Maybe I just don’t get it. I prefer Coltrane to Cobain and musicians who focus on licks instead of looks.
Guitar Hero for iPhone has admirable traits, not the least of which is the $2.99 starter-pack price. The touch-screen interface has novel aspects compared to a couple of other major players in the genre. But ultimately what you’re playing is a hyper-slick variant of the ancient catch-the-bomb classic Kaboom!, released when Activision was a startup.
The major diminishment, so to speak, is the absence of an instrument as the controller. If you don’t think it defies logic to play Dance Dance Revolution with a gamepad, then using four tiny touch buttons along the bottom of an iPhone screen may be a perfectly acceptable substitute for a Gibson Les Paul. If so, the potential appeal of this app is greatly increased.
But you’ll still need to get past one more significant discordance. The basic app comes with six songs and most of them aren’t all that great. That’s not the Blue Note in me speaking, since I can scroll through the set lists of console GH titles and find dozens of tunes worth playing. Additional three-song packs are available for $1.99, but as of this writing the selection is tiny and mediocre.
A few other gripes before getting to the good stuff. It has maybe the most clueless wifi detection I’ve ever seen in an app, failing to connect automatically when you try to do something like purchase a song (eventually I managed to switch it on by tapping the community button). There’s no multiplayer, which competitors Tap Tap Revenge and Rock Band include. A lot of users complain about crashes and slowdowns, although I didn’t experience those problems on my year-old iPod.
Shifting to the positives and specific features, which undoubtedly will be familiar to the many who’ve made it an App Store best-seller. The interface is attractive and efficient with a comprehensive set of tutorials, allowing even balding cubicle drones to relive their never-was youth fantasies while stranded in the passenger terminal for hours. Customization options for your rocker are plentiful (I fancied a simple brunette with a hooded sweatshirt and no makeup, not uncommon at your average Arctic village gig) although most you’ll have to unlock through achievements.
Those 260 achievements – reached by playing all the songs on both guitar and bass – take the place of a career mode, which will undoubtably miff some console loyalists. But they’re well-implemented, with lots of goals at varying skill levels easily selectable by the player.
Gigging, aside from the obvious controller limitations, implements a few decent emulations of a virtual fretboard. Sliding along the note button for strums, holding one or more tones for prolonged notes, and tapping an occasionally lit icon above the notes for Star Power button are among the extras. The gig animation superimposing the fretboard hovers between clever and over-the-edge confusing, but you be spending much time watching it while lunging for notes anyhow.
The touch screen’s response seems mostly on, if not perfect. I achieved 80 percent accuracy on my first gig playing a semi-familiar song, which no doubt is awful in the eyes of the competent. But it also means I wasn’t trying to find my axe with both hands behind my back (not to mention the notes missed while taking screenshots). I rapidly progressed into accuracy ratings exceeding 95 percent, but a few things never ceased to annoy me. Hitting notes in the fretboard didn’t always register (eventually I found hitting the touch-screen buttons just before the notes reached the fretboard works best). The screen is too small for comfort once multi-note hits appear. If you miss a long held note by even a fraction you miss the whole thing, which feels unjust as you helplessly watch it scroll by.
Maybe the biggest issue is even with high accuracy scores I hardly felt like I was playing along in time to the tune (I’ve played both guitar and bass, so I know there’s more involved than just the melody notes). Instead, it felt like playing catch-the-notes while some rock tune and a lot of MTV graphics did their thing in the background. It’s something I think Activision can fix in updates and/or future songs, but I also wonder if they’ll even care enough to make the effort.
Despite the long list of negatives, I can see the appeal of this game for so many. There was a certain desire to get enough credits to get my rocker out of her cliche punk wardrobe into something I could stomach. And if Activision massively expands the music library, I can see myself tempted to fall prey to those money demons for the likes of Satriani and Santana. In the meantime I can name a dozen music apps off the top of my head I’d rather make noise with and recommend to those not assimilated into GH Nation, many of which are free (iBone, Wivi Band, NLogFree and ReBirth, just for starters).
By Mark Sabbatini
Guitar Hero by Activision Publishing Inc.
$2.99
Platform Reviewed: iPhone/iPod (Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later)
Category: Music
Languages Supported: English
Rating: 12+ (Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes; Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity; Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor; Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References)
File Size: 106 MB
#1
nice review. thanks.