Guitar Hero 3

Played through easy to warm up on my rusty Guitar Hero abilities and quickly bumped it up to medium.

I don't quite understand the flak the game is getting from gamers on some sites I have seen. While I will never get that feeling of innovation I got from the first installment to the GH franchise I simply can't find too much to fault in the current incarnations game play. It is after all the same game with some minor additions and new songs.

The game has the standard career, co-op, and online modes as well as an area to purchase new song packs from Xbox Live. By the way anyone who has this game should download the two free packs provided. One is the songs for the boss battles which is one of the minor additions I was describing earlier, more on that to come, and the other is a Halo theme song remix which is pretty cool for a free download.

So Career mode is where I have spent most of my time so far and I have to say the minor additions do make the game more fun. Occasionally (3 times) through out the career of your band you come across a "boss battle" which plays out a little differently than the normal regiment of hit as many notes as possible. Instead of star power you get battle powers for hitting specific note combinations successfully. These powers are there for you to try and get the other player to fail the song and it can be a nice touch of strategy to a game that typically lacked any. Other than that its a pretty straight forward Guitar Hero game.

I have not yet tried multi player but later this week I will be trying out co-op with a buddy of mine and I may find some time to jump on Live to battle some people and see how I fair against them...I'm no Hendrix yet but I'm no slouch either.

One thing I have noticed on the 360 is that, at least on medium so far, when the camera is trying to focus on the guitarist and there's a lot of notes on screen the game seems to stutter a little bit, nothing that has affected my game play yet, but noticeable none the less. I have also heard rumors of guitar lag for the PS3, but as I don't have the game for this console these are just rumors as of yet.

More to come as info materializes from the ether.