Harry and I picked up GH3 a few days ago.  The packaged guitar that comes with Rock Band has always kind of irritated us, the strum bar is too squashy and neither of us are smart enough monkeys to have wrapped our brains around using the small fret buttons for solos.  Whether this guitar is actually “worse” than any others is certainly open to debate, but maybe because we learned on the old PS2 and Xbox controllers we don’t like it much.   It also isn’t backwards compatible to  GH2 and we’ve been having a hankering for doing some duoing guitars or guitar/bass on that.

Long story short, the simplest solution to all of this was to go out and buy GH3.  We had contemplated just buying the guitar, but if you’re spending 70 for the guitar alone you might as well spend the extra few and get the game.

It’s not exactly news that GH3 doesn’t live up to the rest of the genre, so I’ll try not to beat a (now year or so old) dead horse too much.  Suffice it to say that the opinion of the general populace from when GH3 came out is a pretty accurate in my experience.  There’s nothing particularly WRONG with it, but they implemented a number of features that just get in the way of what you want to do, which, in my case, is namely rock out to goofy songs I know and love (or, in a lot of cases, songs I know and loathe, but then grow a sinking, private joy for because they are just SO DAMN FUN to play) and very little else.  A key example of the game getting in way of the game is the ‘boss battle’ that you have to pass to open up higher levels.  I find them to be gimmicky and well, pretty absurd.  I am a ROCK STAR.  I play GUITAR.  This is not Free Style Hero, I am not doing a DJ battle.  Nor am I dueling banjos.  It’s an awkward fit.   That said, it’s not a horrible mini-game, but it got in the way of me playing the game I want to play.

Last gripe is for whatever reason, I’m just not as good at internalizing the visual info of GH3.  I don’t know quite what it is, if it’s simply that it’s a busier display and it takes that one or to nanoseconds more for my brain to read the notes and communicate info to my hands, but I’m just not as good at it.  I miss stuff that I know I can play, patterns and rhythms that I know are totally do-able I just boff, and I do it over and over again.  It’s very odd, not to mention frustrating.  I started playing through the solo campaign on my own last night and ended up playing a couple of songs over a few times rather than progressing on because it just galled me that I only got 3 stars when I knew I was technically capable of acing the song.  I also find the other UI features harder to see and digest the meaning of at a quick glance.  This, certainly is partially just conditioning, my brain just doesn’t have a GH3 auto-pilot wired in to be able to glance around and digest the meaning of the things I’m seeing, but I also think they are (at least for me) less intuitive.

All that said, it’s still fun to play a new batch of songs, and it’s nice to see how far I’ve come from a skill perspective.  When I stopped playing GH2 I had kind of plateaued out, I could do the first couple of songs on Hard, but not much beyond that.  I was really struggling with getting the fifth button in to my repertoire, and adding that along side the increased difficulty level was just too much.   Since Rock Band’s difficulty curve is much more forgiving, playing that let me sneak in the fifth button and work that out, and then advance the difficulty once I’d got some technique.  So, now that I’ve bumped myself comfortably in to Rock Band Expert guitar, it more or less equates to GH2/3 high end of hard, low end of expert.

Back to the orriginal issue of the physical guitar controler, while it’s much, MUCH better than the Rock Band packaged guitar, I still prefer it less to the old GH2 guitar, I like the snappy buttons and the snappy strum bar.   The GH3 guitar’s strum bar is much better, as is it’s whammy bar in comparison to the Rock Band guitar.  I like it’s weight, and I of course love that it’s wireless, but in terms of tactile response I sill prefer the older one.  Harry, thank goodness prefers this one, so we no longer have to play the “no, I’LL be nicer” game with who’s using what controller.

It would be extremely remiss of me to not mention the one very nice thing about GH3, which is that you can play the campaign through in multi-player mode.  Granted, one person has to be lead guitar and the other person is forced to be bass or rhythm, but you can swap up who plays what easily, and you can also play through at different difficulty levels.  We’ve both been annoyed recently at how many games require you to play as a solo player in order to unlock multi-player content, and mercifully, although GH3 trips and falls in to any number of murky pits, it avoids this one.