Shredded Fingers

By Plagiarize

Recently I’ve been buried with review copies of horror related titles, and it’s forced a number of great games to be pushed further down the ‘to be played’ pile than I’d like. Shadow of the Colossus is buried. Call of Cthuhlu. Serious Sam 2. Quake 4. All buried as I slog on with Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil and Resident Evil 4 on PS2. Not that either of those are bad games, in the latter case far from it infact, but I don’t like having my hand forced. It’s hard to sit down and enjoy any time I spare on Call of Cthuhlu because someone else is reviewing it for the horror channel and I still have two games I’m working on reviewing. Still, for the most part I’ve been quite responsible. I’ll have both those games finished and reviewed probably by the end of the week, where upon I’ll run head first into Mario Kart DS… also the X-Box 360 launch looms big and large.

So really, it takes a great game to distract me from my work efforts. Two nights ago I was dedicatedly playing Land of the Dead when I’d have much rather have been playing, well anything else on my ‘to be played’ list. I made a conscious effort to lend Shadow of the Colossus to my brother in law so it wouldn’t distract me. Call of Cthuhlu is the kind of game you have to give at least a couple of hours to at a time, so while I’ve had a couple of play sessions it’s not been that difficult to stop being distracted by it.

Of course, I really I should have known better than running out on Friday and buying Guitar Hero.

One of my problems is, that when a game that excites me comes out, I don’t think ‘oh I haven’t finished games x, y and z’. I think… I need that game. Guitar Hero was just that sort of game, and hearing that Best Buy had broken street date by selling the copies of the game that were meant to be used as display models didn’t have me tut tutting and shaking my head, but driving down there and handing over some $70 cash for a game with a peripheral that’s unlikely to see more than one more game supporting it.

Guitar Hero though, is the kind of game I can’t pass up. It’s not so much innovative as it is quirky and my love of the quirky game is no secret. On the surface, it’s just a rhythm action game like any other. Infact, a rhythm action game a lot like Frequency. Coloured circles scroll down the screen towards a line and you have to hit them as they reach the line. Playing it on a pad, it’s just Frequency with two extra notes and rock music, nothing that noteable.

But you don’t play it with a pad. Donkey Konga and DK: Jungle Beat both showed me how much a novel controller can impact your gameplay. The bongo controllers basically have three inputs, a left drum, a right drum and a clap sensor, playing either of those games with a pad, and there’s no fun to them at all. But throw in those drums, and you’ll be grinning away like a loon. There’s still something magical about clapping in time to a song, and the game knowing how well you’re doing. It’s arguably the endorphin rush you get from DDR, and such games. The mechanics of all those games are the same, hit inputs in time with the onscreen prompts… but the interfaces completely reinvent them.

Guitar Hero, Donkey Konga and DDR are all very different games, but only if you use their special controllers… and the controller for Guitar Hero is about as special as they come.

My hands hurt. Muscles in my hands that I basically have never used before ache. Parts of two of my fingers are swollen. Heck some of the paint is coming off the plastic on the strummer of the guitar. I’ve hit that game hard, and I’m working my way through the hard difficulty right now, and it just keeps getting better and better.

The magic of Guitar Hero is that, by approximating real guitar mechanics and techniques, albeit it in a simplified manner, and giving you something to hold that feels like a guitar, your body and brain are tricked into believing that you’re really playing guitar. You aren’t obviously, but it feels so much like you are. As the game gets more and more difficult, and the actions and notes better approximate the music, the feeling strengthens. When you nail an espescially hard solo or twiddley bit, the accompanying guitar notes are as rewarding as anything else.

When you miss a note, the note doesn’t play. Nothing is worse than missing the beginning of a really long sustain, and sitting there in awkward silence waiting for it to finally end so you can get back to playing.

It’s a brilliantly realised concept that’ll tire you out, hurt you if you play it as obsessively as I am, and yet It’ll reward you more than most any other game I’ve played since Ouendan. Rhythm action games seem to be as capable of putting you into the zone as shmups, making them this weird cross over of mainstream and hardcore.

IGN did a roundtable, discussing whether or not Guitar Hero’s controller was proof positive of the Revolution’s controller being a good idea. I can see why they came up with the topic now having played the game on both a guitar and a pad. Changing the controller, even when the gameplay mechanisms of the game itself don’t change, can completely revolutionise the game play experience. More active games can be more fun, and performing a wider array of actions than current pads offer will make games more immersive.

But, really, the only thing Guitar Hero shows is that the US has been long overdue a guitar game, and that crazy peripherals can make a game more fun, when the game design is there to back them up. That’s the crucial piece of the picture still missing from the Revolution mystery. Using two revolution controllers as drum sticks is something I hope will be well realised. I actually look forwards to sweating, and exhausting muscles I don’t normally think about.

And if I don’t get those reviews finished this week, it’s because I’m trying to nail the solo in ‘Get Ready 2 Rokk’ on hard. I figure if I don’t stop playing the game, those muscles will get up to speed and never ache again and heck, if I do start trying to play guitar, at least that’ll be one less thing to go through.