Bytica

Fargo and Crystal swung by tonight for some Beatles Rock Band action, which marked my first attempts at the game’s vocals. Crystal and I attempted a bunch of songs with the new harmony support, and ended up with top-10 scores all over the place, including a few 1st-places:

I’m definitely enjoying the vocal bits more than the guitar, which, honestly, I’ve found pretty boring. Why? That’ll be another post, coming shortly.

I’m not entirely sure what triggered it, but I have now “completed” Guitar Hero 5 on Expert Guitar, which means I’ve: seen a end cutscene; played through a final song as the credits roll; gotten the associated Achievements (200 / 1000 points total so far). I think it was completing all the songs in the next-to-last tier, which included Jeff Beck’s “Scatterbrain” and Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio” (which is a live version, but not a bad one).

But really, I feel like I’ve played about 1% of the game so far. I’ve only played 40/85 songs on one instrument, I haven’t played as part of a band or gone online, and I haven’t touched the studio or done much customization. Really, this is when the game STARTS for me: I’ll play through all the other songs, chase down 100%’s, and try to work my way into the career top 25 on the XBL leaderboards and ScoreHero.com.

And so no matter how much people whine about Activision milking the franchise dry — which they’re certainly doing — I can’t get upset over it. If there weren’t 5 other games coming out in the next few months, I could play GH5 from now until Christmas and still not feel like I’d “completed” the game. And so now I head off to play the rest of the setlist on guitar, after which I’ll make one more post with my initial stats and rankings before moving on to other instruments Thursday.

It’s a little easy to get sidetracked when you’re playing a Guitar Hero game and forget you also want to post impressions. That’s exactly what I did with GH5 today, letting three hours go by without realizing it. But I’m here now!

The traditional gameplay hasn’t really been touched much — it’s all the surrounding stuff that’s been tweaked. Everything’s been reorganized, although it’s debatable if it’s much more efficient: the reality is that there’s so much STUFF in Guitar Hero 5 that there might not be an easy way to organize it all — there are little goodies are hidden in various menus that you might or might not ever see, and you’ll just have to spend some time exploring if you want to see it all.  

As far as I can tell, there’s now just one career mode now, instead of four or five for different instruments plus a band. Like recent GH games, the career is organized so you can zip through it: once you acquire X amount of stars in the first tier, you open the next. The addition of bonus challenges and the ability to get up to 9 stars on every song means that you can blow through the career at record pace.

Which is what I’m doing now. I’ve played 25/85 songs so far, which may not sound like a lot, but the reality is that I probably only need to play 10-15 more songs to finish unlocking all the venues and complete the career, which would be less than half the setlist. This is OK by me: in recent years, the Career mode has become a starting point, a way to ease into the game quickly without having to slog through songs you don’t like or can’t beat.

So I’m off to complete the Expert Guitar Career, and then I need to do a little research on some features, particularly the GHWT song import as well as this GH Van Halen deal where you can “get the unreleased game for free” within 6 weeks of today. Between GH5, Rock Band Beatles, GH Van Halen, LEGO Rock Band (which will be importable into Rock Band 2) and Band Hero, it’s going to be an epic few months for rhythm games.

This morning, I finally started up Guitar Hero 5, and over the next two or three days, I’ll be chronicling my playthrough along with various impressions of the game. So far, I’ve only played two songs on Expert guitar – “Song 2″ by Blur and “In My Place” by Coldplay (100% on both, of course), but I’ve already noticed a few interesting things:

-          As is becoming the norm for rhythm games, the entire 85-song setlist is unlocked from the get-go in Quickplay, so you don’t have to slog through Career mode or find some weird cheat code if you just want to party with your friends.

-          The menu system has been overhauled, with mixed results. There are a LOT of menus to sort through, and while it’s certainly an improvement over Guitar Hero World Tour, it might not be obvious where certain things are located now. On the plus side, I was happy to see that Hyperspeed is no longer a “cheat” to be unlocked, but a standard option that can be toggled on and off at the song start screen.

-          In addition to the classic characters like Axel Steel and Pandora, and the ability to create your own rock star, there’s a new option to use your Xbox Live avatar as your rocker. Will it look out of place alongside the GH5 graphics? Maybe. But it’s cool that the option is there, as there will undoubtedly be players thrilled to see their XBL avatar rocking out.

-          Maybe the best new feature we’ve seen in rhythm games in a while are GH5’s Bonus Challenges. As usual, you can get 5 “stars” on a song for playing well, with a 6th star for getting 100%. In addition, you can earn three more stars by performing certain tasks. On “Song 2,” it’s a band challenge: get 500,000, 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 points. On “In My Place,” it’s a guitar challenge: Whammy notes for 30, 40 or 80 seconds total through the entire song (it’s got a lot of sustain notes). If balanced properly, these challenges will offer lots more replayability to songs instead of playing them once and forgetting about them.

So off I go to plow through the Expert guitar campaign. My prediction is that I’ll 100% about 20 of the 85 songs on my first pass; we’ll see how that goes. I’ll be posting every 15 songs or so with updates and more impressions, and maybe even a few videos if I can get some all-star band sessions together.