Killed in a Smiling Accident.

After a vigorous evening of highly scientific testing with Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 2 I’m ready to present my paper Upon The Differences Between The Second Full-Band Plastic Instrument Based Entertainment Software Released By Harmonix And Neversoft, and my neighbours are ready to call the local council regarding a noise abatement order.

Guitar & Bass
There isn’t much difference between the two games for guitar and bass gameplay; hit the five coloured buttons and strum, collect “star power”/”overdrive” in certain sections with a whammy on held notes for a bonus, tilt guitar to activate. I slightly prefer the circular “gems” on the note track of Guitar Hero vs the rectangular blocks in Rock Band, but I suspect that might just be a case of being more used to the Guitar Hero games; the other visual thing on the note track is that Rock Band adds some swirly background colours when in overdrive that I found slightly distracting, though not to the point of missing notes particularly.

Each game has a slight nuance; I quite like the Rock Band solo sections that offer bonus points depending on the percentage of notes hit, and in Guitar Hero hammer-on chords and open notes on the bass work quite nicely, but overall it doesn’t make a massive difference. I declare… A DRAW!

Drums
Though mostly playing guitar and bass, I do like to flail around like a madman now and again. And also play the drums, ah! There’s a more obvious difference between the two games here, Guitar Hero 5 continuing the World Tour setup of three drums pads (red, blue, green) and two cymbals (yellow and orange) compared to the four drum pads of Rock Band that represent different drums and cymbal as needed.

Playing Rock Band with the Guitar Hero drums I haven’t had any major issues, as most songs so far have been based around red being snare and yellow being hi-hat, which maps naturally to the GH drums. It does feel slightly odd sometimes with the blue pad often doubling as a cymbal (the orange cymbal of the GH kit can be used in addition to the blue pad, but I’m usually having enough trouble remembering to hit that pedal thing at the right time to worry about anything else), and a couple of songs seem to go a bit crazy and mix the drum mapping up even more, but I’ve generally been doing fairly well on the same Hard level I’ve been playing in Guitar Hero 5. I’d turn to a rather better drummer for a more considered view, though.

Aside from the pad layout the basic gameplay is again pretty similar (“HIT PAD WITH STICK FOR POINTS!”), though there’s a difference in star power/overdrive activation: in Guitar Hero at any point you can hit the yellow and orange cymbals at the same time to activate star power, in Rock Band the game leaves you a space for a drum fill, following which you can hit the green pad to activate overdrive. In theory the GH method sounds better, giving the player full control of when they want to bring star power in for either a score boost or to help out for a trick section, but in practise I’ve found I’m usually a bit busy actually hitting the proper notes to take time out and kick star power in; if I try and go for it, I almost always end up missing a few notes, resetting the score multiplier and slightly defeating the object.

With the overdrive activation counterbalancing the occasionally odd pad layout, I declare… A DRAW!

Vocals
I try not to inflict what could very loosely be termed my “singing” upon the world in general, but I have caterwauled along to a few songs in both games. Once again with the broadly similar gameplay, words appear on screen and you attempt to vibrate your vocals chords in such a manner as to produce a sound wave of a frequency in keeping with what the game’s expecting.

I could make a half-decent stab at quite a few World Tour tracks, but Guitar Hero 5 is either less forgiving or I’ve got worse (or the songs are harder), as even on Easy mode I’m not putting in very good performances; in Rock Band 2 on the other hand I’ve hit 100% in a couple of songs (though perhaps its Easy mode is closer to Guitar Hero’s Beginner). Rock Band 2 also has percussive sections, where the singer hits the microphone in time to the music a la tambourine or cowbell, which is quite welcome, especially in songs with lengthy instrumental sections; in Stranglehold on Guitar Hero World Tour you could sing a couple of verses then wander off, whip up a light salad, clear excessive leaves from the guttering and construct a rudimentary pot from clay while Ted Nugent noodled around on guitar. Guitar Hero sometimes counters the boredom with “freestyle” sections, where, as the name suggests, you can freestyle (hiphopopotamus style) and apparently gain points for fitting in with the general pitch and rhythm of the song, but I’m not entirely sure much of the rock oeuvre lends itself to going “shooby dooby bop bop do ba ba” at random intervals.

