I reviewed Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for Variety. It was pretty okay, but I found it a little bit indecisive and tacked together. For someone like me who is training, training, I tell you, to be a self-masturbatory plastic guitar soloist and an Expert-mode button-masher (on GHIII, I'm foundering in the last segment of Hard mode), I found GH: Aerosmith a bit too easy.
After turning in my review, I of course went and read other people's to compare opinions, and found I wasn't the only person to note the kinder, gentler difficulty curve, largely due to the fact that Joe Perry is a pretty melodic soloist and not generally German metal twiddly-fiddly. With the exception of Walk this Way, which was pretty awesome to play, I didn't find too many of the songs really juicy and satisfying from the standpoint of technical proficiency.
Though, in the end, spending so much time on GH: Aerosmith for review was forgiving enough that it forced me to finally master using only three fingers unless there's an orange note, a skill I desperately needed to learn to take it to the next level.
Anyway, okay, so, too easy, sort of dull notewise. But then I began to reflect on what my favorite songs to play from GH: Aerosmith were, and I realized that the ones I'm most inclined to revisit are ballads, specifically the cover of Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes." That's probably the easiest song in the game, so it had me headscratching a little as to why I loved playing it. Aside from the fact I especially like the song anyway, is it because Midori looks so cute actually singing along?
It got me mulling the whole contentious culture war between Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The general opinion, to me, seems to come down to a couple key differences; Guitar Hero is squarely a gamer's game, geared at challenging and inflating the button-masher's sense of ego and technical mastery, while Rock Band is a true "band simulator" that's all about the music, man. Activision, says the general consensus, is a sellout extraordinaire, slapping the once-glorious franchise with cartoony trappings and horrible energy-drink metal, while the eclectic, sophisticated musical tastes of the Harmonix team are well-respected.
It's easy to see why Rock Band comes out on top in the court of public opinion -- unless you are hardcore and lower-key collaborative play is too mainstream for you, one supposes. GH purists seem to envision that Rock Band sets clutter classy urban apartments or suburban houses for 30-plus marketing professionals and investment bankers to enjoy during martini parties. The horror.
I'm generally the easygoing type; I found GHIII-era cartooniness to be sorta cute, I'm not in the business of calling anyone sellouts (not in print, at least!), and I understand the Rock Band preference that most of my friends and colleagues maintain -- excepting a surly, kvetchy period of resistant resentment at the game's launch when it appeared that everyone I knew professionally received a free copy except for me.
GH: Aerosmith had just whetted my fake guitar appetite enough to tempt me into spending much of my weekend practicing GHIII songs. I'd expected to be joyful to return to the bosom of Dragonforce, and I did have a rather ecstatic, note-streaking and personal best score-defying run at Metallica's "One." But now, I'm feeling the itch to just zone out with "All the Young Dudes" and "Dream On," a song that encapsulates, for me, high school dance angst over a rather particular memory.
Then I stumbled on this very interesting blog post at Versus CluClu Land (VersusCluCluLand? Versus Clu Clu Land? Versus CluCluLand?! A spiritual sibling to Sexy Videogameland!) wherein the writer got to pick Harmonix's brain on how they select songs and map notes, and I found it rather enlightening:
I talked with a Harmonix staffer about the process, and I was surprised to learn that the most important factor in the process is musicianship. The people responsible for note tracking, she told me, aim to reproduce the way that the song is played on a real guitar to the greatest extent possible within the confines of the guitar controller's limited repertoire of moves.Ah, so the peanut gallery is correct -- Rock Band's priority is to be a music sim, not a finger-contortion sim or a hand-injurer. And while I still enjoy the way that Guitar Hero solos taunt me with their apparent impossibility, and the adrenaline rush I get from gaining in proficiency, rocking out to the ballads on GH: Aerosmith helped me realize that I like pretending to play music, too.
So I've become a little bit sold. And then, I saw these potential track lists for Rock Band 2, noted that in addition to the stunning fiercity of their general win-win awesome, one of my total favorite Interpol songs is on there, and, hey, that's really all it took.
[Header webcomic comes from xkcd, which I just remembered is pretty fab.]
