Guitar Hero - A Silverhaze Review

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Guitar Hero - A Silverhaze Review

Postby Silverhaze on Mon Sep 18, 2006 4:58 pm

On the recommendation of my younger brother I went and picked up the new Harmonix guitar based rhythm game. It set me back £50 which I was prepared to part with because his advice is usually sound.
It came in a huge box which I won’t show in this review and I hurried back from work on Friday afternoon to try out my new toy.
On taking the thing out of the box and attaching the shoulder strap I started to feel silly….Ok I’m wearing a miniature plastic guitar plugged into my PlayStation and I’m 29 years old…..what am I doing?!

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Ok we got passed that and had a proper look at the guitar peripheral device. It’s fairly well built but wouldn’t take much of a twist on the neck end to do some pretty nasty damage. It has 5 coloured buttons at the top of the neck and the body of the guitar has a ‘strummer’ and a whammy bar along with Start and Select buttons where the volume dials would be. It all feels very comfortable and the weight balance is nice allowing you to either sit or stand as you play. I’d like to try standing with the game but being quite close to the TV and looking down at it doesn’t feel right. Also I think I’d probably start breaking ornaments trying to rock out.

The ‘strummer’ is a clicky bar that moves up or down, it’s your choice which way you want to strum but I find just holding my thumb on it is enough for me. The buttons on the neck are large and sort of lose feeling, in a ‘kid’s toy’ sort of way but once you start playing you’re happy they are so easily pushed and the lose feeling doesn’t even come in to it.
Finally the last control is the whammy bar. This is only really used to score extra points on the long held notes and you really can get a good sound when using it. Sadly it only slackens the ‘strings’ and so only moves in towards the body of the guitar. Still it’s enough to show off and add a bit of customisation into the tunes.

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The difficulty of the game goes up in 4 stages. Easy, Medium, Difficult, Expert. After playing with the game for a weekend I have progressed from finding the Easy songs a bit tricky to being fairly competent at the Medium setting. I imagine it starts to get scary at Difficult.
Easy difficulty presents you with just 3 notes to use, medium adds another and difficult adds the 5th and final button. From there, I’m sure things just get much much worse!!

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The game works on the same concept as any other Harmonix rhythm game. Notes travel down the screen towards a target bar but the main difference here is that simply pressing the buttons on the neck of the guitar won’t cut it! Just like a real guitar you get your fingers ready on the correct note(s) and ‘strum’ it when it passes the target line. Quite tricky to pick up initially as you tend to try and keep rhythm with your left hand. Once past that though things begin to flow a bit more easily.

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Tutorial mode leaves you feeling half taught which is a shame. It sets you a task and even if you’re not doing it quite right it stops the tutorial telling you you’ve got it and moves onto the next thing. When dealing with the concept of ‘Hammer Ons’ and ‘Pull offs’ the tutorial is definitely lacking. I’m hoping to meet somebody with more experience at the game who can show me how to integrate them properly into the songs. It basically involves holding buttons down while others are pushed or holding all the buttons down and then releasing them one at a time. I understand the concept entirely but getting it into a track is another thing entirely!

So, tutorials over we move into the Career mode of the game. This is unusual for a rhythm game and is refreshing to see. You start out as an ordinary Joe starting as lead guitarist in a band. You play in various different venues that have all been painstakingly created in real 3D so that spectators get a great show as they watch. The virtual guitarists pull all the classic expressions as well as actually doing the correct fingering for each song as it’s played. The better you do the more into it the crowd get as you hear them cheering and clapping along.
Completing all the songs in any given arena grants you access to a new arena to play in and some new songs.
Once Easy mode is completed you turn Pro and unlock the Unlock Shop where you can use money earned from doing gigs to buy bonus tracks, guitar skins, characters and a few other goodies like ‘making of’ movies etc. A nice touch not always seen in this kind of game. You can even unlock Death as a playable character. Sod the bonus tracks, that’s what I’m saving up for!!!!!

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As with most rhythm games it’s not just about hitting the notes. Every now and then some of the notes appear highlighted and star shaped. Nailing every one of these notes in a combo adds precious juice to your ‘Rock meter’. Once above half way you can initiate ROCK MODE!!! This is where things really get funny as you have to yank the guitar up to a vertical position to start the mode. All the notes then turn the same glowing electric blue colour making deciding which note to play a bit harder if you haven’t got used to their positioning yet but each note you nail in rock mode is worth double the score. Your guitar plays louder on the track, the crowd scream, shout and clap along even louder and your virtual guitarist really starts going for it, playing behind his head, on his knees or spinning the guitar around his head etc. The mode continues until the rock meter drains and you have to start nailing those rock combos again to build it back up. Hitting the rock mode at just the right time in a track can really rack up those points.

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The tracks are all pretty much Air Guitar classics like Iron Man (Black Sabbeth), Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top) and Smoke on the water (Hendrix) but theres something like over 30 tracks in there so theres something for everyone and even those that say they hate ‘cock rock’ or ‘cheese rock’ or whatever they want to call it start rocking out when they finally nail that Iron Man combo!
Everybody ends up singing the main riffs from the tracks by the end of it.
Theres even a track from Harmonix residents Freeze Pop although its not nearly their best track from any of these games. That has to go to Science Genius from Frequency.

The graphics in the game are quite nice. Characters are all very styled and the animation is good. Some of the club scenes look almost believable when the camera is positioned behind your rocker and you can see the slightly blurred faces of the crowd rocking! It most definitely does the job and keeps spectators happy while waiting for their turn.
This leads me onto the only downside of the game I have found so far and that’s the length of the tracks. In most rhythm games they are not quite as long as their originals but not here. Oh no! You play the song from beginning to distant end, burning forearms or not. As you can imagine it can get a little tedious listening to ‘I love Rock & Roll’ for the 6th time as your 9 year old niece destroys it again.

The songs are not originals. They are all cover version but as far as covers go, these are great!!! I don’t have a trained ear but if you played me any of these songs I would not have guessed they were covers. The sound is really what makes this game and pumping up the volume a bit to drown out that annoying clicky strummer is a must. The danger here of course though is that playing it too loud might cause you to rock just a little bit harder than you intended and do yourself an injury!

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So overall I can highly recommend this game to anybody with a PS2 and a like for rhythm games. Even those that don’t like rhythm games should have a try if they get the opportunity as it’s a riot to play for everybody.
Loving this game and looking to buy another guitar for it. Sadly they come in at £30 a pop which is as much as a new game on its own and when Guitar Hero 2 comes out I’ll end up having 3 guitars unless they release it separately which would be sensible.
2 player mode is supposed to really come alive allowing 2 players to bounce solos off each other and really have a good laugh.

As far as rhythm games go, this one is close to 100%. Brilliant!!!

I just went and bought a second guitar so the missus and I can rock together!!! One and a quarter hours til I can go home!!!! :D
Last edited by Silverhaze on Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby adidas on Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:30 pm

dude, smoke on the water is by deep purple :)

Thanks for the review, I actually want to try this game but I don't think I can plunk down the money for it. It's a shame because there's really no way to try it out, unless you can get someone to lone you one of those 'guitars'

This looks hard:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hnLHYhV_Y2o
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Postby were on Mon Sep 18, 2006 8:23 pm

rock on dude 8)
Zep wrote:yes, i am drunk, but did I loot? NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
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Postby Silverhaze on Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:05 pm

Dude you're SO right!! I had purple haze in my head as I was writing that LOL :lol:
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