This would’ve been a victory for Rock Band 2, then, but it blows it with the overdrive activation. In Guitar Hero 5 you can activate star power by tapping the mic, or more usefully pressing the A button on the Wiimote at any time. In Rock Band 2, you have to wait for an appropriate moment (when you’re not supposed to be singing), and… shout. Or go “woo!” or something. I’m quite self conscious enough about singing at the best of times without needing to draw extra attention to the whole business. At least the rock-tastic nature of most of the songs means it isn’t quite as daft as in The Beatles: Rock Band (“here comes the sun, do do do do, here comes the sun, and I said… right let’s activate Beatlemania YO LONDON ARE YOU READY FOR THE SUN LET ME HEAR YOU WOO!”), but it’s also not terribly precise. I’ve taken to coughing to activate overdrive (*ahem*, sorry, don’t mind me, just overdriving here), but being able to push a button at any time is a much better idea, leading to vocals being… A DRAW!

Musical Selection
Very personal, this one, you’d need to decide for yourself. There’s some cracking songs in both games, and as per usual they’re introducing me to some interesting new stuff, none of which I’ve (really) hated. Yet. After careful consideration, I’d have to declare… A DRAW!

Downloadable Content
While not strictly speaking DLC, Rock Band allows users to export most of the songs from Rock Band 1 to play in Rock Band 2… on the 360 and PS3. Not for the Wii, unfortunately, partly no doubt because Rock Band 2 came out before the Wii had SDHC support, limiting it to 2Gb cards. Guitar Hero 5 does support SDHC, and you can download some of the World Tour and Greatest Hits content if you have those games (only around half the set list in each case, though), which just claws back enough points to stop it being utterly obliterated in this category.

In terms of actual DLC, Rock Band already had a massive head start of a back catalogue when Guitar Hero World Tour was released, and though Neversoft have been churning out three songs most weeks for Guitar Hero World Tour and now 5 the gap keeps opening with Harmonix regularly adding 10 or more Rock Band tracks, it’s really no content (especially as the crown jewels, in my opinion, of World Tour DLC, the Hendrix tracks, are the only ones that can’t be used in GH5).

The only potential fly in the ointment was for us poor old UK Wii users; the music store wasn’t available at release (fair enough, it took a couple of weeks for the Guitar Hero 5 store to be available), and we had the promise of “over 250 songs available on disc and for download by early 2010″. My suspicion was that there’d be a gradual trickle of songs over the next couple of months, but in fact the music store turned up last Tuesday with a veritable Texas Flood of hot rocking action, 170-odd songs to choose from. While that’s only around a quarter of the total library, it’s a damn good start made damnably gooder by the fact that one of those songs is Still Alive by GLaDOS and Jonathan Coulton, and damnationally goodest of all, it’s free! Naturally this renders Rock Band 2 an instant triumph and furthermore great success, so I declare the winner to be ROCK BAND 2!

Career
Finally, the career modes. I touched on these a bit previously, very generally Guitar Hero 5 being a more linear progression through difficulty with achievement-centric challenges for each song, and Rock Band 2 being a sort of RPG-ish development of your band travelling around the world earning money and fans. Both games allow you to branch out from the on-disc songs, which is very welcome, Guitar Hero has an open challenge or two in every venue for which you can pick any song, including DLC and imported songs, and Rock Band 2 venues have a variety of gigs options including choosing your own setlist.

As well as picking your own songs Rock Band 2 offers various mystery setlists, which have all the usual advantages and drawbacks of randomness. On the plus side, if the 100-odd songs on offer lead to paralysis of indecision when it comes to deciding what to actually play, you can let the console decide for you. On the downside, the console is deciding for you, and might like to have a laugh and finish off every sodding set with SODDING RATT.

Overall, I really couldn’t pick between Rock Band 2’s money and fan accumulation and Guitar Hero’s challenges, I suspect they’ll both keep me coming back for as long as I’m interested in either. Yup, I declare… A DRAW!

Conclusion
Get both games, buy whatever DLC appeals, and LET THERE BE ROCK!

The Beatles: Rock Band, Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 2 (yes, they really did release the Wii version in the UK) are RPGs. Honest. Oh, all right, they’re actually music games, you’ve defeated me with your piercing logic, but they do have some RPG elements.

