Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits (Xbox 360)

ROCK ON!!

There’s only one question to answer. Is Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits a bridge too far?

When Guitar Hero: Rocks The 80’s was released a few years back, pretty much everyone had their suspicions over what was coming. It took a while, but as soon as Activision deviated from the tried and tested route of “improve game, release sequel” with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and a few hundred thousand of us drunk the Kool-Aid, the path had been laid.

And so we have Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, a compilation of all the “best” tracks from the first three Guitar Hero titles (and the aforementioned Rocks The 80’s set)  - laid out so that groups of players can play them in the band format from Guitar Hero: World Tour. What’s that? It would have been a grand idea to release these songs as downloadable content for that game, and forgo the whole new game release thing? I quite agree.

While we’re talking about downloadable tracks, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits doesn’t have ANY – other than via GHTunes. When I say that, I mean that the songs you’ve already purchased for World Tour are NOT compatible with the game. You can leech all of the player-made (and therefore pretty dire) GHTunes tracks as you want, but that’s your lot. Oh, and you can’t export the tracks from Greatest Hits to be able to play them in World Tour, either. So, that setlist of Beat It, Killing in the Name Of and Through the Fire and the Flames will have to wait for a title that’s probably already just been added to Activision’s whiteboard for 2010.

In short, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is a standalone title. You load it up, you make a band, and you play the songs until you’re done. The career mode is far more balanced than the one featured in Guitar Hero: Metallica, and is all the better and more challenging for it. Whilst you still have to obtain a certain amount of stars on each level, you no longer will be able to unlock the entire game just by blasting through four or five songs. This is a bonus, and whilst it may sound like I’m wailing on the game, there are times when it feels like you’re playing the greatest game in the world. Those times generally occur whilst you’re drumming through Freebird, hitting the bass once again on Killing in the Name Of or doing your damndest to belt out the vocals to Round and Round. The songs make the title here, and that is the entire point of it all. Activision didn’t release this so that folks would buy it because of some massive new addition or game mode, oh no. They released this so that when the rose-tinted spectacles came out and everyone remembered exactly how much fun they had playing the first few games of the series, they’d put their hand in their pocket once again to try and replicate it with the full band set-up. The addition of the “Expert+” drum mode to selected tracks – by no means all of them – will pull a few lone drummers in, too.

However, that doesn’t mean that a full-price release was warranted. If you’ve been all over the series since the first PS2 release, and bought new guitars and equipment for each new version, you’re probably out £500. It would have been nice for Activision to realise this and to actually REWARD the fanbase, rather than raising two fingers to them whilst chanting “If you want it, you’ll have to PAY for it, bitches!” To an extent, that would be fine, but as with all of these games, each player will only generally be a fan of – or want to play – thirty to forty percent of the on-disc tracks, with the rest being regarded as filler content. The same goes, here. Sure, it’s awesome to be able to try my hand at Freebird without having to boot Guitar Hero II, but since I’m not a fan of Anthrax persay, their track doesn’t attract me in the least.

When all is said and done, new players will get a kick out of playing tracks that are new to them and old players will get a kick out of playing tracks that are familiar to them. It would be advisable that they don’t view the game as anything more than relatively overpriced downloadable content is all, since as a retail release, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits is only worth half of the asking price at a push

Guitar Hero Smash Hits – Rock On!

When the original Guitar Hero hit the PS2, it was clear that the music genre that we’d known for a while, dominated by the likes of Dance Dance Revolution, would be changed forever. Guitar Hero II was met with even more enthusiasm as people who’d played the first for hundreds of hours wanted more, and it indeed delivered.

And then Guitar Hero Encore: Rock the ’80s was released. And then Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. And then Guitar Hero Aerosmith. And then Guitar Hero: World Tour. And then Guitar Hero: Metallica. And now we have Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, to be followed up later this year with Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero V and Band Hero. Oh, and then there’s the offshoot DJ Hero.

And let’s not forget about Rock Band. And Rock Band 2. And the forthcoming The Beatles: Rock Band. Or the three Guitar Hero DS games. Oh, and Rock Band Unplugged on the PSP.

I think you get my point. By my count, I’ve listed nearly 20 titles right there, and it looks like we’re only just getting started. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably played at least a couple of these games, and they’re probably starting to grow a little stale.

So that brings us to the version, I’ll say, at hand, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. The game is a compilation of some of the best tracks from Guitar Hero 1, 2, 3, Rock the ’80s and Aerosmith. The song list is great, to be sure, though there are certainly some we would drop in favor of others (where’s Clapton, for instance?). But on the whole, it’s a great setlist.

Check out the HD trailer here

But, we’ve played all of these songs before. It’s possible that you’re relatively new to the franchise and in that case this will all be new to you. But whatever the case may be, it doesn’t change the fact that this is simply a rehash of existing songs with the only “new” thing being the ability to play them as a full band. While that’s cool and all, this really should have been DLC or even multiple track packs.

Virtual Band

Yep, we’ve seen this before.

The game’s main feature set is largely the same as Guitar Hero World Tour, with a couple of the additions seen in Guitar Hero: Metallica tossed in, such as the Expert+ setting for drummers on select songs (roughly about half of them it seems). It forgoes the gig-based structure of World Tour and instead goes by the setlist-based setup of GH: Metallica, where you unlock the next handful of songs (and their corresponding venue) by accruing a certain number of stars. While the requirements in GH: Metallica were pretty low (I “beat” the game with only 40% complete), you’ll need much more to move on here, which I’m happy to see as it means you have to work harder to progress. But the result is the same where you can skip songs that you’re not good at (or don’t like) and still make it through the game, which is nice.

While the setlist is indeed great as a whole (featuring nearly 50 songs, all of which are master tracks, though two of them are live versions), there are three main problems that I have with the songs. Firstly, the note structure has changed on seemingly every track. If you’ve memorized these songs in other games, you’ll find that you have to play them differently here, and many times it’s not for the better. Note progressions sometimes don’t make sense when compared to how you’d play it on guitar, and things just generally feel “off” if you’ve played them before.

All in all, I recommend playing it if you are even a slight fan of guitar, rock or gaming general. I play the guitar and i can’t wait to compare to this.

Buy it