I mean... when you boil it all down (excluding vocals anyhow) isn't it all just timing?

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And when it comes to GH vs. RB, there's the eternal "Artificial Difficulty" argument.

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More on gameplay-- I semi-hated RB1 because it was waaaaaay too easy. On the other hand, I thought the difficulty of GH3/GHWT was a little unbalanced. 'Hard' feels like a snoozefest, while 'Expert', on some songs, is too hard. (Please keep in mind that I'm referring to the guitar parts only...)

We all probably know of at least one good example-- I can pretty much 99% 'One' by Metallica on 'Expert', until you get to that one section.... seven hundred notes in the span of two seconds. You all know what I'm talking about. Your rock meter will go from 'green' to 'failed' if you miss just one of those stupid hammer-ons...

There is the 'GH is overcharted' arguments, but I don't care about that. If I wanted pinpoint accuracy, I'd put the plastic down and pick up one of my real guitars. Videogaming is videogaming.

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Except that we'll assume not every single person who plays plastic instrument tapping games are guitarists. Mostly because, let's face it, if it was actual guitarists who were interested in this phenomenon the Real vs. Fake war wouldn't still be going on.

You might not care about that, but I personally do and pretty much a good portion of players who've played both and chose RB do as well. If the song feels off, it ruins the experience, and yes, even while inebriated. GH3 was bad. Yes, GH2's covers were atrocious (Harmonix, please, NEVER do another cover again. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top), but the main element - the gameplay, was very solid, and in fact moreso than GH3's. Ultimately, if we DO play a game, then gameplay is more important than song selection.

Otherwise, gameplay is less important than song selection.

As far as the Hard/Expert unbalancing goes, once Neversoft learns to notechart properly, this effect will still be there, except there won't be 700 notes in 2 seconds.

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"Harmonix, please, NEVER do another cover again. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top"

Is that a Monkey Island 2 reference?

On mathers at hand: Having played Guitar Hero: World Tour for the first time yesterday, I felt like they improved the gameplay from GH3. But still the songs are way harder than they should be and overcharting is a major problem. I liked the little add-ons but really the only song I loved playing was Sweet Home Alabama.

There are some songs that I just don't understand why notes are placed there on the note chart. I mean the feeling of what you play doesn't really convey what you hear... I like GH but honestly, I left the bandwagon after the goal seemed to become: "How to make an extreme note chart we at activision can't even play".

Rock Band (Which I prefer) might be a oversimplistic but all in all it's made to have fun with friends. Truth is, some of your friends I'm sure, aren't as good as you with the plastic instrument thingy and should still be able to play with you.

Oh and one last thing, the presentation of GH suggest rock, heavy metal, hard rock and all in all, a healthy dose of headbang... So: WTF La Bamba??

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Just the other day i brought the game to my grandma's (family time every week) and we started playing. I was on guitar in hard (i'm still not good enough for expert on many songs) and everyone else in easy (my dad and my cousins) on drums, vocals and bass. None of them ever played guitar hero and we had no problems having fun.

Whenever a part got too hard for them and they started to go on red i just activated the star power so the metter went to green again and they could have more time to recover.

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In GH3, the timing windows feel more generous, but the levels are more interesting and packed with notes. In "hard" there are actually hard songs, and a couple I can't beat, while "extreme" is usually too hard, but sometimes quite playable - the difficulty curve seems more curved now instead of going from boring to ok to impossible.

As for music... I think they're all ok up to 3, but not fantastic. My faves tend to end up in the indie tracks anyway, but I did really like some of the normal tracks in GH3.

Reading Kotaku, you'd think it was the biggest flop in the series, while RB walked all over it. RB was alright, but TBH it still feels like the same game to me since I'm most into guitar. (It's also funny how people accuse Guitar Hero of ripping off... Guitar Hero, yet when Harmonix sells the rights to it openly, then makes a one-off, they're still the good guys somehow.)

Ah well, either way, at this point, if GH3 is a failure, then so is Super Mario Bros, haha.

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anything resembling a game, as in requiring skill, endurance, or adherence to rules

For your trolling pleasure.

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Yes, I'm sure it was just thrilling to beat all the songs on easy.

@xeleion:

I actually disagree with that. I felt that there were quite a large amount of good songs in the game and the charts were perfect to me. Comparing it to RB2 and GHWT, I think GH3 was much funner to play.

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Same here. GH, GH2, RB, RB2.

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You can like BOTH games!

Anyway i'm having a ton of fun with GHWT. I'll have another ton of fun whenever ea gets their shit together and release rockband 2 as a standalone disk in México. Once i have both games then i'm set for the rest of the year. The Beatles game is a given since my dad is a fan and the Metallica game is gonna be seriously considered, but i'll probably just wait for GH5.

I also think that to actually enjoy both games you NEED both sets of drums, because GHWT is incredibly fun with 5 pads (except that country song, that's incredibly dull on drums) and i've heard that the translation to the rockband set is not that good. And i can't imagine playing rockband four drums with the GH set... it would be kind of a mess. But i shal see. I'll concentrate in vocals, guitar and bass for RB2.

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