All three games share the basic push-coloured-buttons-in-time-to-music basic gameplay; you can just launch in and play on your own or in a band with friends for fun, or you can play competitively, with each performance gaining a number of points and awarded a rating out of five stars. All three games also offer some sort of extended gameplay mode.

The Beatles: Rock Band features a story mode; those of you who like to play amateur detective may be able to deduce from the title of the game that it’s the story of the Beatles. In this mode the songs are arranged chronologically rather than by difficulty and inextricably linked to famous venues like the Cavern Club and Abbey Road studios, through which you progress linearly. You’re always represented as your chosen Beatle, with garb and instrument appropriate to the time, and have no way of affecting the story; you can’t decide to split the band up in 1968 or keep it together in 1970. It’s a bit like an early laserdic game, one of the ones that basically just played a series of sequences and forced the “player” to push the right button at the right time to keep it going. It makes a lot more sense when pushing the buttons is quite fun, though, and in the case of The Beatles the story is the music, which is the gameplay. As a linear story there isn’t a great incentive to play through it more than once, though there are some bonus bits n’ pieces (mostly photographs and some audio and video clips) for either compulsive completionists or Beatles fanatics.

Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 2 have career and tour modes respectively that start with that RPG staple, character creation. Name your band, pick a logo, and create the band members. Rock Band 2 is the more traditionalist, allowing you to select your face, hairstyle, physique etc., then handing you your starter gear of a tatty t-shirt, jeans and a basic instrument; Guitar Hero 5 is more akin to City of Heroes or Champions, offering a massive range of outfits to select from and customisable instruments down to the pick-guard colour and knob configuration (Matron) on your guitar. Both games then despatch you to various venues, and hand out cash as well as points scores and star ratings for playing songs.

The Guitar Hero 5 career is fairly structured. There isn’t a story as such (some of the previous games had little cut scenes, usually of a generic small town band becoming global megastars as you progressed with the odd digression into rock heaven/hell), you’re turned loose into a series of venues, broadly arranged in increasing difficulty, each with five to eight songs. Future venues, and songs within venues, need to be unlocked but it’s a fairly swift process with a degree of freedom, not the strictly linear progression of the first few Guitar Hero games or The Beatles. On top of the usual five star rating each song also has a challenge, as I outlined previously, giving plenty of goals for the achievement-centric, offering a further three stars to collect plus various costume and character unlocks.

Tour mode in Rock Band 2 has the strongest elements of development or progression. Starting out clad in an old t-shirt with $100 to your name, the money you’re awarded for successfully completing songs is vital for expanding your collection of clothes, instruments and accessories. You pick a home city for your characters and the band, and initially have access to a limited selection of small venues in nearby cities; as you play, you can compete in challenges to unlock vehicles, allowing access to venues further afield, and bigger venues as you become more successful In addition to cash rewards you earn fans for performances, giving a measure of success, and you can even hire a member of support staff like a promoter or merchandise vendor. You could almost remove the playing-along-to-songs bit and still be left with a tycoon-style band management game.

While not quite meeting all four of Bioware’s pillars of RPG (“you’ve got exploration, you’ve got progression, you’ve got combat, and you’ve got storytelling”) it’s interesting to see cross fertilisation of mechanics across game genres. Next stop, a proper guitar-wielding Bard class in an MMO! Or maybe a dual-wielding mace class using a drum set for the input, I can think of someone who’d be ideal for that…

If you were contemplating a holiday to the Hell region I’d advise taking a nice warm jumper, as early reports reaching us suggest it may have frozen over. In unrelated news, Rock Band 2 is actually coming out in the UK for the Wii this Friday, though I’ll remain skeptical until I’m actually strumming along to Norman Greenbaum, as the not-entirely-accurate “available in April” announcement is still there…

Just to put a slight crimp on the party, though, we’re not going to have the entire back catalogue of DLC available at launch, with “over 250 songs” (out of the 700-odd) “available on disc and for download by early 2010″. Probably makes sense; I imagine people are more likely to buy a few songs each week as they become available rather than going on a massive spending spree in one weekend. It’s still going to be terribly galling, though, if it takes a while for us to get some of the top-notch DLC on the way, like the Electric Six pack featuring that favourite of flying Viking kittens, Gay Bar, ten Queen songs later in the month, and, of course, the greatest news in the history of time ever, Flight of the Conchords coming to Rock Band.

