Tonight I finally got back to Guitar Hero 3 and plowed through the Easy career in one sitting, mainly to get it out of the way early on, raise some easy cash, and unlock all of the songs for quick play. In fact, I earned enough to unlock all of the bonus songs and buy Slash as a character, since it was easy enough to five-star every song for the full reward. Except one song, that is — Raining Blood, which I could only three-star. It’s infamous for being near-impossible on the Expert level, and I’m not liking what I see of it already.

In fact, the difficulty of the songs didn’t always seem to match up with what tier they were in. Some of the later ones might have had more notes, but still felt a lot easier for some reason. I can’t remember which ones offhand though; I whipped through it so quickly that all the songs kind of blur together…

After completing Easy, I went back to Medium and tried the Tom Morello boss battle again. (I’d also played it while doing Easy, but it was no problem there.) I could keep up with the song this time, but still failed multiple times because it wasn’t clear just what was supposed to happen at the end of the song when ‘sudden death’ was supposed to kick in. I’d finish my part, Tom would play for a while, I’d get the ‘drain’ graphic on my side of the screen, and then I’d fail a few seconds later, without even having the chance to do anything since I never got any notes on my side while all that happened.

The game finally took pity on me and gave me an option to bow out and skip this battle, but I figured I was pretty close and kept trying. I finally beat him by holding on to a couple of attacks and saving them until that last section where Tom plays by himself for a while, and by using them all in a row, he failed fairly quickly. The boss battles are still annoying and pointless though, since they don’t really wind up having much to do with playing ability at all.

After that I went on to five-star the encore song, Bulls On Parade, so I’m definitely feeling some improvement. I then also tried a few of the bonus and download songs like Putting Holes In Happiness and The Pretender, and beat them on Medium, but not very well. PHiH is full of a really awkward, rapid transition between green and red single notes and chords, and The Pretender has a lot of hand-shifting chord transitions that I’m still not good at yet, making it hard to keep a multiplier going.

Now to continue the rest of the Medium campaign…