Category Archives: Guitar Hero

Ow, My Arm

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My Guitar Hero 3 bundle and copy of Guitar Hero 2 finally arrived today. You know how sometimes people can pick something up and discover they’re a natural at it without any prior exposure or practice?

Well, that’s not me. :P Even the medium difficulty in GH3 is kicking my ass so far. In order to proceed past the second tier, you have to defeat Tom Morello in a ‘boss battle’, and I’m stuck on that right now. I also went and tried out GH2 for a bit and it’s medium difficulty is definitely a bit easier. My main problems right now seem to be with parts that wildly jump between the frets, where I just can’t keep up and get out of sync, and long sections of quickly repeated notes, where I just can’t get the right rhythm.

I left the careers at the second tier in both, but unlocked a few of the bonus songs out of curiosity, including the infamous Jordan. I actually did better on it (88%/4 stars) than I did on Trogdor (80%/3 stars), though again this is just on medium. My highest score so far (around 118k) is actually from one of these bonus songs, specifically the Freezepop one. And I actually managed to get the ‘perfect song’ achievement in GH3, though admittedly from when I was first fooling around at the Easy level…

As for the guitar itself, it works pretty well, with none of the problems some other people have had about the detachable neck being loose and the frets sometimes not working. The only quirk is that I pretty much have to hold it vertically straight up to trigger star power, though that might be intentional.

And, as the title implies, my arms are already sore. I have to get into the habit of holding the frets properly; by default, I put too much pressure when pushing on it and my hand cramps up fairly quickly. I also still have to adjust the straps to hold it properly while standing, as proper rocking out does not involve sitting. And there’s already a slight bruise on my right arm from where it lies against the edge of the base…

Edit: Oh, and you can even follow along on my stats page at the official site.

Rock You Later, Alligator

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After one more failed attempt to grab the GH3 bundle, I gave up and just placed an order online. It’ll take a bit longer since they’re still backordered, but at least now all I have to do is wait and it’ll eventually just show up.

I also tossed in a standalone copy of GH2, and the 360 version has some GH1 tracks available as DLC, for something like over 160 songs total. I’ll have a bit of catching up to do…

So Much For Real-Time Updates

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I thought I’d grab a copy of Guitar Hero 3 today, but it looks like it’ll be as hard to get as GH2 was when it first came out. I checked six places around the Sunridge area after work, but none of them had it in stock, instead reassuring me that they’d have more copies “in a week or two.”

It was particularly frustrating because the Future Shop site showed it as being in stock, so I placed an order for it for in-store pickup as soon as I got to work, and I was supposed to get an email within three hours telling me it’s ready to be picked up. Seven hours later I finally got a response, telling me that my order was cancelled because they were out of stock. Even though their site still said they had some. It’s supposedly updated every hour, so if it was correct, I could have popped down over lunch and picked one up instead. Ugh.

Oh well, I can wait. People are still playing the previous GH games a lot, so the multiplayer community isn’t going to disappear after a week like it does in so many other games. So, instead, I bought a few other things I’d been meaning to get: the PS2->PS3 memory card adapter, Ratchet & Clank Future, The Witcher, and Hellgate: London. After all that transferring, organization, and installation, I didn’t have much time left for actual playing, though.

The memory card reader worked well enough for my 8MB card, but wouldn’t recognize the 32MB card at all. Not too surprising since it’s an unofficial third-party card, and Sony’s only ever officially supported 8MB cards, but it’s still disappointing. I just had to fire up the old PS2 and copy saves from the 32MB card to the 8MB in passes, which was made more annoying by the lack of a card format function, so every save had to be individually deleted to free up more space after each pass. Oh well, it’s a one-time thing, at least. I also got to try the system backup function on the PS3 afterwards, which is something I wish my 360 had.

Hellgate: London is a bit of a risk since the initial reviews are a bit mixed. The gameplay is supposed to be solid, but it’s a bit buggy at the moment, and the choice to make some fundamental features exclusive to the paid subscription players is a bit controversial. Even without having actually played it yet, the installer’s already annoying me — it asked for the registration key twice in a row, on completely different types of screens, for some reason, and then wouldn’t run until a Vista hotfix was installed. Here’s hoping that the gameplay really is great…

I was surprised to find The Witcher at the store at all, since it’s a lesser known title that isn’t even showing up in a lot of online stores here. It’s also a bit controversial since the North American release has been censored a bit, removing some nudity on playing cards that you can collect. It wasn’t really worth importing just for that though. And I’m sure there’ll be a fan patch to ‘fix’ it before too long…