Unfortunately, it's a neat idea that's overly restrictive in practice. For one thing, there are six songs you can unlock only in co-op career, which means that if you don't have a buddy with a second guitar who can come over and spend an afternoon playing, you won't get those songs. Also, no version of the game ships with a co-op quick-play option. The only way to play cooperatively on a single console is to play in the co-op career mode, and you have to unlock six tiers' worth of songs before you unlock all the available songs. Interestingly enough, the launch-day patch that updated the Xbox 360 version of the game with a co-op quick-play mode hasn't been applied to the PC version--at least, not yet.
Elsewhere in the multiplayer arena, the face-off and pro face-off modes from the previous Guitar Hero games return, and they're still generally excellent. However, the one new addition is anything but. Titled battle mode, this mode replaces the star-power mechanic with Mario Kart-style weapons. If you hit a specific note string, you'll gain a weapon you can launch at your opponent by tilting the guitar. Weapons include broken strings, jacked-up whammy bars, amplifier overloads (which cause notes to appear and disappear randomly), and a reversal of the notes to lefty flip (and vice versa). On paper, this mode seems as if it could be amusing, but in practice it's just dumb. Most of the battle-mode matches we played were over in 30 seconds or less, because one player simply couldn't recover quickly enough to get a weapon and fire back. It's basically a situation where whoever gets a weapon first wins most of the time. Even when matches do go on for a bit longer, they aren't much fun.
Get used to severe hand pain.
Battle mode actually finds its way into the career mode in the form of boss battles. Activision went out and licensed a pair of notable guitar players, like Guns N' Roses/Velvet Revolver legend Slash, and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave shredder Tom Morello. At the end of a couple of tiers in the career mode, you go head-to-head against these guys in original guitar tracks that they themselves recorded, during which time-battle mode rules apply. Nevertheless, the same balancing issue pops up. Most of the boss battles can be bested pretty quickly if you get a couple of weapons in a row. The last boss battle has you playing a heavy metal cover of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" against a fairly obvious opponent, and that fight is considerably tougher than the other two, but it's also the last boss of the game, so it would kind of have to be. The boss-battle mechanic just feels tacked on. With only three battles out of eight tiers in the game, and only two of them against real guitarists, it feels like a quickly tossed-together mechanic that, again, just isn't that much fun.
Quite a bit more enjoyable than any battle modes or boss battles is the addition of online play...at least in theory. While the online play worked fine out of the box on the console versions of the game, the PC version gave us a real headache. On one machine we simply couldn't get the game to connect to the servers at all, potentially because of firewall issues (even though other games on our system worked fine online). The second PC let us connect but refused to register our account no matter how many times we tried changing usernames, and how many different ways we tried to enter our registration code. Looking at the official forums for the game, it looks like some users are having similar problems, but others are able to play the game online OK. Also of note is that none of the downloadable songs from the console versions are up for the PC yet. The game supports downloadable content, so it seems like that should come along eventually, provided you can ever log in.
While on the subject of differences between versions, it's worth noting that each version of Guitar Hero III comes with its own guitar bundle, and PC owners are getting the least appealing one of the bunch. The guitar bundle for the game includes the Xbox 360 X-plorer guitar from Guitar Hero II, the wired one with the goofy strap setup. The guitar itself is fine, but considering that every other release of the game got a special guitar bundle with a guitar that has no strap design issues, better button placement, and full wirelessness, you might feel a little bit gypped if you go with this one. At least it's only $80 for the bundle instead of the $90 and $100 that the console versions go for. And if you already own an X-plorer controller from Guitar Hero II, you can cut that price in half if you just go buy the game all by its lonesome.
The change in developers has also resulted in a slight change in visual style in Guitar Hero III. The look of all the various characters and environments has changed noticeably, and everything has been given a more defined and exaggerated look. It might be slightly jarring to those accustomed to the standard Guitar Hero visuals, but once you get used to it, you'll find the game to be pretty sharp looking. The guitarist characters look excellent, and even the secondary band players look more detailed than ever before (though considering how dog-ugly the singer is, maybe he could have stood to have a little less detail). The PC version looks just about as good as the Xbox 360 version of the game, apart from the aforementioned performance problems. This is one case where we could have endured a bit of graphical downscaling if it'd helped the game run better.
These are the characters you remember, but they look a bit different now.
It's also disappointing that Activision has finally decided to corporate up the Guitar Hero experience with a fair amount of lame product placement and dynamic in-game advertising. It's one thing to get branded guitars and get Guitar Center to sponsor your in-game shop; it's quite another to have several of the game's environments feature billboards that display ads dynamically, and logos for Pontiac and Axe Body Spray that pop up all over the place. It even goes so far as to have Axe-sponsored guitars you can buy in-game, and Axe-sponsored go-go dancers prancing about the stage while you play. Gross.
An abundance of advertising, some overly restrictive design decisions, weak new modes, a major upping of the difficulty level, and significant performance issues might seem like a lot of potential hindrances for a game to overcome, and yet none of these problems are big enough to rob Guitar Hero III of the same brand of addictive fun that made the previous entries in the franchise so engaging. Certainly the fantastic tracklist goes a long way toward that end, but the gameplay is really what sells it. Sure, the difficulty can be vexing, but the game never loses that sense of "just one more song" addictiveness, even at the height of its challenge level. It's a shame that the PC version can't quite measure up to the level of quality of its console counterparts due to those pesky performance problems, but if you've got a system that can run it, any rock fan is guaranteed to have a good time with this one.
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