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!