--- Guitar Hero ---

What can we say about Guitar Hero?  We like it.  :-)

It's another rhythm game, like Band Bros, that gives you the feel of actually playing a song rather than just tapping along with it.  It has a more ambitious soundtrack than Band Bros, with 'real' songs rather than just electronic sounds mimicking real instruments.  The downside is that you're not really playing, even though it feels like it.  For example, if you play the wrong note in Guitar Hero, the game won't play the wrong note, it just plays the 'bad' sound.  Still, it's a lot of fun.

It comes with a toy guitar that might embarrass you at first.  But soon you'll be rocking out as if you really are in some crappy basement band (where the game really does start you).  And someday you might actually feel as if you deserve the cheers in the 20,000 seat arena where you've earned the right to play.

I've heard some people say Guitar Hero is 'just like playing a real guitar'.  Well, that's BS, it isn't.  It's more like 'Guitar for Dummies'.  It's similar, and that's the point.  But you can get good at Guitar Hero in a matter of days, blasting your way through difficult solos and winning virtual acclaim.  Learning a real guitar, you might possibly be able to play 'Cumbaya' while staring at your chord hand in the same timeframe.

The Guitar Hero guitar doesn't have strings, it has big Fisher-Price buttons and a 'strum bar'.  To make you feel cool, it also has a Whammy Bar so you can distort your long notes.  Yeah, baby!  It's meant to be held like a real guitar (the way Bruce does it), but you can also play Leon's way, piano-style (or Jeff Healy-style, man).  Like so:

Those 5 buttons are meant to represent strings.  You just press the appropriate one(s) for each chord, and strum the little bar with your other hand.  It's a simple interface that's easy to follow.  Like this:

    click here for an example video

And that's where 'Star Power' comes in.  Star Power is what saves your ass, because you can't even play the toy button version of "Bark at the Moon" or "Cowboys From Hell" without sounding like you just picked up a guitar last week.  Star Power lets you convince the game crowd that you're playing it right if you can just manage to hit a few notes here and there.  You earn Star Power by hitting key notes (shaped like stars), hopefully on the easy parts of the song.  The only downside to Star Power is that it turns all the notes blue.

So, you wanna see some incredible Guitar Hero videos?  Well...here's the best we can do: Expert Level videos of some of the hardest songs.

Bark at the Moon

Crossroads (no star power)

Godzilla (no star power)

Frankenstein (no star power)

Cheat on the Church (no star power)

Ready 2 Rokk (no star power)

Cowboys From Hell (no star power)

                                        We earned this, but it wasn't pretty...