Is this the great battle of the plastic-instrument-game end times? In the red corner, Guitar Hero 5. In the blue corner, The Beatles: Rock Band. Released within two days of each other (in the UK, a couple of weeks in the US), which is the best? There’s only one way to find out… FIGHT!

(There’s an idea… Note to EA and Activision: why let hip hop artists have all the fun? With all that effort spent creating a digitised Fab Four, plus Metallica, Aerosmith and assorted other Guitar Heroes, relive the glory years of Marvel vs Capcom with a Rock Band vs Guitar Hero beat ‘em up! RINGO FLYING DRAGON PUNCH! SPINNING LARS JUMP KICK!)

Actually, other than the release dates, the two games aren’t really going head-to-head, there are two battles going on here: Guitar Hero 5 vs Rock Band 2, and The Beatles vs The Awesome Power of Hyperbole. Like the opening paragraph.

Starting with the more straightforward, Guitar Hero 5 is the second full-band Guitar Hero game after World Tour (counting Metallica and Greatest Hits as “expansions” rather than main releases), and with Rock Band eschewing full sequels in favour of downloadable content it goes up against last year’s Rock Band 2 (or, for European Wii owners, next year’s Rock Band 2, not that I’m going to keep harping on about that or anything). Guitar Hero 5 doesn’t do anything too radical, but generally spruces things up from World Tour: there’s a single loading screen to skip rather than having to furiously mash the green button 27 times to actually get to the game, the gig venue lists are clearer, the old favourite characters are back with unlockable outfits (despite “create a rocker” being almost as fully featured as the Champions Online character creator, the console interface is pretty clunky when working through hundreds of possible outfit options). The whole song list is open for quick play from the start, and it’s much easier to jump straight into playing, swap players and difficulties without having to backtrack through assorted menus, and, if you have the peripherals, you can have any combination of four instruments allowing for that four-drummer version of Ring of Fire you’ve always wanted to try.

As well as making things much more accessible, Guitar Hero 5 throws in something for the more achiever-centric in the form of Challenges. While playing in career mode each song has an additional challenge for either one of the instruments or the whole band, such as the guitarist whammying notes for a certain duration, the bassist up-strumming a certain number of notes, or the band maintaining a score multiplier. Challenges have Gold, Platinum and Diamond levels of success, offering a potential extra three stars over the main song performance, and they unlock extras as you go.

Song-wise it’s the most mixed bag yet, there should be something for almost everyone, but by the same token it’d be pretty unusual to find someone who loves everything. I’m finding it good so far, and enjoying being introduced to some interesting new stuff (the strength of a disc full of songs over DLC) as well as playing along to classics. There has been one sour note, though: “Bring the Noise 20XX” isn’t a patch on Public Enemy’s original or the version with Anthrax; Zakk Wylde’s riffing is fine in itself but doesn’t fit around the lyrics at all, most disappointing and puts a right crimp on my Chuck D impressions, but still. GH5 also emulates a welcome feature from Rock Band, the ability to import songs from previous games and DLC compatibility, albeit with a lower percentage of songs being transferable (only 35 songs from World Tour and 21 from Greatest Hits so far, possibly with more to come later). I haven’t been able to test this yet, though, as the European Wii music store hasn’t been available over the launch weekend. Annoyingly the only six songs of World Tour DLC that you can’t use are the Hendrix songs, the biggest chunk of my DLC library, but the Hendrix estate has always been strict on licensing conditions with those songs, and those songs only, always using the Hendrix avatar in World Tour (not present in GH5). Speaking of avatars… I’m sure you’ve heard the fun and games over Kurt Cobain being a playable character, which I can’t say bothers me nearly as much as some other people; John Lydon’s advertising butter, Iggy Pop is flogging insurance after all.

