Guitar Hero 3 was finally released in the UK on Friday, so this weekend featured a not inconsiderable amount of rocking, at least until my hands cramped into twisted claws at which point they weren’t much use for anything except raking leaves up in the garden.

The wireless Les Paul controller is most splendid, the song list is generally pretty good, the stuff I didn’t know is mostly decent, even the cheesy 80s anthems are quite fun to play (now and again, when nobody’s looking). Disappointingly, a couple of the songs I was most looking forward to (Sabotage and Reptilia) only show up in the co-op career, so I had to use the “unlock all songs” cheat to get to them. I could also live without the boss battles, at least against the CPU; another human might convey the idea of duelling guitars better, the computerised Slash and Tom Morello are just implacable automata who hit every note precisely until you happen to “attack” them.

I also hooked up the Wii guitar to Frets On Fire on the PC (as per a previous post, plus a handy GlovePIE script I found on HonkeyKong). The bluetooth connection can be a bit temperamental, and something somewhere along the line randomly beeps on the PC speaker, but that hardly matters when the volume’s up to 11. With a little tweaking, that GlovePIE script could be used for inputs to other games too… Hmm; Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with strum up and down as the running buttons and one of the frets for jumping hurdles etc… In fact someone should write a new version, Daley Thompson’s Guitar Decathlon, with different coloured hurdles corresponding to the different frets, and your athletic avatar on screen playing crazy riffs as they sprint…