Guitar Hero

Smell the glove

But stripping down the gameplay to merely matching the colours to the appropriate fret buttons and hitting the 'strum' button at designated time hasn't diluted the gameplay one bit. In fact, focusing the gameplay down to one instrument has given Harmonix the opportunity to test the player in other heroic ways, and utilise the guitar peripheral in ways that make it feel more and more like you're wrestling with the real thing.

To start with, you'll probably dip into the game's career mode and plough through in on Easy mode to familiarise yourself with the various songs, as well as getting to grips with co-ordinating your fingers in slightly unfamiliar ways. Broken down into various 'venues', the idea is to clear four out of the five songs in each 'set' in order to move onto the next bigger and better venue, and gradually improve your rock star status along the way.

On such a lowly setting the game's still reasonably challenging, but sticks to simplifying chords down to single button presses that even the most ham-fisted of players should be able to manage one-fingered. Even better, it reduces most of the playing to the first two or three buttons, meaning you won't have to worry about having to look at the fret board while you work out where the tricky fifth button is. When you move onto medium difficulty and above (up to the fourth, Extreme), Guitar Hero starts throwing ultra-nimble changes at you, off-beat time signatures, and evil chord progressions that quickly work down to the filthy fourth and fifth buttons (and back up to the first), tying your hands up in knots in the process.

Bitch School

It helps, of course, if you already know the songs inside out, and in some cases that'll be a given. All-time classics like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, Queen's Killer Queen, ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man, Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, Hendrix's Spanish Castle Magic, Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out and Joan Jett's I Love Rock N Roll ought to be familiar to most players (of a certain age, admittedly), but the majority of the 30 songs that feature here are either lesser songs from well known artists or from artists that most outside of the US will struggle to hum along to, never mind strum along to. Given that Guitar Hero is currently only available in North America, we shouldn't really complain, but the lack of international star quality about the roster of songs and the absence of the original artists is perhaps the only thing that may detract from the package from an importer's perspective. In terms of song recognition, it's no Singstar - put it that way.

Nevertheless, Guitar Hero is one of those games where familiarity isn't such a big deal, as once you start pushing on with it you'll soon fill in the gaps and be instantly able to remember when those tricky solos kick in (and impressed with how well the cover versions match the original). As much as anything it becomes a bit of a pattern-memory game - much like playing a tricky bit on a real guitar. Eventually practise makes perfect and you can start throwing the sort of embarrassing shapes that smug, show-off rock stars do.

In fact, thanks to the addition of a tilt sensor and a whammy bar, there's a bona-fide reason for such histrionics, with the game often throwing in special chord sequences that contribute to filling up your 'Star Power' meter. Once you've done that you can tilt you guitar controller up to unleash a crazed frenzy of rock moves that wows the crowd and doubles the points you can earn. If you keep missing the chords, however, your Rock Meter starts to diminish, the crowd starts to get restless and eventually boo you off the stage unless you turn things around quickly.

Cry cry cry all the way home

Keeping an eye on the score becomes equally important as you progress, with your overall rating judged on your points tally. While getting through the song might be good enough to earn you a three-star rating and a $100 in your back pocket, four- or even five-star reviews grant you even more, allowing you to purchase a host of unlockables from new guitars and new skins to new characters and even new songs. Sadly, the plethora of 'Bonus Tracks' appear to be from entirely unknown acts, so there's slightly less incentive to buy them than there would have been if they were genuine rock classics. As a package, it's superb, but you can't help but feel that it would have been truly amazing with a better track list. The potential is staggering, but for a small publisher like Red Octane a big licensing budget presumably wasn't available. Let's hope Sony or someone of significant stature can license it for Europe and provide the kind of set list the game truly deserves.

One other thing we ought to mention is the game's awesome multiplayer potential. Clearly we didn't have the capacity to test this out ourselves with just one controller, but we're hoping to source another one soon, and will be sure to report back with our adventures when we do.