Overall, then, a solid development of the series, well worth picking up for anybody with a set of World Tour instruments unless you really can’t stand the bulk of the song list.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a slightly different kettle of fish. Or the same kettle, but with different fish in it. From the purely pressing-coloured-buttons-in-time-to-music perspective it’s fine; technically I believe the only thing it really adds to the genre is three-part vocal harmonies, but that’s not really the point. The point is it’s The Beatles, in the Beatle-iest game ever made (admittedly there isn’t really much competition there). Where the Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Metallica games had songs from other artists and were generally structured as games, with a loose story following some of the band’s major gigs but the songs themselves arranged by difficulty, The Beatles: Rock Band includes only Beatles songs, 45 of them (with more coming as DLC), arranged chronologically. I previously linked to a New York Times article that goes into the care taken over the production of the game, with clinking-teacup ambience added to fragments of studio chat for the in-game Abbey Road sessions; glorious dreamscapes kick in when playing the later songs, transporting the band out of the studio. It’s all very lovely.

There are slight quibbles, from both a Beatles and Rock Band perspective. From the former, it’s undoubtedly a sanitised version of history with no acrimonious break-up, the band always playing together, Ringo on the drums (even if McCartney played them on the song in question). From the latter, the sanctity of the material means you play the songs as they were, no drum fills, no whammy, and no audible effect when you kick in overdrive/”Beatlemania”. Neither seems a particularly major loss to me, though.

The attention to detail is superb, but it’s generally just a slightly more specific evolution of band-centric games rather than a revolution (number nine) in the genre; for a die-hard Metallica fan the opportunity to play the motion-capped band at Tushino Airfield in Guitar Hero: Metallica is probably as appealing as a die-hard Beatles fan getting the opportunity to play Shea Stadium. A more significant difference is that from the very beginning guitar games have been pitched at hard rock/metal fans, but The Beatles: Rock Band has a different profile and target market, potentially spreading the joy of plastic instruments (Matron) further than ever before. In newspapers and the music press, TB:RB is sneaking out of the “Games” ghetto into the wider “Arts” sections, with predictable results; there’s the usual barrage, occasionally in the reviews themselves, always in online comment sections, of “learn a real instrument” from people labouring under the illusion that players labour under the illusion they’re really in The Beatles. Newsflash, folks: the (vast overwhelming majority) of plastic instrument players no more believe they’re actually playing music than somebody playing a racing game with a steering wheel and pedals believes they’re a Formula 1 driver moving around a track. Enough of that before I get cross.

Veering too far the other way and declaring the game of massive cultural importance also seems wide of the mark; it’s possible TB:RB will introduce new players to gaming who’d never thought about it before, but just as World of Warcraft’s massive subscriber numbers don’t seem to have translated into a a similar upsurge in interest in other MMOGs, and Wii Sports drove sales of the console itself but not so much interest in other Wii games, I’m not sure it’ll have a more lasting effect. Last week’s games charts saw Guitar Hero 5 at number one followed by Colin McRae: Dirt 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylym, with The Beatles: Rock Band in at number four; the hefty cost of a console plus instruments might well be putting a dampener on totally new gamers rushing to pick it up, or it may just be a slow burner.

For myself, at the risk of being branded a Partridge-esque Beatles phillistine (“I’d have to say my favourite Beatles album is… The Best of The Beatles”) my collection doesn’t stretch much past old taped copies of the Red and Blue compilations, which in a way is what the game represents too, so I’ve been really enjoying it. I’ll have to find some non-gaming Beatles fans to see their reaction to it sometime.

I have indeed got The Beatles: Rock Band (despite the lack of Wiimote waggling “bed-in” mini game), and been Fab-ing it right up; Guitar Hero 5 then turned up last night in what’s widely being referred to as “The Point That Even I’ve Hit Plastic Instrument Game Saturation” (“Though I’ll Still Get Rock Band 2 For The DLC” (“If They Ever Release It For The Wii In The UK” (“Which Is Looking Increasingly Unlikely”))).  I had a quick blast through the first venue, which includes the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (mostly playing the piano part on guitar, quite tricky for a first tier song).

