7-24-07: Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80's

[HAMMER FRENZY]

I though I would start a thread for this, as it will be in all our hands really soon and we will need a place to vent our frustration and resentment for such a rushed, poorly executed expansion that we are all most likely going to buy and force ourselves to enjoy. 

Just in case you don't want to take the full hit to your wallet, Best Buy has this game for $40. Unfortunately the game should go for $30, and we should pay $25.... Anyway, have fun.

Schild: Everyone at scorehero.com is pissed off, apparently the game is easy as hell and if you are any good you can play the game through on first try within 2 hours.... I am actually getting sad. Oh, and I saw Ball Room Blitz. It looks about 7 times less fun than you and I imagined it...Poop on that. 

[Ookii]

Well it's good news for people like me who are terrible at the game, but not for expert-freebird-beating people like you.

They really should just come out with a Guitar Hero 'Unsigned Edition', sure the songs would suck, but they would be free and you could get the bands to do their own tracks.

Anyway how do you know the 80s anyway, were you even in the country at the time?

[Yoru]

Moved to game releases and added the release date to the title. Carry on.

[OcellotJenkins]

I just got my grubby little hands on a copy and can't wait to get home and play it.  I fall into the drunken medium/hard category and expect many hours of fun!

[HAMMER FRENZY]

Ooki: Of course I know the 80's jerky! I grew up in them...Playing games... Anyway, I just have a hard time understanding why they chose to do an expansion pack based on a time period in which main stream music was mostly synth and drum machines THEN they pick nothing but new wave and hair metal (not the best of either mind you) then the omit bonus songs then sell ti at a full price. I actually would write them a mean letter if I knew it would get to the right person. This is seriously lame. I really hope that the game surprises me and I am left eating my words cause so far I am almost thinking about not buying it till I play it and I like at least 20 of the 30 tracks AND those tracks are somewhat challenging. I am done rewarding companies for being lazy just so that I can play new shit.

This game SHOULD have been Guitar Hero Encore: Manic Shred Blitz 2007. Then I would be freaking drooling.

[Ookii]

This game SHOULD have been Guitar Hero Encore: Manic Shred Blitz 2007. Then I would be freaking drooling.

Shredding isn't so fun, I'd rather have 'Guitar Hero Encore: Acoustic Explosion'.

Oh and I forgot say I Ian.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

This game SHOULD have been Guitar Hero Encore: Manic Shred Blitz 2007. Then I would be freaking drooling.

Shredding isn't so fun, I'd rather have 'Guitar Hero Encore: Acoustic Explosion'.

Oh and I forgot say I  Ian.

I am completely okay with that too. I just want some sort of focus on building skill at the game and having actual great songs to play. This game has a poor track selection because they were lazy, not because there was a lack of music. There is plenty of 80's songs that would have fit the bill for both a classic metal shred fest and an awesome soulful acoustic bonanza. As it is, this seriously just looks like them milking a franchise before they even earned the right to do so.
Lame-sauce.
  

[Yoru]

If they had the Safety Dance on the disc, I'd've taken the day off from work. Oh well.

As for milking the franchise, yeah, they really are. GH3 looks to be the same way, unfortunately.

[Ookii]

If they had the Safety Dance on the disc, I'd've taken the day off from work. Oh well.

As for milking the franchise, yeah, they really are. GH3 looks to be the same way, unfortunately.

Have you guys even looked into GH3 yet?  Lookie this:

    * "Barracuda" – Heart
    * "Cherub Rock" – Smashing Pumpkins
    * "Even Flow" – Pearl Jam
    * "Knights of Cydonia" – Muse
    * "The Metal" – Tenacious D
    * "Paint It, Black" – The Rolling Stones
    * "Rock and Roll All Nite" – Kiss
    * "Sabotage" – Beastie Boys
    * "School's Out" – Alice Cooper
    * "Welcome to the Jungle" – Guns N' Roses

Still according to Flores, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock' will feature a cast of twelve characters, four of them unlockables. Of the eight starting characters, one new addition is Midori, a purple-haired Japanese girl with a J-Pop look.

And of course the new guitars:



Of course though, you have this:

IGN announced the game would feature a new multiplayer game mode called Battle Mode.The mode puts a twist on the Pro Face-off mode introduced in Guitar Hero II. Two players will face each other, trying to complete a song while successfully playing Star Power sequences to earn attacks that can be used against their opponents. Players will be able to store 3 attacks at a time and can activate them by tilting their guitars upward. If neither player fails the song, they will face each other in a sudden death segment. The attacks will include:

    * Broken string: One fret button on the opponent's guitar will not work until it is fixed (by rapidly tapping the button).
    * Difficulty up: The opponent will play the song on an increased difficulty for a short duration of time (except for expert difficulty).
    * Amp overload: The fret board will shake and appear blurry, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.
    * Whammy bar: The opponent will have to use the whammy bar before he/she can play notes again.
    * Steal power: This will steal your opponent's power-up (this will be lost if used when the opponent has no power-up).
    * Double notes: The opponent will have to play twice as many notes for a short duration of time.
    * Lefty flip: The fret board will be mirrored, requiring the player to switch their handedness on the guitar.

