Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

Sunday July 1st brought the release of the second Guitar Hero game for the Wii only a week after the release (finally!) of Rock Band. What's the music geek to do? Why, buy it of course! After all, I'd had enough left over from my birthday money to get this game in addition to getting Rock Band. What surprised me initially, though, was the game was priced at nearly $60. This was odd considering Guitar Hero III was only priced at $50, and in all honesty, despite the fact that Aerosmith only contains a little over half the number of songs on GH3, I expected a $50 price tag. I went ahead and got it, but The Queen wanted to get online as soon as we got home to see if anyone had a special price on it, since Wal-Mart honors competitor ads.

Didn't take long before we found a 49.99 cost on the game, so I marched myself back to Wal-Mart to get a reduction from my 59.74 to 49.99. Initially, the person behind the counter said that for competitor ads that reduce a price by $10 or more, they required the ad. Never heard of this before, but I argued that the reduction was only 9.75, not 10 (thank you very much, weird Wal-Mart pricing). After he checked with someone else, I got the reduction.

Now to play it. GH: Aerosmith was a refreshing and interesting change from GH3. The charts were constructed a bit differently. Medium was actually medium, and not "hard without the orange button". Hard was a bit more difficult, but not "expert without three button chords". Expert requires some fascinating finger positions that remind me of actually playing the guitar, instead of an overwhelming focus on three button chords and cripplingly fast solos. It has a lot of challenge to it, but instead of being insane and frustrating to play, it was a lot of fun. While difficulty is a nice factor in a game, frustration is not. It's entirely possible that Raining Blood on GH3 is actually that hard to play in real life, but it's too much for a video game played on a toy guitar. On Aerosmith, I completed the hard level fairly quickly, though they also enhanced the "pling" sound when you miss notes, so I admit that on some songs, I sounded more like I was playing the slots instead of Aerosmith. No jackpots, unfortunately.

But it's a fun game, and I hope when they come out with Guitar Hero: World Tour, it retains the sort of style of charts that this version has. Definitely worth playing. The only thing I wish it had was a co-op career like GH3 had instead of plugging the co-op under multiplayer.