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Guitar Hero 5 Review

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:22:00 +0000

Wide-ranging improvements and an excellent new Party Play mode make Guitar Hero 5 a great way to bring some rock into your living room.

The Good

Party Play mode is superbly social
All songs available right from the get-go
Improved visuals
Music studio is much more accessible.

The Bad

Lackluster song import feature
Vocalists need controller to activate star power.

The Guitar Hero franchise took a big leap last year with World Tour, incorporating vocals and drums and making a bid for Rock Band’s multiplayer music game crown. While World Tour was a great debut, Guitar Hero 5 is a more refined, more accessible game that better fulfills the promise of a full band experience with the Guitar Hero name. A number of enhancements make the game more enjoyable across the board, and the new Party Play mode sets the standard for relaxed, social gameplay in the genre. The freestyle jam mode provides a fun creative outlet, and folks interested in recording their creations will have a much easier time thanks to the significantly improved music studio interface. While none of Guitar Hero 5′s improvements are groundbreaking, they all contribute to this very entertaining, very well put-together package that is sure to please both aspiring and established Guitar Heroes

The most significant new feature in Guitar Hero 5 is Party Play mode. When you start up the game, you see a brief intro animation, and then the game starts up a random song and a video of Guitar Hero characters performing. You can press the start button to call up the main menu, or you can press the yellow button to jump right into the song being performed. Your note highway appears, and after selecting a few options, you’re playing the Guitar Hero you know and love. Up to four players can join this way, using whatever combination of instruments they want. Two vocalists, a drummer, and a bass player? Yes. Four guitarists? By all means. You can’t fail in this mode, and changing difficulty, skipping the song, and dropping out are all easily accomplished through a little menu that only obscures your own note highway. The result is a casual play environment that is accessible, welcoming, and delightfully low key. You can jump in and out as you like, rotating in other players or just taking a break. The music keeps playing, and you can tailor your experience on the fly without any abrupt pauses or song restarts. It’s a great way to entice shy friends to join in the fun, and it makes firing up Guitar Hero 5 at a party a more informal prospect. A way to exclude certain songs from the random play rotation would have been welcome, but you can temporarily interrupt a song to create a set list and then jump right back into the music. Party Play strips away anything that might impede your enjoyment of the game, and as a result, Guitar Hero 5 shines as an example of how to make music games accessible and fun for a wide range of players.

If you prefer more deliberate and finite sets, then Quickplay is a great place to go. Here you can construct a set list and play with up to four players, again using whatever instrument combinations you see fit. Quickplay also makes accommodations for more casual players, allowing only those playing on hard or expert difficulty to fail out. Previously, you could save failed bandmates only by using the star power you earned by nailing glowing notes. You can still use this method, but Guitar Hero 5 gives you another option. When a bandmate fails, a crowd meter pops up. If the rest of the band plays well enough for long enough, the failed bandmate is revived and the band keeps on rocking. There is no limit to how many times you can revive a bandmate, though it does seem to get harder as the fails pile up. The crowd meter makes your band less dependent on star power opportunities that may or may not appear in time and also means you don’t necessarily have to save your star power for a flagging fellow rocker. Quickplay is also a good place to make a bid for a spot on the extensive leaderboards. There are high-score categories for each song, each instrument, and each difficulty, so score-seekers of all levels can participate.

Xbox 360 Avatars make strange band fellows.

If earning rewards for your skills is your thing, Career mode once again provides a place where you progress through different venues, playing songs and unlocking new gigs. In Guitar Hero 5, you earn up to five stars for each performance, and the more stars you collect, the more gigs you unlock. This mode will feel very familiar to Guitar Hero veterans, but there’s one new element that helps keep it from going stale. Each song has a bonus challenge associated with it that allows you to earn up to eight stars per song instead of the usual five. These three-tiered challenges (one extra star per tier) can be either instrument specific (whammy for a certain amount of time as the guitarist) or band-wide (maintain a 4x multiplier for a certain amount of time). This variety encourages you to mix up the instruments you use or to play with a few friends, and there’s a handy onscreen meter that tracks your progress throughout the song. Some of these challenges will be easy for confident players, while others are so difficult that only experts will have a shot. Earning a few extra stars is nice, but completing challenges can also earn you bonus unlockables, including new outfits, sponsored equipment sets, cheats, and new playable characters.

