by Cat Sentz

Created on: May 21, 2008   Last Updated: March 06, 2012

If you haven't given into the music game genre yet and played Guitar Hero, then skip the exercise in franchise milking and go buy Rock Band. If, however, you are a Guitar Hero enthusiast then please, pull out the leather pants and read on. The Guitar Hero fan base is practically insatiable, and I more than love the addition to the party game genre. There really is something magical about a game with plastic peripherals that makes you feel like a rock star.

Like any good rhythm game, Guitar Hero III relies heavily on a good soundtrack, and delivers. After the success of previous Guitar Hero games I can easily imagine that some bands were just a little more willing to license their music, and from Metallica and the Rolling Stones to Aerosmith and the Sex Pistols you won't be disappointed. Unless of course you wanted original recordings, because as usual, most are covers.

If you were as disheartened by Rocks the '80's as I was, take heart, Guitar Hero III introduces some much needed improvements. Among them are cooperative career mode with songs geared toward bass and rhythm parts, and battle mode in which players duel against each other in order to win the crowd over. The co-op career mode is missing from online, though perhaps a worse grievance against co-op is the inability to play the battle songs from career mode with a friend.

The online does include the aforementioned battle mode as well as non-career co-op play, and a face-off mode. Unlike the 360 version in which you can invite a friend, the PS3 version will likely leave you playing mostly strangers. I didn't really take issue with this, as most of my co-op gameplay happens when friends are over; the single-player mode is plenty consuming. All versions have an online compilation of statistics, tournament management and clans, which is nice but so expected it doesn't really garner Guitar Hero any favor.

The Les Paul guitar is one of the best improvements to the game, but if you would rather just play with your wired guitars you won't suffer for it. After all, how many guitar peripherals does the average gamer need? If you do spring for it, be warned, earlier Guitar Hero games are not compatible and apparently we can pretty much forget about using it with Rock Band.

I guess I'm supposed to be impressed that I can play as Slash or Tom Morello. I'm not, and the lack of character creation capability is pretty pronounced. The character models don't exactly raise the bar, and while mo-cap was done for the licensed

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