DarrenKitchen.net

Infected with PS2.Guitar.Hero.Worm

Writing about games isn’t really my strong point, so if I get some things wrong you’ll just have to flame me in the comments, but recently I’ve been infected with the PS2 game “Guitar Hero”. I blame Jenn Cutter. She came down a couple months ago to hang with the Hak5 crew where she infected the Wess and Paul units. After putting this game off for so long, resisting every button mashing urge, I’ve finally fallen for it’s rhythmic pixely goodness. Seduced by the star power and dreams of becoming nearly as leet as Bill & Ted, I secretly played in free mode while the cast were at work. Until recently.

Paul and I were at the store picking up video patch cables for “72″ (more on that in a later post) and there was a Guitar Hero 2 kiosk setup. Being the weak minded technowenie that I am I picked up the guitar and rocked out in the store in front of Paul. The ball had been dropped, my secret addiction was out in the open.

So today I picked up my own guitar. Not one of those uber-leet wireless units. No, I’d totally love to throw down some wicked micro on one of those bad boys, but that’ll have to wait until Red Octane decides to stop being puds to 3rd party vendors. Yes, they’re puds.

With everything out in the open and a brand new stickerfied (trust your technolust anyone?) guitar I’ve been free to rock out to my hearts content. So here are my thoughts so far.

Aside from the RSI factor I have nothing severly negative to say about this game. It’s so intuitive even a dyslexic monkey could play it, even without the opposable thumb. When I first picked it up I jumped right into medium and, though I never scored higher than 70% at first, it wasn’t discouraging. Quite the opposite in fact, I’ve been bitten by the bug, and I’m not what you would consider a music game junkie.

There is one problem however, and this is all me. I absolutely suck at enabling star power. You’re supposed to lift the guitar neck up in a radical rock out motion that Matt Harris would be proud of, but my micro is far from spectacular in that department. I end up trying multiple times missing half the notes or even worse getting misaligned and absolutely borking my solo.

So for a while I’ve been ignoring the star power completely, just enjoying the game as a toy and having fun regardless of score. But like many games it’s one of negative reinforcement. Unless I’m getting 5 gold stars, a perfect score which I’ve yet to obtain, it’s always how much I could have rocked. And the star power meter and multiplier meeters at the bottom of the screen don’t help much either. They’re even there in practice mode taunting me as if a score even meant something there. So those blue sparkles that once brought so much joy in Double Dash that are the bane of my rockstar existance.

I guess with enough practive I’ll get it eventually. Until then, this post is reminding me of my absolute favorite song in the game, which I think I’ll play again right now. Less Talk More Rokk!!