In addition to franchise standbys like Axel Steel and Judy Nails, Guitar Hero 5 features the likenesses of a handful of real rock stars. You unlock many of these stars just by playing through their songs successfully in Career mode (no boss battles here), while other stars become available only after you complete one of the aforementioned bonus challenges. Once unlocked, these stars can join Guitar Hero characters, your user-created rockers, and your Xbox 360 avatar onstage. This gives rise to some truly bizarre band lineups. Seeing Kurt Cobain perform onstage with three avatars is like watching a bizarre segment from Sesame Street, while watching four Johnny Cashes sing a song by Public Enemy is just ridiculous. Regardless of whether you find these strange pairings hilarious or utterly stupid, Guitar Hero 5 delivers improved visuals that you’ll easily notice when you get a chance to look away from your note highway. Character animations are more fluid, and lip synching looks good, even on the avatars that are just cycling between a few different mouth icons. The crowds still look like a patterned mass of clones, but the lively performance camera angles ensure that you’ll notice them only at the beginning and end of your song.

One of the most improved aspects of Guitar Hero 5 is the music studio. The overhauled interface makes it much easier to lay down tracks, and you can learn more about the different options simply by holding down the fret button you would use to select them. It still requires patience and skill to make a decent song, but the barrier of entry has been significantly lowered. If you’re not at the composition stage yet, you can flex your music muscle in the new jam session mode, which allows you to choose a background loop and play over it to your heart’s content. This feature makes it much easier to experiment with playing music with your not-actually-musical instrument, and noodling around with some cooperative friends can be fun.

GHJam mode is a fun place to cut loose with your plastic guitar.

There’s an extensive set list on the disc, and players can once again download user-created tunes as well as official downloadable content tracks. However, if you’re looking to import songs from your copy of Guitar Hero World Tour, you’re in for some disappointment. After entering the 20-digit Unique Owner ID from the back of your World Tour manual, you have to pay 280 Microsoft points to download digital copies of the World Tour songs to your hard drive. Worse, you get only 35 of the 80-plus tracks from World Tour. Though the 35 tracks have been updated to include stuff like band moments (a bonus for playing in unison) and expert plus drumming (with adaptor-enabled double foot pedal action), it’s disappointing that a higher percentage of tracks aren’t available.

There are a number of other sundry tweaks in Guitar Hero 5, but the core gameplay remains largely the same as World Tour. The new Rockfest multiplayer mode eschews item-based battles for more natural challenges, like nailing the longest streak of notes. Oddly, vocal star power can no longer be activated by tapping the mic, so singers have to keep a controller on hand if they want to use star power. Other than this change, and the disappointing song import options, Guitar Hero 5 improves upon its predecessor in almost every category. It’s an easy buy for folks who bought World Tour, and it is a great option for those looking to see what this plastic video game rock craze is all about. It won’t blow the roof off, but Guitar Hero 5 will definitely get your party rockin’.

By Chris Watters, GameSpot

Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? Review (PSP)

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:38:55 +0000

Prinnies are done with being used as mere cannon fodder in other people’s elaborate games of turn-based war. The combustible penguins from the Disgaea series have ditched the strategic grid in favor of a starring role in an action platformer, but even though they’ve turned their back on being hurled at enemy forces against their will, that doesn’t mean that they’re any less fun to play with. The intense action is always rewarding and downright heart-pounding at times so the shift in genre shouldn’t be too devastating for longtime fans of these sinful penguins. There are some control quirks that will cause more than a few cheap deaths, but the devious level design, intense boss battles, and ridiculous story make this a must-play adventure for both Disgaea purists looking for a change of pace and 2D action fans looking to appease their hyperactive thumbs.

A flying carpet lets your penguin take to the air like a normal bird.

Prinnies are now the stars of the show, but that doesn’t mean that they are acting on their own accord. These flightless birds are the reincarnated souls of evil humans being forced to serve in purgatory under the whims of a crazed demon master. Etna is in charge of your flock, and when she finds that her dessert has been stolen from right under her nose, it’s up to you and 999 of your closest friends to obtain the ingredients for the Ultra Dessert. Your cruel mistress mocks your every move, and her callous attitude leads to many funny situations. In fact, the whole journey is chock-full of jokes, from a boss remarking that your sauce is remarkably weak to a prinny gingerly holding up a soiled passion diaper that is to be used in the recipe. Even though the focus is still on pure action, the story interludes add a lot to the experience, rewarding you with humorous anecdotes after every major fight.

What isn’t funny is your finite reserve of prinnies waiting to die for a fabled dessert. Etna has 1,000 penguins in her command, and though you’ll control only one at a time, you’ll still find yourself going through hundreds of lives as you traverse tricky platforms and bop angry bosses until they submit. You should be able to finish the adventure with several hundred prinnies still in reserve, but if you find yourself without a hero to control, you aren’t completely out of luck. Those who burn through the whole troupe of explosive birds are able to start a new game with a special attack that should make the adventure slightly easier. This is a challenging game, but the smooth difficulty curve eases you into the world gradually, building on your past exploits so you rarely feel overwhelmed in battle.

