Well, visiting family this holiday, I was hectored into playing Guitar Hero III. As expected, I hated it and fell into passive-aggressive methods before I was a third of the way through the first song and scored absolute 0 on the second.
That said, I could have easily loved this game if it had come out twenty-five years ago. While it looks like a simple color-matching game, how it really plays is as a memory game. You don't excel at this game by watching the screen and developing hand-eye co-ordination reflexes. Rather, you play the game over and over and through trial and error, learn the patterns for each song until you can five star ever damned one on expert without even looking at the screen.
The odd thing about this is that it's not a bad skill to develop for playing a real guitar, you just would have to substitute the colorful buttons with actual chords, infinitely more complex, but it's still a matter of memorizing the patterns without having any reference save your own sense of timing, and maybe the drums and base giving you a point of reference. This theory is confirmed by various You Tube videos of kids doing exactly that. I was surprised to find this game could conceivably be a useful exercise for the budding young guitarist, but there you go.
But, like I had said, this game has come out too late for me. When I was twelve, I would have been all over this thing, possibly decking my room and wardrobe out in Guitar Hero merchandise, eating Guitar Hero cereal with little marshmallow music notes for breakfast, etc, etc. But I'm older now, and while I'm no less a nerd, I take a great deal less pleasure in being one. More to the point, my reflexes are completely shot, so I suck air like a Dust Buster right out of the gate. This means an uphill battle to do well at this game requiring hours and hours or practice, which would dig into my porn-surfing time, so this will not be happening. Also, I'm also not buying the whole rock star fantasy thing, anymore. I'm thirty six. Even if I did turn out to be marvelously gifted the first time I picked up a real guitar, to become a rock star at this point would require me to suck a lot of dick. This is also not going to happen, because they're music industry guys. Who knows where their tweeter has been? Frankly the very notion gives me the ickies.
That said, I could have easily loved this game if it had come out twenty-five years ago. While it looks like a simple color-matching game, how it really plays is as a memory game. You don't excel at this game by watching the screen and developing hand-eye co-ordination reflexes. Rather, you play the game over and over and through trial and error, learn the patterns for each song until you can five star ever damned one on expert without even looking at the screen.
The odd thing about this is that it's not a bad skill to develop for playing a real guitar, you just would have to substitute the colorful buttons with actual chords, infinitely more complex, but it's still a matter of memorizing the patterns without having any reference save your own sense of timing, and maybe the drums and base giving you a point of reference. This theory is confirmed by various You Tube videos of kids doing exactly that. I was surprised to find this game could conceivably be a useful exercise for the budding young guitarist, but there you go.
But, like I had said, this game has come out too late for me. When I was twelve, I would have been all over this thing, possibly decking my room and wardrobe out in Guitar Hero merchandise, eating Guitar Hero cereal with little marshmallow music notes for breakfast, etc, etc. But I'm older now, and while I'm no less a nerd, I take a great deal less pleasure in being one. More to the point, my reflexes are completely shot, so I suck air like a Dust Buster right out of the gate. This means an uphill battle to do well at this game requiring hours and hours or practice, which would dig into my porn-surfing time, so this will not be happening. Also, I'm also not buying the whole rock star fantasy thing, anymore. I'm thirty six. Even if I did turn out to be marvelously gifted the first time I picked up a real guitar, to become a rock star at this point would require me to suck a lot of dick. This is also not going to happen, because they're music industry guys. Who knows where their tweeter has been? Frankly the very notion gives me the ickies.
