So that was Christmas. The officially-sanctioned extended eating/drinking session is over for another year. I didn’t take a whole deal of time off work (absolutely nothing to do with the in-laws visiting) – only the actual public hoildays themselves, plus Boxing Day (which over here is officially called ‘The Day After Christmas’ – the Americans apparently didn’t know why it was called ‘Boxing Day’ either so just decided to drop the name entirely). Still, it was nice to have a few days off to play with the kids’ new toys.
The best present by far was Guitar Hero III – Legends of Rock for the Playstation 3. I Santa bought this as a ‘family’ present, reasoning that we’d all get some use out of it. (Gone are the days of family board games, I guess.) As I expected, Finn and I both loved playing it – when we could wrestle the guitar out of my father-in-law’s hands (he used to be in a band, way, way, back in the day and was apparently now trying to make up for the ‘wilderness years’). The girls were a different matter – Freya showed little interest (now, if it was a pink, fluffy guitar and all the songs were Hannah Montana it would have been a different story), and the wife refused to even touch it – no doubt holding out for Steel Guitar Hero IV – Legends of Country. Their loss – we boys had a great time with it.
Guitar Hero is (as the name suggests) a ‘game’ where you get to ‘play’ the guitar. It even comes with a little plastic guitar (about the size of a ukulele which is none too rock-god-ish) with five buttons on the neck for the notes and a single plastic ‘strum bar’ for a string (plus a whammy bar!). So it’s not exactly like a ‘real’ guitar, but for those of us who have signally failed to teach themselves to play an actual guitar (a constant source of personal regret), it’s a pretty neat (and easy) alternative.
I call it a ‘game’ in inverted commas, because it’s really just a toy. The gameplay is quite limited, largely consisting of a ‘career’ option where you progress through songs of increasing difficulty, culminating in a ‘guitar duel’ against a big, horned, cloven-hoofed character strangely called “Lou” (I guess actually calling him “The Devil” would have caused the kind of outrage in the Christian world that calling your teddy bear “Mohammed” would in the Moslem one [although I would have thought that as you get to ‘beat’ him, it would have been a positive Christian message – Yay, go Jebus!]). Anyway, there are 44 songs to get through, and four levels of difficulty: from “Easy” which uses three of the neck buttons and progresses at a moderate pace (you hit one note for about every two or three in the real song), through to “Expert” which uses all five buttons and you have to hit every note. But at the end of the day it’s still the same 44 songs on all four levels (and also the same ones on the ‘quick-play’ (non-career) option), and there’s only so many times you can hear Slowride by Foghat before you want to ram your little plastic ukulele in your ear just to make it stop. There are some additional songs in the ‘Co-Op’ mode, but you need to buy another guitar (controller) for that, which is just a scam.
That said, the songs are certainly one of the selling points – at least for me. They are all ‘real’ songs (as opposed to just anonymous stuff made up for the purpose of the game) and actually played/sung in full for you to accompany. (Although it should be noted that most songs are – admittedly very good – ‘covers’ of the originals, presumably to save on licensing fees. The game’s publishers obviously ran into some legal problems with this, as the game display announces “[song] as made famous by [band]” and not just “[song] by [band]”.) Given that Guitar Hero III is the ‘Legends of Rock’ version, I knew a lot of the songs, and was especially pleased by the opportunity to play along to Sonic Youth (Kool Thing), Smashing Pumpkins (Cherub Rock), The Stone Roses (She Bangs The Drums), and Rage Against The Machine (Bulls on Parade – the superior Killing In The Name, with its rousing chorus of “F*ck you I won’t do what you tell me”, no doubt being omitted to keep the PG level down). Add to that some top tunes [“made famous”] by Santana (Black Magic Woman), Stevie Ray Vaughan (Pride and Joy), The Rolling Stones (Paint In Black), The Who (The Seeker) and Eric Clapton (Crossroads), and you’ve got a pretty good compilation, never mind the game.
After almost a week of annoying the wife by plugging in the Playstation at every opportunity, I thought I was doing pretty well. In Easy mode, I’d managed to get through 43 of the 44 songs (I just can’t master the Slayer number – Buckets of Blood, or Reign of Blood, or Bloody Blood Bloodfest, or something equally cheery and life-affirming), beaten Lou in a Devil Went Down to Georgia guitar duel, and crowned myself official King of Rock. But then on New Year’s Day we were round for drinks at the house of someone else who also had Guitar Hero, and my son’s 10 year old friend kicked my ass. We duked it out on Story of My Life by Social Distortion, on the Hard level, and I crashed and burned miserably. Then I looked over and noticed that he was playing left-handed – so all of the buttons are backward to what you’re seeing on the screen (during the ‘guitar duels’ your opponent will occasionally do this to your guitar just to mess with you). And he still beat me. A ten year old who’s probably never heard the original songs anyway. I could have cried. If only I’d taken more time off work to practice…