 |
| | Gameplay
Sound
| | Graphics
Value
 |
| |
| | Publisher: Aspyr Media  Genre: Arcade | | | Min OS X: 10.4 CPU: Intel @ 2000 MHz RAM: 999 MB Hard Disk: 6100 MB DVD-ROM Graphics: 128 MB VRAM |
| |
|
I don’t have a lot of rocker cred, I’m afraid. Other than a brief stint at a radio station in Western Massachusetts years and years ago and about the largest collection of Hair Metal on CD this side of the Mississippi, there’s not a lot to my name that would enshrine me in the Rock and Roll hall of fame. That said, I’ve got a lot of time swinging a plastic axe on the consoles and on this computer- Frets on Fire, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, what should have been Guitar Hero 3- the 80’s edition, and now the actual Guitar Hero III ported by Aspyr, my fret fingers are more nimble than they’ve ever been. Nimble isn’t everything, and that orange button still plagues me. If you look at the numbers above the review, the game looks like one of the best games for the Mac this Christmas season but in this case the numbers do deceive. The question remains, should Guitar Hero III gather some of your Christmas sponduliks?
Livin' the Life - Gameplay I’m not sure I really need to summarize Guitar Hero mechanics at this point. Just in case you’ve been hidden in your fallout shelter since The Final Countdown was on heavy airplay in the eighties, frets roll down from the top of the screen. You hit the matching fret on the neck of the guitar, and you strum the strum bar in time with the note. Simple rhythm game mechanics with simple surface presentation. Long ago, a board game said it took minutes to learn, and a lifetime to master. While this may not be entirely the case, the saying is mostly apt. If you don’t have, or don’t have the space for a USB guitar controller which ships with the game, you do have the option of using keys on the keyboard for this functionality, but this makes the game a bit less fun to play, as far as I am concerned. If you have to get your Guitar Hero on while in air to your next gig, the keyboard is really your only option, as I’m pretty sure that you’d get tazed for trying to rock the house at 40,000 feet.
Every Guitar Hero game has some fantastic tracks for the game genre, and some not so good. Guitar Hero the first had a Judas Priest track which was fantastic in single player, but when it got moved over to co-op play for Guitar Hero II, it wasn’t any fun to be the bassist at all. The same goes for the song selection in Guitar Hero III, but calling out any specific tracks that I think are awful in various game modes may be putting the cart before the horse. Rhythm and music games in general are polarizing, what one person thinks is the epitome of the musical arts, another may think is total crap. Go into Guitar Hero III with the assumption that you’re not going to like every track in every mode, and you’ll be fine. A welcome addition to Guitar Hero III are some master tracks- not everything is a cover song! Even though on the computers we’ve never seen Guitar Hero I and II tracks other than in Frets on Fire, the addition of master tracks in the game is welcome, and frankly, how rhythm games should be.
I hate boss battles, and always have. Adding to my ire, there’s no place in a rhythm game for them, the songs themselves stand on their own. Over the course of the single player campaign, you’ve got to guitar duel Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, and Slash of Guns and Roses or Velvet Revolver. Why? In fact, the loading screen for these battles says right up front you need to deploy battle power, which replaces star power in these sections, to beat them or they will win, guaranteed. Believe it. These battles are pointless, and break the game, as far as I’m concerned. While my memory doesn’t go back to 60’s rock that well, I don’t think that Eric Johnson or Brian May had to beat down previous guitar gods dueling banjos-style to advance their careers at a certain point.
For the first time in a Guitar Hero game, there’s a plot, but the less said about it the better. While the cutscenes are animated well, they’re just silly and detract from the whole point of the game. I won’t discuss them any further, but feel free to skip them, you’re not missing anything.
Stand Up and Shout! - Graphics and Sound Sound is everything in a rhythm game. You may have heard about technical issues with other versions of the game. The sound is outstanding on the Macintosh version, only suffering from a decent home Dolby solution, but this isn’t Aspyr’s fault. The graphics are what you’d expect from a Guitar Hero game, although inexplicably changed from the other games in the series. It’s not a major adjustment if you’ve played the others on the console, so it’s a non-issue, really.
The motion capture is well done, but man, is your lead singer ugly. I mean ugly, like fry pan to the face ugly. You could land planes on that dude’s chin. There’s some nausea-cam going on when the camera view shifts to the top of the guitar neck, but those breaks don’t last long.
|
|
