So over New Year’s I acquired this new little music game called Rock Band. And while it’s totally cool and has lots of cool tracks, there’s something about it that’s just not quite as good as Guitar Hero. It’s not the looks, Rock Band looks better than Guitar Hero in about every way imaginable. And it’s not the options, Rock Band lets you customize your character in so many cool ways that GH can’t even look directly at Rock Band without feeling ashamed. And it’s not necessarily the tracks either, Rock Band has a number of good tracks and absolutely zero Slipknot. And it’s certainly not the unholy blight that is boss battles, someone should repeatedly punch Neversoft in the crotch for coming up with that gameplay mechanic.

Still, there’s something about Rock Band that isn’t quite as good as GH3 … oh wait, I figured it out. Rock Band’s guitar sucks. While I don’t mind the removal of the clicky strum bar (GH guitars click when you strum up or down while Rock Band Guitars do not) the instrument itself seems poorly designed. Looking at the back of it, there are screws everywhere. You even have to unscrew the back panel to put new batteries in. Plus, instead of having one large bump on the middle button on the neck, the Rock Band guitar has little bumps that are hard to feel on 3 buttons on the neck (1, 3, 5). This makes it a lot harder for me to tell what button I’m actually on. And while I haven’t played the guitar portion of the game enough for it to happen, I’m pretty sure that my guitar is going to fall apart at some point here and I’ll have to get it replaced by EA.

All of this is my way to say, if I’m playing by myself and it’s just the guitar part, I’m probably going to try to play it on GH3 for now. Their better constructed guitar and massive set list make for a generally better solo guitar experience. The one area they’ve been behind in though was the downloadable track list section. Rock Band gets 3 new tracks a week (from which you can buy songs individually or as a pack) while Guitar Hero sporadically gets new 3 song track packs. Often they contain 3 songs by the same crappy pop/emo artist.

According to the GH leader boards however, there’s a new set of songs coming out that look to be awesome:

• Journey - “Any Way You Want It”
• Foreigner - “Jukebox Hero”
• Boston - “Peace of Mind”

Unfortunately there isn’t any information on which are covers (I’d assume all of them but who knows). Still, these would definitely be fun and a great set of songs to add to the game. If only they had a World Tour mode like Rock Band that would randomly through groups of songs (including ones that you’ve bought online) into sets that you have to play through to get money and fans.

Activision does want money from Harmonix to let me use the PS3 GH3 guitar with Rock Band.  Activision, you suck.

Anyone want to buy a copy of GH3?  I think I’ll be trying to sell this and get Rock Band instead since they are apparently not complete jackasses about how you use their controller.

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of games that I get to play with fake plastic instruments.  I’ve been a Guitar Hero fan since the first one came out over a year and a half ago.  In fact, we’ve got some pictures of the controller on the design for this very site.  As you may also know, I bought a PS3 last winter and am a big fan of the machine.

So when I found out that both GHIII and Rock Band were coming out for it this year I was pretty excited.  The fact that I’d get twice the music fun and a couple new ways to play (and DRUMS!) I was really excited.  So, after getting hooked on the demo for GHIII in late October, I bought the game at launch–I even went out at midnight and picked it up (since my girlfriend was sitting around playing Viva Pinata I didn’t have much else to do).

Unfortunately, when Rock Band came out, I didn’t pick it up.  Mostly since I still had one fake guitar game that I hadn’t gotten around to beating but also because I had heard that the PS3 GHIII guitar  wasn’t going to work with it.  That turned out to be true and I was glad that I hadn’t spent $170 on a game that I was missing a peripheral for.

Then, last week I heard some good news.  Harmonix was going to release a patch to enable the GHIII guitar to work with Rock Band.  This was definitely good news.  Now, I could go out and buy the bundle when I was done with GHIII and get some new music game excitement.

Sadly the scheduled release date for the patch came and went and it was never released.  I (among many others) started to wonder what had happened to this great new functionality.  Well, it turns out that the culprit is Activision, the company that owns the rights to the Guitar Hero name and bought plastic guitar manufacturer RedOctane.  Apparently, Activision (which will soon be the worlds largest video game publisher thanks to an upcoming merger with Vivendi Games to become Activision Blizzard) is afraid that their colored plastic guitar cash cow may go away and are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening … including being complete jackasses by threatening Sony to not actually release the Rock Band patch that enables compatibility.  Supposedly they’ve threatened platform support on upcoming Activision titles (like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, etc.).