I for one (even though I suck at the game) am somewhat excited.

[schild]

    * Broken string: One fret button on the opponent's guitar will not work until it is fixed (by rapidly tapping the button).
    * Difficulty up: The opponent will play the song on an increased difficulty for a short duration of time (except for expert difficulty).
    * Amp overload: The fret board will shake and appear blurry, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.
    * Whammy bar: The opponent will have to use the whammy bar before he/she can play notes again.
    * Steal power: This will steal your opponent's power-up (this will be lost if used when the opponent has no power-up).
    * Double notes: The opponent will have to play twice as many notes for a short duration of time.
    * Lefty flip: The fret board will be mirrored, requiring the player to switch their handedness on the guitar.

It's tough to gay up a game in 7 steps. These guys successfully did it.

[Nonentity]

    * Broken string: One fret button on the opponent's guitar will not work until it is fixed (by rapidly tapping the button).
    * Difficulty up: The opponent will play the song on an increased difficulty for a short duration of time (except for expert difficulty).
    * Amp overload: The fret board will shake and appear blurry, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.
    * Whammy bar: The opponent will have to use the whammy bar before he/she can play notes again.
    * Steal power: This will steal your opponent's power-up (this will be lost if used when the opponent has no power-up).
    * Double notes: The opponent will have to play twice as many notes for a short duration of time.
    * Lefty flip: The fret board will be mirrored, requiring the player to switch their handedness on the guitar.

It's tough to gay up a game in 7 steps. These guys successfully did it.

I think schild hit the nail on the head here.

I play guitar hero to rock out, not SHOOT BLUE SHELLS AT MY OPPONENT.

'Difficulty up'? No, seriously? Come on now.

I think at this point in time, everyone who was up to regularly playing on Expert mode in Guitar Hero/Guitar Hero 2 is just patiently waiting for Rock Band. I will confess, however, that with the majority of people, the Guitar Hero brand will still sell copies.

I will do whatever is in my power to convince all my Guitar Hero playing friends that they have a new god, and that god is good. And has drums.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

    * Broken string: One fret button on the opponent's guitar will not work until it is fixed (by rapidly tapping the button).
    * Difficulty up: The opponent will play the song on an increased difficulty for a short duration of time (except for expert difficulty).
    * Amp overload: The fret board will shake and appear blurry, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.
    * Whammy bar: The opponent will have to use the whammy bar before he/she can play notes again.
    * Steal power: This will steal your opponent's power-up (this will be lost if used when the opponent has no power-up).
    * Double notes: The opponent will have to play twice as many notes for a short duration of time.
    * Lefty flip: The fret board will be mirrored, requiring the player to switch their handedness on the guitar.

It's tough to gay up a game in 7 steps. These guys successfully did it.

Man, You said in 15 words what I was about to say in 5 paragraphs. I will play GHIII but I know that NS has to go through some growing pains before they are spitting out the calibur of GH that I am expecting. There really is no excuse, there is  a lot of good music to select from, they need to get the right songs and quit mucking up the design with their half ass attempts at injecting innovation to the franchise. Do the right thing for right now, more of what works and cautious additions of game play enhancing options. You guys did it with Tony Hawk, you can do it here. GH has a lot of room to grow and I really do believe that NS can easily add new stuff and modes and techniques that will make the game better and still seperate it from the guitar portion of Rock Band. I really believe that GH is in the hands of a competent developer right now, GHIII SHOULD kick lots of butt, but as it is going, it looks like it is not gonna be nearly as hot as it is supposed to be.

[Ookii]

It should also be noted that nobody HAS to play that crazy face-off mode, beyond that it looks like the game is largely the same.

[Phildo]

For that matter, the company is totally tight-lipped about information.  Try looking up ANYTHING about when new song packs for GHII will be available.  There's nothing.  I almost missed pack 4 completely.  They still haven't given me Godzilla, Even Rats or All Of This.  Fuck them.  Angry letters will do absolutely NOTHING, as evidenced by the amount of complaining about the cost of the downloadable song packs and the fact that it's still 500 points for three songs.  They haven't learned their lesson, and eventually the profiteering is going to bite them in the ass.

[Chimpy]

If this is an '80s expansion does it come with a key-tar?

