Complaints Cont.

Last night I said a few things about GHIII that I wasn't too happy about. I've got a few other points to elaborate on, but this doesn't just apply to Guitar Hero. These ideas can be applied to other games as well.

First, the songs must be fun to play. I've played a large amount of music and rhythm games. A lot of my top 20 are from that genre. I'm not nearly finished with GHIII, but I have to comment that my opinion on the music selection is that it is poor. So far the songs just aren't very fun to play. I don't know who or why they chose the songs they did. A song shouldn't necessarily be chosen because it's popular or catchy. It should have a quality either from the note placement or rhythm that makes a player want to play it again. If you look at Guitar Hero II and Sweet Child of Mine. Yes, it was a popular song and everyone knew it, but a lot of it's success comes from how the guitar parts fit with how you play them. I love the intro to the song and it just build up to the solo making it a great fun song to play. In GHIII I've found some songs where you sit there for 5-10 seconds not playing anything because there's no guitar part, just a bass line in the background. It just really breaks up the action and makes the song less fun. The current song list has bands that could have had much better songs selected.

My question is "What is influence behind the songs that are selected?" Sure some of it is personal preference. Maybe my music tastes differ so I just can't relate to the songs chosen. I'm sure there's some of that mixed in there. But I'm more worried about how much licensing costs come into play when making song lists. I'm sure some unknown C-list song is going to cost a lot less than a song everyone knows, loves and has the all the lyrics memorized to. If the cost of licensing certain songs is going to mess with the budget for development, that's going to factor directly into the quality of the songs and then the game itself. Take for instance Konami, a lot of their Bemani franchise's music is original music. They have their own in house artists making different genre's of music and then they share it around to all the other music simulation games. They do license songs for their rhythm games but a bulk of the songs are owned by them. So there's not all the other channels to go through. If they need a song, they simply make it. I believe that's one of the reasons why their music games have been so successful.

Also, I'm beginning to think that Achievement Points are stupid. It was definitely a smart move on Microsoft's part. It's made me buy a few games on XB360 over PS3 but I'm finding the whole point whoring and the actual achievements themselves annoying. Take for instance Guitar Hero III. A bulk of it's points are from collecting things and beating certain songs of various difficulties. But I don't really care about buying every damn guitar, outfit, character from the game. And I'm not going to go out of my way to do those things for the points either. I guess I just like to get points for playing the game and I can see how trying to get all the points could make the game worth every penny you paid for it. But when I look at an achievement that says, "Fail a Song 90% through" I'm disgusted. I mean, I don't fail songs, at least not on purpose. I'm not sure how the points should be set up. Should it be where you actually have to sit there and practice and do a number of times until you're good enough to get the achievement? Or should it be something that happens because you did something, sometimes even accidentally. In the example of the 90% fail, it would be a nice consolation when I did fail a song that far in, but then I can't see that happening to me anytime soon and I don't plan on going on a mission to fail 90% into a song just to get five measly points. I'd probably fail the song and the screen would read 89.99% completed.

David