Back To Work

After a nice weekend at home, I'm back in Austin and playing games. And since I'm now posting, it must be that I have something to complain about. I'll get right to the point and say, the Guitar Hero Boss Battles are trash. It's cool that they got a couple big name guitarist to come in and create original guitar tracks just for the game, but I'm can't but all the flash and I can see right through the smoke and mirrors.

First off the system is entirely broken. You switch off playing guitar parts while trying to earn power up attacks. You use these attacks to make the opponents lose life and cause them to fail. Some of these attacks are very balanced like the Amp Overload which makes the notes flash and harder to see. A good player will be able to read through those and still be able to keep their combo. There are others like the Double notes and Difficulty which just make the game harder and those are alright. The problems I have are with the Broken String and Whammy Bar. They cause you to miss notes regardless of how well you play the game and there is no way around them so you're basically screwed at least for a couple notes.

The problems arise because of the way you obtain these power ups. You get them by successfully hitting a series of notes that are denoted by their unique shape. If you miss hitting the combination successfully, you don't earn a power up. The game ends up becoming a battle of who can get a power up and use it to mess up the other player right before their power up series of notes comes. With attacks like the Broken String and Whammy Bar, you are forced to miss notes and the advantage stays with the player who first used the attack. They are then able to go through their series without any distractions and if they are able to obtain another attack power up, you can foresee the chain of events that can follow. The focus of the game is then shifted to getting the power ups and using them at the appropriate times instead of your guitar playing prowess. It actually becomes more advantageous to sit their and miss notes so that you can time an attack with your opponent's screen. This shift is a huge mistake.

Personally, I find this frustrating in career mode as I've been stuck on Slash now for a few days. Now I realize he's Slash and he an amazing guitarist. But the only way you can make the CPU miss notes is by using an attack. When you mess up and don't get the power up, it becomes the computer's fun time where it'll keep getting power ups and using them on you until the end of the song. I won't die, but there's no way I can progress because the CPU will just not miss notes and fill it's life bar. I really wish they would have made the boss battles optional or that you didn't have to beat them to progress. Or even made them so that you just had to survive the crazy difficulty that they threw at you. Neversoft tried to make a battle system that had some complexity and depth so that it wasn't the same old Guitar Hero formula of getting to the end of the song, but all this shows me is that they really don't know what they're doing in making a music game. It's harsh, but this is problem that should have been noticed the first time someone play tested it and it should never have been allowed to be put in the final version of the game.

David