GoldfishX Oct 29, 2007
First time going to a midnight launch. It was a pretty awesome feeling...About 80 people showed up and it ranged from "Yeah, can't wait to do Fire and Flames on Expert with Hyperspeed" to "OMFG, how do you even DO hard mode!?" to "My boyfriend dragged me out here for Halo 3, I'm doing the same for GH" So about an hour of that, they started letting people go in. I was stuck at the back of the line, so it took another good hour to get up and get my copy (PS2 version) Interesting note: Everyone buying a bundle got either the Wii version or (especially) the 360 version. No one got the PS3 bundle.
So far, I've done the obligatory "unlock everything for Quick Play" on medium and I've started hitting some of the ones I was looking forward to on hard, so I'm looking forward to officially getting my hands dirty from here on out. Can't put my finger on the speeds...I know Medium is faster than it used to be, but then "Rock You Like a Hurricane" on hard (a fifth tier song), I had to alt-strum because the notes were coming too fast to single strum, which never happened in GH2 or 80's.
The Tom Morello Guitar Battle threw me for a loop, though; I lost the first time, simply because I wasn't sure what I was doing. My best advice: use every attack power-up that you receive straight away once Tom starts his sections.
That's about the gist of it. If I get a whammy or string break, I wait for a section where I can screw him up from getting a power-up, but I just dump a difficulty boost or 2X notes as soon as possible because they're not useful VS the CPU. I did the three battles on medium...The final one's a real bitch though. You don't get any power-ups until close to 2 minutes into the match and I don't think there are enough power-ups or notes to kill the final boss without luck. Hopefully that's not the case on hard. And on top of that, "Devil Went Down to Georgia" is not available outside of battle. Overall, I chalk the battles up as an idea that shouldn't have left the planning stages or at least need to be refined quite a bit...Dying from the Death Drain instead of, oh say, looping the song and continuing the battle is really lame. It even looks half-assed when it happens. On the plus side, I really liked Morello's original piece.
The new interface is a nice touch, with things looking sleeker all around. The venues look great, but the new character modeling took a hit in my opinion; they just look more fugly, and the animation, at least in the PS2 version, becomes a bit herky-jerky at times. And that damned string pull sound every time a message comes up (like the confirmations during auto-save, for instance) has become nerve-grating. I simply turned off auto-saving this time, largely because the saves seem to take an unusually long time this time around.
The cast looks like it got beat with an ugly stick. Izzy's design (and maybe Lars) is probably the only one that resembles his GH2 design in any tasteful way. And Midori is actually kind of creepy...She looks like a guy in badly designed drag. And less mention of the singer, the better. I think "neanderthal" about covers it. I thought the string-pull sound was someone yelling "shit" off-camera on Youtube and it still sounds like it. Really annoying. And I kind of miss the board shake when I activate star power. It's going to throw me off going back to GH2.
On the plus side, the storyline (especially towards the end) is funny and the venues are pretty cool (and not just minor cosmetic changes, like 80's was).