Let me just be the level headed one here, Activision, and say that you guys are complete morons.  I know you’d like to be the only plastic guitar game in town and it was a good run but you can’t hold onto a monopoly forever.  Denying that and trying to lock people into your bullshit isn’t going to make it any better.  In fact, I’m now less likely to buy your future games with peripherals since I know that they’ll only ever work with your game.  When I’m going to waste a bunch of money on a novelty peripheral, I’d like to know that if I wanted to, I could use it on almost any game.  The fact that you seem to think a $50 device that I paid for should be useless unless I keep giving you money makes me think that you are jackasses.

And while right now this is only a PS3 issue, I’ve heard rumblings from a 1UP podcast that Activision is actually looking to break Rock Band compatibility from the GHIII controller on the Xbox 360 as well.  So yeah, no matter what system you’re on, Activision would like to screw you over.

Hope you guys like the fact that I’m not going to buy your crappy music game again (I’ve got an idea for a boss battle … it’s me giving you the middle finger).   With your crappy downloadable content system (3 packs, really?), inability to get quick-play co-op in the game, the continued lack of a rhythm/bass career track included, and your complete misunderstanding of why Guitar Hero was fun … see Boss Battles you have managed to quickly run a great franchise into mediocrity.  It takes real talent to do that AND make EA look like the good guys and yet somehow Activision, you’ve managed to do it.  Bravo. ::slow clap::

There are a number of songs on GH3 that are a blast to play. There are two though that even when I’m doing something completely different (like sitting at work) I’ll get struck by the urge to play.

Lay Down by Priestess

My Name Is Jonas by Weezer

Ok, so I just feel a need to get it out that I broke down and purchased GH3 this weekend.  I wasn’t really planning on buying it immediately but it just kind of happened.  I’ll give some of my feelings on the game in a bit but first a brief history.

I picked up the original Guitar Hero in April of last year for my PS2.  I played the crap out of it and liked it enough that we even added the controller to the redesign of the site.  I got GH2 as a gift around Christmas and while I enjoyed it, it seemed to lose some of the magic of the original game.

I played it off and on for about a month but then in February I bought my HDTV and ended up getting a PS3.  I’ve detailed the issues I had getting that workin and even with my post saying that GH controller was mostly working with the PS3 I’ve since reversed my stance due to inescapable lag that had made playing any of the more difficult songs nearly impossible.

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So, I’d heard some rumbling on the internet over the past month or so that the issues with the Guitar Hero controller not working with GH1&2 on the PS3 had been mostly resolved. So yesterday on my way home from a particularly stressful day at work (this week has been pretty crazy), I stopped by RadioShack and bought a Playstation to USB adapter.

When I got home I opened the PS-USB adapter packaging (thankfully not an injury-inducing blister pack) and connected the new adapter to my GH controller + extension cord and then plugged the USB end into the PS3’s USB ports. When I plugged it in, it immediately started ‘working.’ By that I mean it does the same thing that always happens if you’re in a Playstation system menu and you have a GH controller plugged in, it thinks you’re holding the ‘down’ button in.

I promptly unplugged the GH controller and tried to press buttons on either of the two PS3 controllers I have or the PS3 remote. None of those buttons seemed to do anything though. I ended up holding down the PS button to bring up the controller menu and then just pressed ‘O’ to quit.

Back in the main menu I could navigate with the controller again and started up GHII from the menu. I then quickly plugged in the GH controller. I was amazed when the game detected button presses from it! When I got to the menu though I quickly noticed that it got confused by strumming up vs. down. It used to be that strumming down moved you down and up moved you up but now up moves you down and down moves you up.

I then played a couple songs on it and realized that the whammy bar was also not working. Unfortunately it didn’t detect its use at all. Still, the whammy bar isn’t that essential to playing the game and without it you can get about 98% [non-scientific number] of the enjoyment out of it without it.

So if anyone was holding off spending $600 on a PS3 simply because it wouldn’t play the PS2 version of  Guitar Hero you can now spend freely. Guitar Hero is actually operational on the PS3. You can finally get rid of that PS2 dead weight that has been holding you down.

Next up, I’ll be hooking up some PS2 controllers to see how gameplay works with those. Exciting!