The Loews hotel, home to a lot of Activision’s E3 activity is in packup mode on Friday afternoon, LA time. And even while half their compatriots flee to poolside drinks and post E3 parties, the Guitar Hero 3 lads are still at it.
You get the impression that they have been asked the same questions a load of times. And most of those questions have circled around Rock Band, Harmonix and EA’s ambitious attempt at folding in drums and vocals into the “music game” experience. Rather than duck the questions, like many would, the Red Octane team seem happy to talk about how they and Harmonix go way back, and they think the game will rock. And further, how the two can co-exist.
It’s a fair call. God knows how much Rock Band will set punters back, while Guitar Hero has the runs on the board already. And there’s a pretty decent catalogue of Guitar Hero songs out there already. And GH3 is bound to deliver in this aspect as well – how can it not when it has Knights of Cydonia by Muse on it, after all.
Initially, all the talk is about the new wireless Les Paul controllers (PS2 owners get a Kramer design instead, don’t fret. Get it? Fret?). In addition to now being able to prevent you from yanking your console off the shelf, the wireless guitars have range. Red Octane’s trusty PR guy demonstrates by leaving the room and playing from across the hallway. Even at a range so far its hard to make out the individual notes, he’s better than me.
To make the controllers as portable as possible, you can now detach the next from the body of the guitar – a nice touch. Also the button layouts have been changed to bring the buttons that get a lot of use to the forefront, while the less used buttons are now more out of the way and unlikely to be hit in the heat of guitar battle. Wii owners will have a slick compartment where the Wiimote goes, which arguably is a lot more well thought out and modular-meets-practical than the Zapper, at least in my opinion.
The actual note buttons on the next are rounded and the colours are now edge based, not solid, making the controllers look less toy. A sweet addition will be custom faceplates for the guitars. We were shown working prototype faces, including US, UK and Australian flag designs, a nice mirror finish, woodgrain sunburst, a white spray, Slash’s signature ebony (or at least I’m guessing that’s that the matte black one was meant to be) and a more generic green art style one.
Red Octane has upped the multiplayer meat of the game here. You can now co-op play career mode, not just have a one off challenge, and the game will be playable online. I asked if latency would mess things up and go a pretty convoluted answer. The Red Octane guys pointed to the success of action games and first person shooters online, which is a fair point – but I wonder with music’s inherent demands on timing and rhythm how you will go playing against or with someone from overseas – specifically how the game will keep track of how they go on your machine.
You will be merrily playing along in tune on your machine – while seeing what the other person is doing will be delayed – and potentially the game making the “you screwed up” sound effects could end up out of sync, causing confusion. Time will tell how the team circumvents this issue, or if they may have to mute elements of your partners playing.
We jumped into the guitar battle mode. Me vs a photogenic rookie reporter chick. I’m no world beater, so I picked a song she didn’t know. To no avail. I got smoked. Battle mode has attracted the informal “Mario Kart” comparisons from most who have played it for good reason. Pull off a sequence and you get a type of weapon to use against your opponent. You can store up to three – I know this because I consistently failed to unleash mine. Some force the victim to wail on the whammy bar, others “break” your string forcing you to tap on a note repeatedly, and the diabolic lefty flip inverts the note layout, making it extremely difficult to deliver. All the while, you’re losing ground on your opponent. Well, at least I did.
The visual elements of the game have been given work as well. The light shows, camera angles and crowd panoramas look pretty cool now – much more “rock”, and even the venue art has been designed by a professional poster artist to give that veneer of authenticity. When you’re rockin’ it, there’s also a row of vacuum tubes that progressive light up and overload depend on how your skills are.
Of course, one of the biggest additions in Guitar Hero 3 is Slash. We’ve already covered his involvement in the game from our Activision press conference wrapup, but the Red Octane crew chatter briefly about the Slash experience. The Slash you get in Guitar Hero 3 is actually motion captured – they asked him to turn up in his gig clothes and got the great man in action. Who says games can’t be glamorous? Beat Slash in a guitar battle – playing the song that Slash wrote for the game – and you get to play “Welcome to the Jungle” alongside him. Can’t knock that.
The Red Octane guys have stressed this is an incremental step up from Guitar Hero games. They aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel here, just refine the formula. There’s plenty of reasons why they would specifically stress this, but the one I’d go with for now is they wish to avoid being directly compared with what is a much different game – Rock Band. After all – they are competing at different price points (or so you would think). And who knows, maybe the Red Octane guys have their own band concept game in the pipeline?
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