For those who have been keeping up with the casual gaming trend, you'll know that Guitar Hero III is out. I've acquired it (thanks to a nice promotion and Big W), and I've been playing it over the past week very heavily. For those who aren't so familiar, it's a guitar-sim game where you have this guitar controller and pretend to play a guitar. LOL.
I don't really have much to say about the game. The new wireless controller is good. It has a good weight to it, a detachable neck and overall solid feel. Since I have the XBox 360 version, I can also say that it works well with the Wireless Gaming Receiver and you can enjoy a good game of Frets on Fire with it. My only real complaint with the controller is that it consumes batteries rather quickly. I've had to recharge a pair of batteries every two days, and I play about 5-6 hours every day. The removable faceplate is kinda good, since I can take it off for cleaning (it's a real fingerprint and dust magnet).
The game itself has gone through some graphics overhaul, with the new Star Power meter, combo counter and of course, being on a powerful console, looks really nice. I like the new art style and the guitar battles - which are plenty of fun.
I'm the most satisfied with the song selection this time round. (I wasn't too happy with Guitar Hero 2's song selection.) Plenty of good tracks - and of course, the best part is that a greater amount of the songs are now masters (recordings by the original artist) and those that are covers sound pretty good too.
I don't know if I'm right, but I have reason to believe that the difficulty for the game has increased by a noticeable amount for every single one of the difficulty levels. I found Easy to be more demanding than it was in the previous games, and the same goes for Medium level note charts. While the 3 buttons and 4 buttons limit is still in place for the two difficulty levels, they have become technically more difficult to play.
I'm certain Hard is harder than it used to be technically - but that might be actually due to the songs themselves - a lot of which are I believe more difficult to play in real life to begin with than some of the earlier songs. I've only recently been able to play Hard difficulty songs in Guitar Hero 3 (just today, actually - most of the solos that are made to be trivial in Medium are really difficult in Hard). Why am I sure it's harder? Because I don't remember quite so many green-to-red-to-yellow-to-blue-to-orange (and practically in reverse immediately) sequences when I tried playing Hard on previous Guitar Hero instalments. That being said, those probably helped me a lot. Playing on that difficulty level helped considerably with my memory of where my hand was on the fret buttons.
Since I can't play on the Expert difficulty yet, I won't comment, but I'm certain it's gotten more difficult too - which is a good thing.
I won't bother putting photos for a simple reason - they're everywhere - no point, especially since this is kinda a late review for the game. I believe this game is currently the best in the series, and you can't go wrong when it comes to simple fun.
(On another note, the Xbox 360 is making my room really really hot, so I can't play it for too long, otherwise my room becomes a small dry sauna.)