Cause you can't hit the most popular 80s tunes without one imo.

[Big Gulp]

Activision and Red Octane have really crapped the bed with the Guitar Hero series.  They're sitting on a huge pile of cash that they've barely managed to tap.  When I hear about the plans Harmonix has for Rock Band (full albums, weekly DLC, master tracks out the ass) I actually feel a little bit of pity for the guys who are stuck with Guitar Hero.  It's about to become a really dated looking series.

[MisterNoisy]

If this is an '80s expansion does it come with a key-tar?

Cause you can't hit the most popular 80s tunes without one imo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjO4-TbW938

[HAMMER FRENZY]

So has anyone picked the game up? Can we confirm whether or not it is crap? 

[Yoru]

I picked it up and blew through the first three sets on medium. 100%ed two songs, 5-starred the rest, all on first tries. The first two sets are definitely on the "super easy" side, the third one starts to get interesting in a few places.

The amount of content, though, is completely not worth the $50 price tag. 30 songs total, 6 characters (1 unlockable), no unlockable songs or outfits. The stages are somewhat redone (so far - although I do like what they did with the Blackout Bar) to be Eighties-themed, mostly involving tweaked lighting and colors. The crowd and your bandmates are identical to GH2 in appearance.

If I could to set my own price, I'd say it's worth $30, tops. I do enjoy belting out some of my favorite Eighties tunes, but I doubt the privilege was worth the full price of admission.

[Nonentity]

I'm stuck on the last song, Play with Me (FUCK YOU PLAY WITH ME, EAT MY DICK), so I'll give my impressions here, all Expert mode.

- I Wanna Rock, done by Twisted Sister. What is this, some version he recorded when he was 42? His vocal range sounds terrible in this version. That's all I'm sayin'.

- Limozeen - What the fuck? I know, lets throw some insane solo into the middle of a song for NO FUCKING REASON.

- Welcome to Guitar Hero, three-button chord edition. Seriously, every single friggin' song is loaded with them.

- And I Ran is kind of cool.

- Wrathchild by Iron Maiden is much cooler.

- The general difficulty curve is kind of muddled, you'll see really easy songs in the batch of really hard songs for no apparent reason. Generally, though, I would say the later part of the game is so far harder then anything Guitar Hero 2 has to offer (Sets 5 and on).

Okay, I'm going back to win this stupid song.

[squirrel]

I picked it up and blew through the first three sets on medium. 100%ed two songs, 5-starred the rest, all on first tries. The first two sets are definitely on the "super easy" side, the third one starts to get interesting in a few places.

The amount of content, though, is completely not worth the $50 price tag. 30 songs total, 6 characters (1 unlockable), no unlockable songs or outfits. The stages are somewhat redone (so far - although I do like what they did with the Blackout Bar) to be Eighties-themed, mostly involving tweaked lighting and colors. The crowd and your bandmates are identical to GH2 in appearance.

If I could to set my own price, I'd say it's worth $30, tops. I do enjoy belting out some of my favorite Eighties tunes, but I doubt the privilege was worth the full price of admission.

That's kind of disappointing. I know from first hand experience that I'm nowhere near where you and schild are at GH but the fact you're that far through on the first day of owning it is pretty weak. I'll likely still buy it though because:

a) I'm older than all you chitlens and I actually partied to this shit in the 80's
b) I suck at GH enough that even a small expac will last me a long time

[Nonentity]

Okay, I beat Play with Me, so I beat GH 80s on Expert.

No unlockable content (aside from one character, the grim ripper... with 3d glasses. Yay) - songs, costumes, videos - none of that is there.

So.. yeah, I guess I 'beat' it. Fuck getting 5 stars on everything.

I even had enough money on one play through of Expert to buy everything except the unlockable guitars from the other difficulty levels, but even that isn't really worth it.

The amount of standout songs is really minimal. It's kind of depressing - there's only really the ones I mentioned, and then Play With Me is the hardest song, but it's nowhere near as epic of a final song as Freebird and Hangar 18 were.

I guess this really is goodbye to the Harmonix Guitar Heros, and it's kind of a poof instead of a bang.

BRING ON THE ROCK BAND.

[Yoru]

To be fair, I can 95%+ most of the songs in GH2 on medium, but that's after a good bit of repetition and practice on the various interesting bits of the songs - that's what struck me as a problem: I shouldn't be 100%ing something, let alone two things, on the first try - I've only ever 100%ed a song in GH2 once (and that was at F13con, so I didn't even get to keep the gold stars).

Getting 50% of the way through the track list in an hour is also irksome - a lot of the songs I've gotten through are extraordinarily short.

I decided to try out the Sins of a Solar Empire beta (comes with your preorder :) ), and that was entertaining enough to distract me from finishing this title in one sitting.

