Guitar Hero - Two steps forward and three back?

Guitar Hero have been embraced by both gamers and music-lovers, and when it first arrived it was considered a revolution within gaming-industry. Just a look at the guitar-shaped controller confirmed this, and while the Nintendo Wii have/had games which had you swinging your paddle as a tennis-racket and a golf-club, Guitar Hero had its players stand infront of the TV, rocking/dancing merely because you got so into the game that you really felt like a rockstar! It was revolutionary - no question about it.

But what has happened with Guitar Hero since that?

This is not a review on any game in particular, but instead thoughts on the direction Guitar Hero as a franchise has taken, good things and bad things.

My personal experience with Guitar Hero started when my brother recieved the second game; Guitar Hero II for PS2. We were super-stoked and started off on easy, went quickly over to medium, and over the next few months we kept competing in who could advance the fastest and got the biggest scores. I am a big fan of rock and roll, the 60s and 70s stuff in particular, and I am a gaming-geek ofcourse, so I LOVED this game. After I had played it for months, the only things I could think of which had potential for improvement was its menus and the way profiles couldn't be used along with quickplay, but only career-mode. Our quickplay list of records all consisted of: 1) A 2) AAAAA 3) AAAAAAAAAAAA etc.

Guitar Hero 3 then came out. It felt alot more "modern", gameplay-wise. Hammerons/Pull-offs were much smoother, and this allowed much more complex patterns..shredding on expert felt AWESOME! Notes rolling down the screen at an incredible tempo, and with volum on full, your fingers somehow played along with the colorful note-chart that blasted through your screen. No improvements were made to the menu/profile system however.

Then came Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is where I began to be dissapointed with the Guitar Hero franchise. Not because of the songs, but because the gameplay had been changed dramatically from Guitar Hero 3, it was ALOT harder. The "window" for which a note was accepted as 'hit successfully' became alot smaller. I considered myself a pretty good Guitar Hero gamer, but all of a sudden I found myself struggling with playing through songs on expert again. Perhaps was this the goal when they released it - to give the expert-players a new challenge, but it really didn't feel fair and it didn't feel natural anymore. It felt as if the game had been crafted for the top-players that you see on youtube or other sites, having competitions to decide who world's best player is. Again, menus and profiles remained inconvenient and awkward.

Now the transition between Guitar Hero II and III felt alright, and justified - because Neversoft produced the third game, and it felt as if the game took a step into a more modern world of gaming.

After the third game, things started falling apart. Neversoft and Activision had the opportunity here to lay down a standard, which future games would rely on, but instead with every release, difficulty and the way the game plays have been adjusted back and forth...and back again. Guitar Hero: World Tour was alittle bit easier than Aerosmith but still harder than Guitar Hero III, and Guitar Hero: Metallica became alot like Guitar Hero III again.

Personally, I would appreciate it if they created a solid "backbone" or "engine" if you will, which you as a gamer could rely on for all games to come, not forcing you to change technique depending on which CD you put into your PS2/PS3/Wii console. However, this can be debated.

One thing there is NO excuse for not getting perfect after having released three games within the same niche of gaming though, is the menu-system! To me it is incredible that the menu-system - where the most potential for improvement were, just after the SECOND game in the franchise - have only gotten worse and worse. To play together in GH: WT feels like a clutter! Everyone have to press the correct buttons on each of their instruments through atleast 4 menu-screens. It is pretty annoying inbetween songs, to sit and wait for players to ALL press "Ok, I want the next song". Don't they realize we are all in the same room, talking with eachother? And if you are on your own, playing songs over and over/changing inbetween songs, certain things get EXTREMELY annoying. Such as pressing Start Button -> Exit Song, then ANOTHER screen pop up where it asks you: "Are you SURE you want to quit??" and the default choice is "No". The warning-screen can perhaps be justified, but why should the game -every- time presume that you selected the WRONG option? This gets very annoying especially on drums, where the "gamepad" is awkward to reach inbetween cymbals and drums.

It is also extremely annoying to for example play a song flawless in quickplay when you were just playing for fun, and then having to do it AGAIN within "career mode" to get those five golden stars.
Why can you not log into your profile FIRST, then play quickplay OR career mode within your profile?? It makes no sense.

