"Dansun! It's my turn!"
"Hold on, I have an encore."
"Why would you get an encore, you suck."
That was my Saturday afternoon.
Guitar Hero. How can I even begin to explain Guitar Hero. For those few of you who don't know, Guitar Hero is a music game (I suppose there are many of them out now) that you can hook up to Playstation 2, your computer, and many more gaming toys. It's no doubt one of the most popular games in North America, perhaps all over the world.
What is Guitar hero, exactly? Guitar Hero, like I said before, is a music game where you choose a character and you start a career to become a Guitar Legend, so to speak. You have many characters to choose from, and like in Guitar Hero 3, you can buy special characters like Slash (From Guns N' Roses) and Tom Morrello. The games characters all quite lifelike, you see in them what you would see in real rockers and guitarists. All of them have many different outfits, styles, and guitars.
To customize your character even more, you can buy new outfits, guitars, styles and finishes for the guitars at the Guitar Hero store. You pay with the money you earn from gigs, being sponsored, winning competitions and so on. You can also buy new songs to play, videos and characters.
One of the things that has made Guitar hero so appealing is that, instead of a regular game controller, you control the game with a Guitar Hero guitar. Although the guitar isn't like a real guitar, there are similarities. It almost feels like you're playing an actual guitar, somewhat. Here is a picture of the Guitar Hero guitar.
On this guitar there are five multi-colored buttons which you press to hit different notes. There is an orange button, a blue button, green, red, and yellow buttons. These are called fret buttons. This guitar is much simpler than a regular guitar because instead of having six individual strings and several frets it has five frets and a strum button, which is how you actually play the notes.
The grey rectangle shape you see on that guitar is the strum button. The other bar you see there is the whammy bar. You hold this down during long notes to get extra points.
I'm sure many of you who have never played Guitar Hero still don't understand exactly how you hit the notes, and how the notes are displayed on the screen. Again, pictures come to the rescue!
This picture is fairly distorted, but you get the idea of how the whole Guitar Hero game works. Those circular dots coming to you on the screen are the notes. If you have a yellow note coming toward you, press down the yellow fret button and use the strum button to play it. You have to make sure you hit the note at the right time. To early or to late, and you'll miss it.
Before you heard me talking about long notes. As you know if you've ever heard a song with electric guitar, some notes are held longer than others. Guitar Hero had to incorporate this into the game. Therefore you get . . .
Do you see the long yellow and orange line coming off of the single orange and yellow note? This is a long note. You have to hold down the correct fret button longer and strum to hit this note all the way through. Stop strumming at any point in the long note, then it stops playing the note itself.
Another thing you can see in that picture is the rock meter. When you are playing a gig, you must please the audience. If you hit most of the notes and use star power (explanation in a bit) then your rock meter goes higher. You want to keep the arrow in the green-yellow range to keep from getting ~gasp~ booed off the stage!
Okay, star power, many of you were wondering what that is. When you hit a row of notes that have a star near them, not missing ANY, then you get star power, which means you hold up momentarily lift up your guitar and you'll see all the notes become blue this electric blue hue! When star power is activated, the player gets double points for every note he hits. Star Power lasts only for a short period of time. Also, in star power, you can't see the color of the notes, so you must memorize in what order the notes come at you. Green is usually first, then red next to the green, then yellow next to red, and so on. Be careful!
There are many different songs you can play, some of which are covers of older songs, classic rock hits, and even some new rock. The newer songs are by My Chemical Romance, The Killers, AFI, The Fall of Troy and others on Guitar Hero games.
Games, you say? More than one Guitar Hero? That's right, ladies and gentleman.
Since the first Guitar Hero release in 2005, there have been many other Guitar Heroes released. Check it out:
Guitar Hero (original)
Guitar Hero II
Guitar Hero Encore: Rock the 80's
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Guitar Hero III Mobile
What makes Guitar hero so much fun to play is how you actually feel like you are actually playing the song, live, in front of everyone. The Guitar Hero games have an incredible selection of amazing rock songs that anybody can enjoy, and all of them are playable.
There are four different levels in which you can play the Guitar Hero games on: Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert. In easy, there are only three notes and the notes come at you slower. As you move up levels, the blue and orange notes are added and the notes come at you in doubles (two notes at the same time) and much, much faster.
The longer the note, if you can hold it, that is, the more points. If you are playing multi-player, whoever has the most points at the end of the song wins.
Whether you win . . . whether you lose, who you battle and what songs you rock out to on the way, Guitar Hero is the ultimate game for music lovers . . . and people who just want to have some fun and look good doing it.
Glitsygrl
