A Fair Desire

Title: Guitar Hero 5 (Amazon)
Year: 2009
Platform: PS2

Guitar Hero 5 is the latest in the Guitar Hero brand, which now also includes Band Hero. My first experience with Guitar Hero was the World Tour version. Then I moved backwards through Legends of Rock and Guitar Hero 2. I found that the older games actually have a cooler "style" to them, while the feature sets have expanded in later games. Of course, World Tour was a reaction to Rock Band and added in the drums and microphone. I can only assume Band Hero was created to further emphasize the fact that you can play multiple instruments, like in Rock Band. It seems that Guitar Hero 5, though, moved closer to the "rock" roots of the game. Considerably more "heavy" songs are included in the playlist, while "poppy" songs were apparently shifted onto Band Hero.

Customization

The first thing I noticed about Guitar Hero 5 was the ridiculous amount of customization you can do for your "rocker". It almost felt like playing the Sims. Of course, this is all optional, but as I moved through the tedious work of making an avatar that somewhat resembled myself, I suddenly hit a spot of excitement: you can also customize your guitar. They even have specific brands and models. Although they did not have my exact Ibanez, they had a model that was close enough. You can even pick what kind of pickups and strings you use. Pointless, of course, but completely fun.

Gig Selection

Next, I noticed the gig selection has changed from the World Tour style (posters on a wall) back towards the older style, where there is simply a list of gigs, and then a list of songs at that location. For each stop on the tour, there are several songs available and typically two or so that can be unlocked. The focus of the career mode is not just getting high scores, but earning the "star ratings," which then get added into a total number of stars you have earned. It does not seem to matter what difficulty level is used, although I could be wrong on that. The more stars you earn, the more gigs and sounds you unlock, along with playable characters and accessories to dress up your avatar.

By the way, in the PS2 version of World Tour, the character animation when a song ended would sometimes loop back to their "playing" animations. Naturally, this does not affect game play, but for some reason it really annoyed me. Fortunately, that no longer occurs in this version.

Scoring

I also noticed that the calculation of the score has been simplified. In the World Tour version, you were given all kinds of information about how many phases you completed perfectly, your average multiplier, "hot starts," unused star power, and probably other items I am forgetting at the moment. Now, however, all you see is the percentage of notes you played correctly (you can see it broken down by section, if you want), your average multiplier, and how many star power sections you finished. That's it. However, like Who's Line is It Anyway?, the points don't matter. Only your star rating matters. Get five stars and you are good to go. It also occurred to me that it is quite difficult to finish a song with less than three stars, but I am sure it is possible if you try hard enough.

One nice feature is the star meter which shows your current star rating and how close you are to reaching the next star. This will come in handy, as I will explain below.

Loading Screens

First of all, this is the PS2 version, so this may not apply to everyone. However, the loading times for songs are almost unbearable. At least the guitars are wireless, so you can click through the menus while stretching your legs, then when the song finally loads you can sit down (or stand up) and play. But staring at the loading screen (which is the least interesting loading screen I have seen in this series) quickly becomes tiresome.

Unfortunately, the game seems to want you to have to stare at the loading screen. Once you complete a song, your only choice is to go back to the song selection screen. That is great if you want to play a different song, but if you want to retry the current song it is silly to go all the way back there (that takes time to load, too), select the song again, and then sit through the loading screen once again. My recommendation is to pause the song right before it ends. If your star rating is lower than you are comfortable with, restart the song from the pause menu (possibly selecting a new difficulty setting as well.) Since the song is already loaded, you will get back to playing much quicker.

Slider Notes

In the World Tour game, Guitar Hero introduced "slider notes" which have to be played on the touchpad portion of the guitar. Not only are these harder to play, it is difficult for me to tell which notes are normal and when they switch to being slider notes. I was truly hoping that Guitar Hero 5 would avoid including these, as they are extremely annoying. Sadly, all they have done is add more. On songs that feature these notes, it is better to use an older guitar without the touchpad, so you do not have to switch between the regular notes and slider notes.

Soundtrack

As mentioned above, the songs on this game are decidedly heavier than earlier versions. They also seem to focus more on recent songs (2007-2009) with only a spattering of songs from earlier decades. The selection of songs will likely be outside of most people's typical listening. For me, the inclusion of more punk and metal songs is cool, but also means faster tempos and more difficult rhythms. Being unfamiliar with a majority of the songs also increases the difficulty level.

Other Stuff

So far, I have only played this game on single-player career mode, so I cannot comment on how good the whole-band experience is. I also did not get whatever guitar comes with the game, as I already have the World Tour guitar and one of the Kramers, both of which work fine. As I am not particularly rich, those are the only instruments I have. So, again, I can really only comment on the experience as a single guitar player.

However, over all, I do like this game and feel it is generally an improvement over World Tour. I will have to write a bit more when I get around to the other features.