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30 Oct 2007, 1:34
Beware Guitar Hero: it will transform you. It will transform you in ways that you expected drugs to, but didn't. It will make you lose your head the way watching a movie you've seen twelve times will. It will make your wrist and fingers ache only in the way that masturbating for an hour and a half will make your wrist and fingers ache. And it will be rewarding in pretty much the same way that all these other private, inane, and squishy activities are rewarding.
Meaning that you'll have a blast while you're playing it but, afterward, you'll realize a magnificent waste of time it is.
I peaked at "I'm a little teacup", as made famous by little girls the whole world 'round.
Because, despite how fun the fantasy Guitar Hero creates may be, it's just that: a fantasy. You're not a rock star. You're a troglodyte pretending you're a rock star. Even if you can make it to hell on hard—the last level is hell, and the Dark Lord presides over your show there—you're no closer to being a rock star than you were when you began. And when you beat it, you don't really become a bat out of hell—your character sprouts giant bat wings and you zoom from hell on a chopper when you beat it—you just feel like one. And that feeling will last only until you start feeling proud of yourself.
I have no idea who this is, but he seems so, so happy
The control of Guitar Hero is a plastic guitar-like contraption that you strap to yourself. It's somewhat smaller than a guitar and somewhat larger than a ukulele. If you're right-handed, near your left hand will be five buttons—vraisemblable of the fingerboard—and near your right will be a trigger—the strings?—that, if you can manage to flip it and simultaneously hit one or more of those five buttons, makes your character play a note. It's really simple to do. The challenge of the game is in playing the right note at the right time.
The gameplay is simiar to Dance Dance Revolution in how things signifying an action you're supposed to take come scrolling toward you on tracks in time, and you prove you're a badass by zapping those things by doing that action. There are four levels of difficulty—the harder the level you select, the closer you'll feel that you're actually playing the song. If you choose easy, the game supplies somewhere between 50–85% of the notes for you, which, if you know or find yourself nodding or stomping along to the song, actually makes hitting the right notes harder. And on hella hard, you might as well be playing a real guitar. But you aren't. You're fingering buttons. If you're going to be fingering anything so adroitly—and you aren't eight years old—methinks that thing shouldn't be plastic.
That's what bothers me the most about Guitar Hero: the accomplishments have no relevance in realty. The skills don't translate into real skills. After playing it, you can't entertain your friends (which, if you can't recall, are people you like that, every once in a while, are in your presence) by playing the songs you just tapped along with on a real guitar. You haven't created anything and you get no bonus points for improvisation. You just played an amped-up Whack-A-Mole for three hours and wrongly feel cooler than you really are.
Huzzah, big boy. Rock on.
I hate Guitar Hero. Playing Cowboys From Hell on a real guitar takes less time and patience than playing fucking Mother in Guitar Hero.
That game can choke on my balls.
—Ezekiel, 14:58, 30 Oct 2007
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