Somehow, overnight, my subconscious decided the two games would make the perfect mash-up when combined with an 80s video tape commercial, and this morning I woke up from an animated skeleton singing the Scotch advert song, itself of course based on the heavy Bo Diddley beat Stones version of Not Fade Away, to the tune of Taxman, with the Beatles doing harmonies:

I’m going to tell you how it will be
(Taxman!)
With Scotch’s lifetime guarantee
(Taxman!)
Tape want you want both night and day
(Taxman!)
And re-record not fade away, re-record not fade away, re-record not fade away…

I tried to work out what it might mean, but Freud’s Traumdeutung is strangely quiet on the subject…

So Zoso, being the fake plastic rock junky that he is, has recently purchased the Wii version of The Beatles: Rock Band. Actually, he has progressed a large part of the way through the game, and so in a KiaSA exclusive we can now confirm that you don’t, in fact, get to a point in the game where you break up with the rest of the band and then spend the rest of your days waggling your Wiimote in bed with Yoko Ono.

So I guess he won that bet.

A couple more bits of Guitar Heroism/Rock Banditude: firstly Melmoth pointed me towards Plastic Axe, a most splendid looking blog for all things polymer-chain guitar related that also hosts “The Vault”, an ambitious project to track all the songs available to virtually rock out to across the various Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Rock Revolution games.

Then I was catching up on Twitter, and noticed Simon Mayo had posted: “Anyone any good at Guitar Hero? Will be playing on air later. But will have the virtuoso skills of @ruskin147 to rely on.” Tuning in to his show, it possibly had the best line-up of subjects ever: Andrew Roberts talking about The Storm of War, a new World War II history that sounds most interesting, then Ross Noble and Chris Addison talking about various tours and DVDs, and finally a segment on Guitar Hero with editor of Metal Hammer Magazine Alexander Milas, International Music & Licensing Manager for Activision Blizzard Sergio Pimental and BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

Ross Noble, it turns out, is an Expert level Guitar Hero player, or at least was until he had to go cold turkey for fear of it taking over his life, so there’s definitely a constituency of plastic-guitar wielding comedians (Noble and Richard Herring for starters). The show should be available for a week on the “Listen Again” link (Wednesday 26th August), or there’s a half hour podcast of the Ross Noble/Chris Addison segment that’s really worth a listen not only for Guitar Hero, but also the sure-fire smash hit replacement for Big Brother “Weed or Not Weed”.

Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits and Metallica are proving to be splendid fun; they both have a great selection of songs that build up to some insane final tier shred-fests that should keep all but the most trained-spider-fingered of fake plastic guitarists busy for a while. I’d say “… busy until Rock Band 2 comes out on the Wii”, but “… until death from old age” might be more accurate with the release date either back to September or just not being listed depending on retail site, not that I’m bitter or anything. So long as the Wii version of The Beatles: Rock Band is released at the same time as the other platforms I’ll let them off (gracious, huh?)

Anyway! While Guitar Hero: Metallica is perfect when you fancy a spot of moshing, it doesn’t feature much outside the broad spectrum of “quite metal” to “very metal”, so overall I’ve been playing a bit more of Greatest Hits which, for the most part, has an awesome set list. I say “for the most part”… The only drawback so far is that, with the new system of unlocking songs where you don’t have to complete every song of one tier before moving to the next one, I’d been skipping songs I didn’t really fancy playing; towards the end of the set list, though, you have to have completed all encores to unlock the final stage. And that meant I had to play all the songs I’d been skipping… basically, the godawful hair-metal cock-rock cheesy stuff that Metallica were railing against in their early years: Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Ratt, Warrant… Ugh. The odd cheesy song can be fun, a bit of Kiss, Poison’s Nothin’ But A Good Time, but having to play through the lot of them in short order is like scraping a massive slab of unpleasant congealed processed cheese off a burger, eating the rest of the meal, then being forced to eat the cheese before you’re allowed dessert. If you don’t eat yer cheese, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer cheese?!

So my advice is to hold your nose, take a deep breath, play sodding Warrant as soon as you can to get it out the way, then enjoy the good stuff. Mind you, if you’re not some sort of completist nutter, you can always solve the problem by just avoiding the songs entirely…

In a shocking turn of events, the European release of Wii Rock Band 2 has been put back again. Current estimate from game.co.uk is 31st July; a Harmonix developer has posted “… we ran into several technical issues that required attention before the game could be finalized”, which I believe may be a code for “we sent a second raft to try and find the first, and located it beached upon the shore of the lost island of Atlantis. Namor the Sub-Mariner is looking a bit miffed about the whole business.”

