Guitar Hero VS Rock Band

Playing guitar hero on stage at the free record shop was kind of weird. The TV had been positioned so you couldn’t see the crowd, so it wasn’t like you were actually playing for a crowd. My first thought to that was: “Then why put up a stage at all?” Both me and Vincent lost our consecutive rounds, but what really mattered was the playing. Game play hasn’t changed much, and unfortunately they didn’t use the new face off mode, not even pro face off from Guitar Hero 2, but just regular face off with you and your opponent taking turns in playing notes. My opinion of this game play mode is the same as when I played it on guitar hero one. While it’s not complete garbage, it still isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

The new versus mode in Guitar Hero 3 was completely hyped, you could throw stuff at your opponent, increase his notes, make his note chart go really fast, and so on. So why they insisted on this I’ll never know. A wasted opportunity in my opinion. Like I said earlier basic game play hasn’t changed. You still have a plastic guitar in your hands on which you press buttons at the appropriate time. If you’ve played earlier games, you get what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, it’s a must buy for rhythm game enthusiasts and other would-be rockers. A discernable difference is the graphics upgrade the game has gotten. The venues look good, the characters look good, and the thing you’ll be staring at most of the game, the notes coming up, look good too. I dislike the new rock meter, but hey, tastes differ. I especially like the way it counts not just the notes you’ve played consecutively without missing one with the multiplier, but also, in numbers underneath the multiplier. So you’ll know when you hit a hundred, just in time to either miserably fail the next note in your excitement, or be bolstered by your success and keep on rocking. Guitar Hero 3 is pretty much what you’d expect from a sequel, little to no tweaks to the normal game play, and a fantastic new set list featuring Metallica and Alice Cooper among many other legends of rock.

Rock Band is in some ways comparable to, and in other ways completely different than Guitar Hero. For one, which is the most important difference, it’s a four player game. The game is at it’s best when actually played with four players, each rocking a different aspect. Playing it with four players was fun, we had a stand in from the EA people function as our microphone guy, since none of us could sing.

The notes coming up look different then on Guitar Hero, more, rectangular. The guitars also have a bit of a different feel to them. I don’t dislike them, they just feel different. For the rest, the guitars play about the same as on guitar hero. A colour comes up, you press down the corresponding colour and strum with the strum bar.

The singing seems to work a bit like singstar, although I can’t comment on that with certainty. The drums on the other hand is, different. Very different. I don’t just mean the other of the colours that they changed, it now goes, from left to right, red, yellow, blue, and green. The orange, activated by stepping on the pedal, is an orange line running through the screen. Not just this, but the fact you have to tap on the drums with actual drum sticks, make it so you have to get used to it. If you watch the video, you’ll notice we failed pretty early in the song, which resulted in me and Vincent switching places. The EA people forced us to play at easy after that, we think it’s to make sure they didn’t lose face. Vincent especially was pretty pissed at that claiming he could have, “Easily made hard”. I found it to be very enjoyable, if actually played with four people. Else it seems a bit of a waste to have all those instruments.

Rock Band is a game which is meant to be played with four people, possibly three, but two might even be stretching it. Playing with people online might be a substitute, but I think the rush which you get whilst playing with your friends is the kind of feeling this game is supposed to evoke.

To see the full extent of our ‘testing’ you should take a look at the movie that was made of it. As soon as our movie editing department is done with it, you should see it appearing on the site.

In short, while both games have their ups and downs, Guitar Hero is for when you want to rock out by yourself, but Rock Band is for when you have enough friends who’ll pay and play with you.

Join us tomorrow for our report on the Big Three, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, and see how they fared at Gameplay 2007! For now, you can enjoy the comic!

Dren Sokić
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