Another thing which is annoying is the multiplayer-"lobby" where you go when you want to get a battle through the internet. Perhaps you just want to play against anyone, maybe you don't care whether it's drums/guitar or bass. And most importantly, maybe you don't care whether it is face-off, pro face-off or battle-mode! That doesn't matter, because BEFORE finding an opponent, you have to narrow down your search by selecting 1) Difficulty. 2) Instrument. 3) Game-mode. Then you click "Find game" and this parks you infront of a screen which give you no feedback or information, it merely lets you know that you are now waiting for it to try and locate someone else that wants a showdown with the exact same settings as you. If there are other players online at ALL - you don't know, and you won't know either, because you'll most likely just exit this screen after waiting for 2 minutes.

I managed to find acouple of battles with Guitar Hero 3, but with GH: WT and GH: Metallica, I have NEVER been able to find someone to battle against. The multiplayer-system is embarrasing. In 2000 it could perhaps be this awkward in a PC-game to play against other internet-opponents, but in 2009 on consoles that cost up to 600$...? Give me a break!

I have yet to try Guitar Hero 5, but unless they have done some dramatic changes to their internet-lobby, made menus easier, I doubt I'll ever buy another Guitar Hero game and rather sneak over to Rock Band to see if they can get it right instead!

Review: Warblade

Alright, for my first review I picked one of my all-time favorite games: Warblade. Just to give you some background information, Warblade is a PC-remake of the classic Amiga-game: Galaga Deluxe. Back in the day when Amiga was the shit, the Amiga was far more powerful than PCs and so the Amiga was the place where the most colourful and innovative games appeared.
Galaga Deluxe was given several rewards, and got voted #19 in the biggest top100 list of Amiga-games through time.

However lets get down to business and talk about Warblade. First off it will seem like a pretty standard space-shooter. What is noticable right off the bat though is how clean, well-polished and responsive it is. To sum up the basics, here's the deal; you control a spaceship whos goal is to rack up as many points as possible through shooting down waves of alien spaceships through 100 different levels.

Now to begin with, the game may seem pretty static, like a basic space-shooter. However, with 30 secrets hidden ingame, various mini-games and tons of permanent addons and bonuses given to the player as he advance and reach certain achievents in his profile, the game will constantly give the player new goals and achievements to go for.

The fun thing is that the best way to rack up high scores in this game is "hidden" and achieved through different secret ways of scoring points. One example is the meteor-storms. This is a mini-game where the player have to navigate their ship through a meteor storm and to start off the novice-pilot will just have to try to avoid the rocks in order to reach the end of the course and recieve some smaller bonuses. However, as the player become more skilled and the spaceship more agile, the goal will be to get through the meteor storm using full speed which will give insane amounts of points and coins. (Coins is what you use inbetween levels to purchase upgrates for your ship)

Another example is the bonus-levels. Bonus levels are every 10th level (or so) and the goal of these bonus levels is to clear all the alienships that appear on screen before they can escape. If the player succeeds in clearing them all they will be given a small point bonus. However, if the player manage to clear two bonusrounds in a row, he will recieve TWICE the point-bonus. This way of rewarding the skilled pilots continues; keep clearing bonus levels with a 100% kill-rate and the bonus score will just keep doubling. Combine that with the 5x multiplier (a normal drop from all alien spaceships) and the skilled players will be recieving insane score-bonuses.

This is just two examples and without giving away more spoilers, I can say the the game is PACKED with these "hidden" way of scoring huge.

Warblade has a refreshing arcade-feel to it, and the PC version have beautiful, clear and colourful graphics and with a profile for each player to work on and an official highscore board on the internet which constantly updates, this game offers unlimited hours of great gameplay.

Check it out at http://www.warblade.as/ and make sure to buy a copy if you enjoy it :-) It is created by a small independent gaming-company and is one of the best action/arcade games i have ever played. Just remember to give it aittle time and patience as it will get more and more fun as the player discover new secrets and new ways of scoring big, and advance through the profile-system!