Still, not to worry, I’ve still got the latter half of the Guitar Hero: Metallica setlist to conquer (quite chuffed about passing One the other day), and Guitar Hero Greatest Hits has just turned up in the post too. Known as Guitar Hero Smash Hits in the US, presumably renamed to avoid the kids/teen pop magazine connotations of the name in the UK, Greatest Hits follows hot on the heels of Metallica, but with less Metallica, and… er… more Hits. That are Great. With 48 songs taken from previous Guitar Hero games, Greatest Hits is probably one to avoid if you’re only interested in playing the plastic guitar and have played the other games extensively. If, on the other hand, you only came into the series with Guitar Hero World Tour, it’s a good way of getting a bunch of rather excellent songs, and with full band support.

Greatest Hits has all the good stuff of World Tour like customisable characters and instruments, and keeps the Metallica approach to the career in which you need to achieve a certain number of stars over all songs in a tier to progress, rather than having to play through absolutely everything, which works rather well. There seems to be some sort of plot involving the classic Guitar Hero characters being summoned to rock out across the world, or something, but plot in a Guitar Hero game is about as relevant as plot in a porn movie, something to rapidly skip through to get to the strumming.

All in all, probably not a mandatory purchase at full price unless you’re desperate for something new, but well worth picking up when they knock a few quid off.

Guitar Hero – Metallica is… Metallica-y. This isn’t terribly surprising, what with it having “Metallica” in the title and everything; 28 of the 49 songs in the game are by Metallica, you play them as motion-captured Metallica, the rest of the tracks can be played as one of Metallica, on signature Metallica guitars, if you buy/unlock them as a character, and there are lashings of Metallica extras on the disc.

If you’re unsure whether you should get the game or not, here’s a detailed in-depth questionnaire to help you decide:

1) Do you like Guitar Hero?
a) Oh yes! It’s a work of plastic instrumental genius!
b) It’s OK I guess.
c) No, it’s a stupid waste of time, learn to play a real guitar.

2) Do you like Metallica?
a) Oh yes! Who doesn’t like the genre-defining multi-Grammy winning fourth highest-selling music artist since 1991?
b) They’re OK I guess.
c) No, I hate them and everything they stand for.

If you answered:
Mostly (a): buy the game right now
Mostly (b): maybe rent the game, see how you like it
Mostly (c): don’t buy the game

Hope that helped.

You may be experiencing a strange sense of deja vu around now, as Guitar Hero: Metallica is a very similar idea to Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, taking a core engine (Guitar Hero III for Aerosmith, World Tour for Metallica) and building a band-centric game around it.

I have most of Metallica’s albums and saw them live a while back, so the Metallica-y-ness a major selling point for me compared to Aerosmith, whose songs never really gripped me even after a few playthroughs of their game. The non-Metallica tracks are a slightly mixed bag, some strong stuff from bands like Slayer, Motorhead, Queen and the copper-bottomed Thin Lizzy classic The Boys Are Back In Town, but generally the Metallica tracks are the highlight, as it should be (my favourite tracks from GH: Aerosmith remain the Kinks and Mott The Hoople covers from the first couple of tiers). Being based on World Tour it’s also full plastic band game, which may or may not be a major factor depending on whether you stick resolutely to pretending to play the guitar, or are more of a living room skinsman.

By crikey, though, it’s a bit tricky. I (just about) managed all except the final tiers of Guitar Hero III and World Tour on Expert, but I’ve started running into difficulty about halfway through the Metallica setlist, mostly thanks to Kirk Hammett solos. If you’re not familiar with the oeuvre these contain, on average, seven hundred and sixty two notes every second, and are often long enough to outlast any star power you might have saved up to assist your desperate flailings. I haven’t made a serious attempt at drums, bass or vocals yet, but being the drums have the extra-bass-pedalling Expert Plus difficulty, I can’t imagine they’re going to be proverbial strolls in the fake plastic park. Still, that’s what multiple difficulty levels are for; I imagine I’ll switch down to Hard to try and complete the guitar career (hopefully I won’t have to resort to Medium), and it’s good to have something to aim towards. Overall, seven thumbs up out of two with an extra “OH YEAH!” and some toast.