[Murgos]

Eh, I dunno.  I picked up Guitar Hero II played Surrender about 10 times in a row one night and then the next time I picked it up I beat the game on medium in a single 4 hour marathon session. I still haven't 5*'d everything on medium though and haven't really tried to make a stab at hard or expert.  I'm just saying that on medium, with almost my first experience at Guitar Hero, it wasn't that hard a game.  Also, I expect my, newly learned, skills with the game will carry over to new editions.  What I mean there is that I doubt if it will ever seem hard to play at medium difficulty to me.

I had my teens in the 80's and so I certainly disagree that none, or even only a few, of the tracks are interesting:

Seriously: Caught in a Mosh?  Yes please.  Hold On Loosely,  No One Like You,  Ballroom Blitz,  I Wanna Rock  Round and Round,  Metal Health,  Holy Diver (How can you not be excited about Holy Diver?)  Radar Love (Would rather have seen Golden Earings version but hey 80's)  18 and Life, Nothing But a Good Time,  Shaken, Synchronicity II?

That's some good shit there, I had almost all those albums.  There are very few on the list of tracks that I am not interested in, less than what was on Guitar Hero II anyway.

[Sky]

    * Amp overload: The fret board will shake and appear blurry, making the scrolling notes difficult to read.

Shit, man. We called that rehearsal. You try drinking a bottle of Yukon Jack and make the fretboard stop blurring.

[a) I'm older than all you chitlens and I actually partied to this shit in the 80's

Hell, I was actually /playing/ some of that shit in the 80s. Where's the Master of Puppets, yo?

[murdoc]

I hate the 80's

[Murgos]

Hell, I was actually /playing/ some of that shit in the 80s. Where's the Master of Puppets, yo?

They could do a whole 80's thrash version.  Metallica (pre-black) could fill a whole 30+ track release by itself IMO.  Not to mention Slayer and Sepultura and Anthrax and Megadeth and et al.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

Man all these responses kill me, cause it is both okay and poop all at the same time. I actually forced myself not to buy this game last night, as a last ditch effort to prove to myself that I don't HAVE to buy Guitar Hero merch just for the sake of it being GH. I sat down and played some more GH2 last night and was blown away at how damn awesome that set list is. It is just a whole lot of fun stuff to play. Anyway, I would like to hear what Schild thinks about this game, I wonder if he picked it up.

[schild]

I didn't pick it up. And I had it half paid off from trading in some trash GBA stuff the other day.

At the end of the day, I'd only be buying it for Ballroom Blitz. And that bothers me. But I reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllly want Ballroom Blitz in Rock Band, but we know that won't happen now.

[Nonentity]

Some of the most interesting tracks to play in the game are the nonstandard New Wave and weird pop type ones, just because the guitar is usually so erratic.

If you're playing a metal song, you know what you're getting - three-button chords, shredding riffs, and insane guitar solos.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

Schild: You know that monkey loves Ball Room Blitz just as much as Schild-bot does. Watch the You tube Video for it. It looks like crap. I wanted to cry. 

[Chimpy]

I'm stuck on the last song, Play with Me (FUCK YOU PLAY WITH ME, EAT MY DICK), so I'll give my impressions here, all Expert mode.

Is that the Extreme song from the mall scene in Bill & Ted?

- Limozeen - What the fuck? I know, lets throw some insane solo into the middle of a song for NO FUCKING REASON.

Dude, that is a 80s metal parody done by the homestarrunner guys isn't it?

[schild]

Yea, Limozeen is fake. That would be the OTHER song I'd want to play.

LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN.

[Nonentity]

Yea, Limozeen is fake. That would be the OTHER song I'd want to play.

LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN.

I know it's fake, which is probably why they are fucking with us all, and putting that insane solo in the middle for no real reason.

It reminds me of that xkcd comic:



And yes, Play with Me is the song by Extreme from Bill and Ted.

[OcellotJenkins]

I beat medium and began working through hard last night; the game is certainly worth fifty bucks to me.  The handful of songs I was previously familiar with didn't dissapoint (Holy Diver and Synchronicity II being particularly awesome).  Quite a few others had surprisingly fun riffs.  Who know fucking Winger would be fun to play? 

From my perspective, a themed release like this will always appear at least somewhat lackluster compared to the regular ones simply because the variety of the songs in I and II is what made them so replayable and fun.  Like any genre, I have to take the '80s in doses and the same goes with this game.  It does make me hungry for more themed releases though.  If Rock Band does deliver on the weekly full album downloads it will be the killer app though.

Regarding GHIII, they would be idiots not to have a classic mode for traditional gameplay in addition to the new gimmicky stuff.  I see nothing wrong with having both options available.