Okay, so I just want to get something out of the way right now. However silly you look playing a normal Wii game, it is necessary to multiply that by a factor of at least twenty when playing Guitar Hero. I don’t care what sorts of decals you have on your controller, or how awesome your stereo is, or whether you are wearing your tightest leather pants at the time. Every one of us looks like a sugar-rushed three year old plunking away on a Fisher Price noisemaker, and that’s before we get excited about the game and start gyrating along with the song itself.

With that out of the way, Guitar Hero III is quite outstanding. And while I wish more bands would give up their master tracks to be included in the game (I’m looking at you, KISS), the ones that are present are exceptional – I will admit that I performed all of the afore-mentioned visual atrocities while playing the actual version of Paint It Black. I haven’t yet unlocked The Devil Went Down To Georgia (hey, a guy has a raid schedule to maintain), but I am looking foward to losing a vast number of hours to that one song alone. The one complaint I really do have about it is that it works better as Guitar Hero than Guitar Hero III. If taken compared to its predecessors, it doesn’t offer a terrible lot of “new” aside from online play. But the quality of what it does offer is first rate.

I’m also happy to report no Wii-related problems (at least with the offline version of the game, I haven’t gone online yet). The Wiimote fits nicely into the guitar, though I suggest socketing it in before you start the game up. I had the guitar face-down on the floor to install the Wiimote and it threw off the calibration of the whammy bar until I reset the game. You can also leave your Wiimote socketed inside the guitar between sessions, as the buttons themselves work fine from inside the housing and the thumb pad on the guitar face allows you to move the Wii menu pointer when you first start up the system. I’ll admit I was a bit worried that the Wii version would be a rush job and a short shaft, but so far it’s played just like I’d expect any version of Guitar Hero to play.

So what is it about a game like Guitar Hero that makes it so compelling? I’ve been asking myself that question for three titles and several expansion packs now, and I’m still not sure I have an answer that fully satisfies. Obviously, the hardware is part of it. The game just wouldn’t be quite as much fun if you were holding down frets with your right thumb and strumming with a trigger. Why we allow ourselves to feel like rock stars while doing something so very uncool is a bit of a mystery. And again, make no mistake about it. Clicking away on a plastic toy while watching notes little circles move across a guitar neck is about as far away from being a rock star as one can get. Yet it really grabs people.

Maybe it’s the immediacy of music. And it’s probably somewhat a matter of favoritism (we all perform better on the songs we know by heart already). I originally expected Guitar Hero to be a sideshow affair for the musically deficient, but that’s not the case. In fact, most of the people I know that play Guitar Hero the the most are actual musicians that can make actual music with actual instruments, and have no need for placebo style interfaces like Guitar Hero. Yet they seem to take even more pleasure from the game than I do.

And it’s not like Guitar Hero is the only concept based game out on the market. It uses the same principles as the Donkey Konga games, or even a variety of smaller games such as Boom Boom Rocket on X-Box Arcade. And yet none of them have really caught on in the same way that Guitar Hero has. So why does a simple timing and rhythm game that makes you look like a tool while you play it latch on to people so completely? Is it really just that we’re craving a different experience, and this happens to be one of those rare examples of difference and great intersecting? Or is Guitar Hero just Dance Dance Revolution for lazy motherfuckers?

Personally, I think it speaks to the fact that so many gamers are getting burned out on the same game over and over again. There is a vast amount of recycled content out there, to say nothing of recycled design. It should be no surprise that upstart companies and, in some cases, homebrew projects are garnering so much attention. Way back in the day, Counter-Strike was nothing more than a modification for Half-Life, as was its WWII brother Day of Defeat. These were simple, defined, rule-oriented games built with someone else’s tools, and yet Half-Life hardly even needs a multi-player component because of their popularity. And even as I type, there are probably hundreds of new player-made Portal levels in the works (and I’ll be joining those ranks once the SDK has proper Portal support – I’m just too much of a lazy motherfucker to rig it to work right now on my own).

Even Nintendo is getting in on the act, including a level editor for Smash Brothers Brawl. Players will be able to design their own level concepts, trade them with friends, and submit them to Nintendo, which will publish the best of those submissions as downloadable freebies. Now, a cynic might say that Nintendo is just cashing in on the hard work of the gaming community. But when the community is so eager to produce its own content, why should they be denied the tools to do so? And using the CS and DoD models, it can potentially open the door for designers and artists who have the creative capacity to make great games, but simply lack the toolset or the engine or, in some cases, the coding staff.

Now sure, there are limits to what a mod team can accomplish. Some of those are imposed by the engine they use, and others are imposed by reality – after all Guitar Hero wouldn’t exist without the controller, and you can’t exactly fabricate that out of thin air via a download. But if these cheap-as-free mods cause the gaming industry to realize that gamers are interested in variation and novelty (so long as that novelty has playable value attached to it), then really that’s good for everyone.

After all, gaming executives don’t always know what is good for them or their product. The president of Epic Games had originally wanted to kill the Mad World trailer for Gears of War. Now, I have a unique experience with this very odd game trailer which features no sound effects and no overabundance of heavy guitar, but rather a short clip of Marcus running through a ruined cityscape. Specifically, the first time I saw it, I was in a bar. It was playing on a television monitor with the sound turned all the way down, and there were no subtitles. So all I saw was the video. Over and over and over again. I must have seen that commercial about twenty times before I left. And the one unique feature of the commercial was lost on me, since there was no audio to be had.

And a few days later, when I heard everyone talking about the ad spot, I didn’t understand why it was any good. Because in my mind, I imagined the typical “thrashing guitar” soundtrack generally associated with action games (think Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but with less tact). So it was a genuine surprise when I finally YouTubed the thing and watched it play out to a very soft, sad soundtrack as opposed to the thundering thrash of metal and bass. The commercial is brilliant, and highlights the fact that you can convey emotion with something as culturally dismissable as a video game.

But the spot almost got nixed. And why? Because the song was from Donnie Darko, and it wasn’t a new movie. So even though the match of the video and the audio was clever and almost touching, the song was from a soundtrack that was a whole five years old. And since gamers only have an attention span of seventeen seconds, none of us would understand the commercial. It wasn’t even an issue of relevancy so much as of cross-branding. What was on the screen wasn’t even assumed to exist in its own context, nor was it assumed that gamers could appreciate what was being shown to them. No, everything marketed to our subculture has to have the desperate rebellion of a G4 television spot or else it will be too highbrow for us to understand.

What far too much of the gaming industry doesn’t understand is that, yes, we are all dorks standing in our living rooms playing other people’s songs on a fake guitar. But we’re also the vehicle for the medium that they are producing in. It’s the geek subculture (at least as much as the porn subculture) that has pushed the internet forward. And yes, we’re the idiots posting things like l2pkthxbye in response to otherwise grammatically correct communication. But we’re also the people who create and explore in this medium. We’re the poets and the bards of the gaming niche. Most of us turned to gaming because traditional entertainment either underwhelms or underestimates us. And when games begin to do the same thing, we will either find yet another alternative or we will once again create our own.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.