entertaining video games ever made. You can play these songs over and over again without losing interest. Trust me, when you're alone, you'll be writhing and grimacing musically like a rock star when you play this game. Pete Townsend windmills and the Chuck Berry "duckwalk" are all possible while playing the guitar controller.
Songs run the gamut from Classic Rock (Jimi Hendrix, Cream) to your favorite 90's bands (Pantera, The Donnas), along with several unknown new bands. I was originally concerned about playing songs I never heard before. But those are fun in their own unique way precisely because you don't know how the song goes. Even songs I hated before (Joan Jett--"I Love Rock 'N Roll") are fun to play. I'm so glad they also included some unique songs like Frankenstein and Godzilla, and especially a great blues tune by Stevie Ray Vaughn (Texas Flood). One of my favorites to play is Ziggy Stardust. Best of all, there's NO METALLICA (I can't stomach even hearing Metallica ever since Lars started whining about impoverished consumers "stealing" music from multi-millionaire rock stars). Despite the lack of Van Halen, I was more bummed that Rush wasn't found here. But good news--Guitar Hero II will feature both Rush and Van Halen!
I've been a frustrated guitarist for 20 years. This game allows me to max out what little skill I do have on the controller, while hearing guitar work out the speaker that I could only dream of producing myself. That makes Guitar Hero a genuine treat for me. I think that's why it is so addictive--it really does make you feel as if YOU were producing those incredible riffs and solos.
Bravo to the developer (Harmonix), and the musicians who created the covers (Wavegroup) for putting so much thought into Guitar Hero! RedOctane is just the publisher, and I think it's a shame they get all the credit when Harmonix and Wavegroup did all the work!
The only conceivable thing missing is brands of guitars other than Gibson. Yet it doesn't really matter since tone and fret action aren't even an issue with a plastic guitar controller. Hopefully somebody is working on a wireless guitar controller, which would allow you to do even more crazy stunts while playing.
I'll end this review by repeating what others have already said: This game is so good, it's worth buying a PS2 system just to play Guitar Hero.
