These are broadcasting music videos 24/7, and have themed shows that change every half an hour. Currently there are two streaming channels (with a third coming), and you can switch between these whenever you want – even mid song. Imagine Spotify for Guitar games, and you’re somewhere near what it is. While the guitar itself is well made, and well worth lauding thanks to the innovative input and gameplay changes, I’m tempted to say that GHTV is the true outstanding moment. There’s really something for everyone, and with support for a mic and a second guitar, you’d have to be fairly anti-social to not get involved. The sweet spot for me ended up being advanced difficulty, but I aim to get to expert some time soon.Īs usual, the songs on offer will be subjective, but there’s plenty here to enjoy: Green Day, Soundgarden, Kasabian, Kings of Leon, Blink 182, and The Who run the gamut of rock and/or indie, but there’re also tracks from Eminem, Katy Perry, Mumford & Sons, and One Republic. It won’t take too long, and the base mechanics are still there (hold notes and shake the whammy, score multipliers, hammer-ons and pull-offs), but it means that it reduces the need to use your pinky, Guitar Hero Live on higher difficulties is a brutally hard game. What this all means, is that you have to relearn how you play guitar-based music games. Thanks to having these two layers of buttons, there are now barre chords (fret two buttons in one column) at once – and these start out simply, but eventually progress to the point where you are nearly playing genuine, real-guitar barre chords. There’s no orange, blue, yellow (etc) here, instead it’s an empty darker fill for the top buttons, and a white fill for the bottom ones. They’re also colour-coded, but not in a traditional sense. Three up three down – these are signified on-screen by plectrum shapes approaching the traditional lanes that are either facing up or down to signify the up or down buttons. Rather than the five buttons and five frets we’re used to, Live splits six buttons across three frets. The entire thing is seamless, and appears to be hidden behind motion blur as the camera swings hard from one angle to another, and in the moment, it’s like some weird voodoo magic.īut the guitar itself is one of the truly innovative parts. It’s utterly silly, but it works as a motivational tool, and I quickly upped my game. Jumping up a difficulty and initially struggling, as my viewpoint swang to the moshpit, they started throwing cups (of piss, one presumes) at me. Play badly, and they’ll react accordingly, too. If you perform well then the crowd will cheer you as the camera swings to a close up view of the most loyal fans. The idea is that you are seeing through the guitarist’s eyes on stage. It only gets bigger and better as the setlists go on, and the entire concept somehow works really bloody well. I watched him play it – you can see the results of his first play in this video – and noticed he found it to be cool as well. But it must be stupid, right? So I even drafted in a friend to play it, to ensure I hadn’t lost the plot. After a few three-song setlists in varying sized arenas, something was very right about it all. Even as you start, and a long haired roadie talks you through the basics of the instrument, I thought I was going to laugh. Now look, I’m well aware of how it looked pre-release, and I fully expected to be laughing myself silly at the over-the-top “you are a rock star” nonsense. Freestylegames has made a third one: something that feels cool despite itself. The elephant in the room is that Live is a FMV game, and there’s really only two types of those: firstly, the one that is funny because the developer has taken it all so seriously, and secondly, the one that is funny because the dev knows it’s stupid, and goes with it. From the very get-go, the entire UI has been overhauled, and there’s a clear, distinct division between the core “Live” mode, and GHTV. You can go the route we’ve seen elsewhere, and play on nostalgia, and make a game wholly for the fans, or you can go away, come up with an entirely new concept, and hope that it works, and is successful.Īnd the latter is exactly what freestylegames has done, because Guitar Hero Live breathes fresh air into a genre that needed it, and it could very well revitalise many people’s dormant love of rocking out with a plastic guitar out, because so many smart decisions are made, and everything about Live feels so fresh and new. Indeed, there’s only so many ways you can go about bringing back something that was so big. Approaching a brand as beloved as Guitar Hero, one that burned as bright as can be, then was extinguished just as quickly thanks to the over-saturation of the genre, cannot be easy.
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