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Guitar Hero Guitar Hero is all about love. It's about love of a genre, love of an instrument, love of and for the men and women - the real guitar heroes - who took that instrument and made it sing. And, deep down in its heart, it's about developer Harmonix's love for videogames.
Guitar Hero isn't just another rhythm action game. While it's essentially about pressing buttons in time to events on screen, and the dedicated controller might look like another expensive peripheral that you'll never get around to digging out at parties, but Guitar Hero is so much more than that.
The controller, for starters, is a quarter-sized Gibson SG, rendered in remarkably solid black plastic, with a "strum bar" for picking out rhythm, five multicoloured buttons for picking out notes, and a tremolo arm. It looks like a child's toy, until you sling the strop over your torso, at which point you discover that you feel like Brian May.
Guitar Hero takes that feeling and runs with it. The moment you hold that little plastic guitar, a lifetime of music - rock, metal, blues, funk, it doesn't matter - comes alive in your veins. And that sensation doesn't go away until you turn the PS2 off.
You won't be turning the PS2 off for quite a while, incidentally.
The game is beautifully balanced. In its easy mode, you need only worry about the first three buttons, or frets; medium mode uses four, and hard and expert level use all five. In addition, the higher difficult modes feature many more notes to hit, and more instances of chords. If you hit certain notes perfectly, you fill up a "star power" bar, which can be unleashed in a moment of rock joy by flicking the neck of the guitar vertical and slamming it down.
In every song you can always see the resemblance of what you're doing with the guitar to the notes coming out. At the higher levels, that resemblance is closer - and that's when real satisfaction comes in.
The songs get harder as the game goes on; the later songs on Easy are often harder than the first few songs on Medium. And this is the way music really is - some songs are inherently harder than others. The moment Guitar Hero really gets under your skin, though, is when you come to a song that's long flummoxed you, and play it nigh-on perfectly.
That's not because you've "levelled up". That's not because you've been "grinding" easy songs, or because you found a power-up. It's because you've become better at playing the guitar. Every single thing in this game stems from player skill. When you first play the game, load up a song on expert - you'll last ten seconds. But remember that moment, because one day, you'll be playing it perfectly, and you'll appreciate just how far you've come.
Of course, this kind of game is made by its music, and Guitar Hero is stacked full of covers of classic rock songs, in all forms - from metal to punk, from blues to ballads. Don't worry if the music is not all to your taste; that quickly changes when you're playing. You may hate power-ballads, but not a lot beats hitting that final chorus on Boston's "More Than A Feeling" with the whole crowd clapping along in time. You may not like meandering blues, but you can't help but reach for the tremolo arm during Stevie Ray Vaughan's fiendishly tricky "Texas Flood". You may hate metal, but nothing will satisfy you more than succeeding at the game's final finale, Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark At The Moon", for the first time.
The covers are spot-on, or as good as; the vocals occasionally jar, but the guitar parts are perfect. And it's worth noting that this game will make you hear things in songs you may never have heard; it's not about playing the tune, it's about playing the guitar part in its entirety. "Smoke on the Water" may have an epic riff, but it also has boring verses. The most challenging part of "Take Me Out" isn't that tempo-change or the well-known riff, but the counter-melody during the bridge sections.
Despite the fact that you're playing it with five buttons on a bit of plastic, Guitar Hero manages to genuinely recreate the feelings generated by playing live music: fear, bravado, and love, all washing over you at once.
And Guitar Hero conveys this to non-musicians in a way that nothing other than a videogame ever could. It perfectly condenses the learning curve of the guitar into a few hours, and leaves you not with a game you'll play a few times and put back under the sofa, but something that will make you grin from ear to ear every time you turn it on. Even when you've finally five-starred every song on Expert you'll want to go back, to songs like "Ziggy Stardust" and "No One Knows" for the sheer joy of playing.
That's what real music feels like, too. You do it for the sake of it, for the love of it. You don't need an excuse to play. And that's why it's not worth quibbling about Guitar Hero's few technical flaws, or the time it wiped my save card, or the stiffness in my wrists until I learned to relax and play properly. If anyone sees the toy controller in your lounge, and laughs at it, turn on the PS2, give them the plastic guitar, and make them play "I Love Rock and Roll". Then they'll understand, they'll get that sensation, and understand that it really is More Than A Feeling; it's true love. There's only one word for how this game will make you feel: heroic.
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