| Andrex said: Guitar Hero 4:
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To me, the way this is handled will be the most important thing in future releases. Red Octane's original guitar design was great, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved. A substantially redesigned controller has the potential to both increase the fun factor and make the game feel new again. However, it's a double-edged sword; maintaining backwards compatability places severe limits on new designs, while breaking it alienates past customers.
As for the Rock Band trolling in this thread... no. Rock Band is a fantastic party game, and the addition of drums adds something very new to the genre. But Rock Band is still very flawed, and Guitar Hero 3 absolutely destroys it as a single-player guitar game.
- Rock Band peripherals are complete crap. The microphone is the only one that works reliably. My drums were unreliable out of the box; both of my friends who also own the game had the same problem. Two of us got working drums as replacements, but my other friend got another bad set. While none of us has broken a foot pedal yet, reports of snapped foot pedals are all over the internet. Playing fast bass drums on expert in almost guaranteed to break the foot pedal eventually. As for the guitar, my first one broke in four hours, my second one arrived broken. I haven't bothered to replace it again because even if it worked, the Les Paul is far superior anyway. For some reason people like to display their loyalty to Harmonix when they bash Rock Band, but Red Octane was a huge part in the success of the Guitar Hero franchise. Hell, Red Octane was the one who approached Harmonix with the idea for the game.
- Rock Band's guitar charts are mostly boring. The hardest thing about most of them is not letting your attention wander off too far. The hammer-on/pull-off placement is terrible after playing GH3. Rock Band places HOPOs solely based on the time between notes; this leads to many notes being an HOPO when the guitar part is clearly strumming, and other notes that should be an HOPO but aren't. GH3 manually places the HOPOs, which both eliminates this problem, and allows for new features in the note charts - such as a sustained note into a slide represented by an HOPO - impossible in Rock Band or GH2. Raining Blood and Before I Forget are definitely not a fun note charts, but neither was Freya in GH2. Meanwhile, the game is packed with fun charts at varying difficulty levels. My Name Is Jonas, Evenflow, Cliffs of Dover, and Impulse all come to mind as standouts, but there's many more. Cult of Personality was even mentioned as an example of an "unfun" chart, but my friends and I all like it.
- Rock Band doesn't have adjustable fret board scroll speeds (aka "Hyperspeed"). I know there's people out there who think it's cheating because it makes the game easier, but I couldn't care less. "Fun" challenges in these games comes from challenging myself to play difficult notes, not challenging myself just to read them. This is particularly bad on hard difficulty drums, where a few of the parts are so close together they practically overlap. Expert drums are actually easier to read to hard drums due to the faster scroll speed. In this case, like in most cases, more options are always better.
This isn't intended as a rant about why Guitar hero 3 is better than Rock Band. Both games have their flaws, and overall I like them about equally. Hopefully both Harmonix and Red Octane continue to make great games in the genre, and use eachother's good ideas.