Your attack repertoire is limited, but it’s still more than you’d expect from a penguin. Your only two attacks are a sword swipe (both in the air and on the ground) and a butt bash, which stuns enemies. You can also perform a dash if you need to make it across a particularly long precipice and, of course, the always-handy double jump. Although these moves function admirably for the most part, there are still a few control issues. First, jumping is extremely rigid because you can adjust your angle only when you press the button. This makes it difficult to land precisely, especially in the heat of battle. Second, your butt stomp has noticeable lag from when you push the button to when you begin the move, which leaves you agonizingly vulnerable in air. Finally, you can’t smoothly string your moves together. If you swipe an enemy with a sword and then see a cannonball steaming toward your head, you’ll have to wait a beat before you can duck out of the way. None of these are game-breaking, but they lead to more than a few unavoidable deaths.

To survive the treacherous levels, you’ll need to land on tiny platforms above bottomless pits and quickly dispose of foes. Enemies will attack at all times, from all angles, and just making your way to the next checkpoint can feel like a minor triumph. There is an element of memorization as well; enemies strike without warning from offscreen, and you’ll find yourself being pushed to your death when eager bad guys nudge you off cliffs if you aren’t careful. But the levels are able to thrill rather than frustrate because of the forgiving checkpoint system, which ensures that you won’t have to traipse over the same ground repeatedly. The excitement of stringing together consecutive butt stomps, vanquishing your enemies with a fell swoop of your sword, and making a turbo-charged leap across a gaping void make the small annoyances little more than forgettable missteps.

Universal Soldier: The Return download

Believe it or not, penguins actually love tropical islands.

At the end of every level, you’re rewarded with an encounter against a cunning boss. These are prefaced by witty banter between the always-aggressive opponent and the all-too-meek prinny, serving as a ridiculous setup for the ensuing fights. The battles are purely pattern-based, forcing you to learn the ins and outs of your enemies’ attacks before you’re able to finish them off. Although the boss fights can be extremely difficult as the game progresses, a victory over your foe always seems obtainable with just one more try. The fair difficulty curve ensures that, when you finally raise your arms in victory, it will be with a feeling of satisfaction rather than brow-wiping relief. There is one boss–the final in the game–who goes against this formula, though, and is far too demanding to be fun. However, the other battles are engaging and exciting.

Prinny’s first attempt at starring in his own game is an undeniable success, even with a few missteps along the way. The boss battles are truly special, combining the need for fast reflexes with clever dialog for a number of memorable encounters. The levels have no qualms about punishing you, but the joy of getting past a daunting obstacle cannot be denied. It’s a shame that Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero suffers from a few control issues, given that the rest of the adventure is solidly constructed and quite rewarding. The leap from strategy-game grunt to action platformer star is daring, but Prinny makes the transition with style.

Source [GameSpot]

Guitar Hero World Tour sells 3.4M in '08, Rock Band 2 hits 1.7M

admin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:03:57 +0000

NPD figures have Activision’s rocker outselling Harmonix rival two-to-one in the United States last year.

Last week the NPD Group, the industry standard of game-industry research firms, released its US sales figures for 2008. However, the company’s top 10 game rankings only tracked individual products, or SKU (Stock Keeping Units), sold at retailers in the US.

The name of our band is “KACHING!”

As a result, it was unclear how two of the year’s biggest rivals–Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2–fared against one another. Besides being multiplatform releases, the two solidly reviewed rhythm games each came in various retail configurations, such as a la carte or with one or more instruments.

Now, NPD has shared the combined US sales of both World Tour and Rock Band 2 across all platforms and SKUs. The result? The first full-band (drums, guitar/bass, and vocals) installment in Activision’s billion-dollar franchise sold 3.4 million copies domestically, twice as many as Rock Band 2′s 1.7 million haul. Analysts had the latter game, developed by former Tony Hawk shop Neversoft, selling nearly 1 million units in November alone.

Though the two-to-one ratio is a blowout victory in purely dollar terms, several factors play a role in World Tour’s success. For one, the Guitar Hero brand is better known than Rock Band, even though the latter series is generally better received by critics. Besides being available in more retail configurations, Guitar Hero World Tour also went on sale on all platforms–the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3–on October 26. By contrast, Rock Band 2 rolled out onto its console on a staggered schedule, hitting the 360 on September 14, the PS3 October 19, and the Wii and PlayStation 2 on December 18. That means that only 13 days’ worth of sales on the two latter platforms–which have the biggest installed bases in the US–were recorded by NPD.

Source [ GameSpot ]