Product Description

Guitar Hero 3 Stand Alone Software PS2

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2154 in Video Games
• Brand: ACTIVISION
• Model: 95135
• Published on: 2007-10
• Released on: 2007-10-28
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: PlayStation2
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .53" h x 5.50" w x 7.50" l, .23 pounds

Features

• Realize a true rock concert experience with all new venues, incredible lighting effects, authentic instruments and sick character moves.
• Engage in boss battles, against the like of Slash from Guns N' Roses, and featuring original tracks recorded exclusively for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and defeat opponents to achieve legendary status in head-to-head competition.
• Gameplay variety options including single player Training, Quickplay and Career Modes, as well as Multiplayer Co-op Career, Face-off, Pro Face-off and Battle Modes.
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for PlayStation 2 features over 70 of the biggest and loudest songs ever compiled in a single game disc.
• Select and customize a wide variety of Guitar Hero characters - including three new ones - as you unlock venues featuring over-the-top stage design.

Amazon.com Product Description

Unleash your inner rock legend with Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Face off against guitar icon Slash, from Guns N' Roses, and others in insane boss battles featuring original tracks recorded exclusively for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Defeat opponents to achieve legendary status in head-to-head competition including the all-new Guitar Battle or share the glory with a friend in the new Co-op Career Mode. Realize a true rock concert experience with all new venues, incredible lighting effects, authentic instruments and sick character moves. And since rock is all about the music, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock features over 70 of the biggest and loudest songs ever compiled in a single game disc. Classic Guitar Hero gameplay. View larger. In-game exclusive bosses. View larger. Deep and varied game modes. View larger. Loads of customizable characters. View larger. Venues, big and small. View larger. More than 70 songs on disc. View larger. Play Modes Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock features an array of game modes designed complement every player's preference and time considerations. In single player, take advantage of Quickplay functionality for spontaneous action when you only have a few minutes to spare for a fast play through of a song, or dive into Training and Career Modes when you want to concentrate of specific skills and song parts, or are ready to make your way to the top of the Rock & Roll game. Local multiplayer modes are just as diverse and include a cooperative Career Mode, Pro Face-Off and Face-Off, in which two Guitar Heroes conduct their own symphonies of destruction, and Battle Mode in which successful playing earns you powerups that can be used to disrupt the flow of opponent's play. A Legendary Set List Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock features a deep set list made up of some of the most iconic hits of rock history, mixed with a sampling of the most infectious rock tracks of recent years. Your game disc includes over 70 songs, evenly distributed throughout every corner and mode of the game. This includes a wealth songs that are unlocked as you play through single and multiplayer modes, those specific to boss battles encountered, tracks exclusively chosen for Co-op Career play and a large number of bonus songs, mostly purchasable using in-game money. The complete set list available with disc includes:    "Anarchy in the UK" - Sex Pistols    "Barracuda" - Heart    "Before I Forget" - Slipknot    "3's & 7's" - Queens of the Stone Age    "Black Magic Woman" - Santana    "Black Sunshine" - White Zombie    "Bulls on Parade" - Rage Against the Machine    "Cherub Rock" - The Smashing Pumpkins    "Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll" - Blue Öyster Cult    "Cliffs of Dover" - Eric Johnson    "Cult of Personality" - Living Colour    "Devil Went Down to Georgia" - Steve Oumiette    "Even Flow" - Pearl Jam    "Guitar Battle vs. Slash" - Guitar Hero III Original    "Go That Far" - Bret Michaels Band    "Helicopter" - Bloc Party    "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" - Pat Benatar    "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys    "Knights of Cydonia" - Muse    "Kool Thing" - Sonic Youth    "La Grange" - ZZ Top    "Lay Down" - Priestess    "Miss Murder" - AFI    "Mississippi Queen" - Mountain    "Monsters" - Matchbook Romance    "My Name Is Jonas" - Weezer    "The Number of the Beast" - Iron Maiden    "One" - Metallica    "Pride and Joy" - Stevie Ray Vaughan    "Paint It, Black" - The Rolling Stones    "Paranoid" - Black Sabbath    "Raining Blood" - Slayer    "Reptilia" - The Strokes    "Rock You Like a Hurricane" - Scorpions    "Rock and Roll All Nite" - Kiss    "Same Old Song and Dance" - Aerosmith    "Story of My Life" - Social Distortion    "School's Out" - Alice Cooper    "Sabotage" - Beastie Boys    "Slow Ride" - Foghat    "Sunshine of Your Love" - Cream    "Suck My Kiss" - Red Hot Chili Peppers    "Talk Dirty to Me" - Poison    "The Metal" - Tenacious D    "The Seeker" - The Who    "When You Were Young" - The Killers    "Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns N' Roses    "Avalancha" - Heroes del Silencio    "Closer" - Lacuna Coil    "Can't Be Saved" - Senses Fail    "Down N Dirty" - LA Slum Lords    "Don't Hold Back" - The Sleeping    "FCP Remix" - Fall of Troy    "Generation Rock" - Revolverhead    "Go That Far" - Bret Michaels Band    "Hier Kommit Alex" - Die Toten Hosen    "In the Belly of a Shark" - Gallows    "I'm in the Band" - The Hellacopters    "Impulse" - An Endless Sporadic    "In Love" - Scouts of St. Sebastian    "My Curse" - Killswitch Engage    "Minus Celsius" - Backyard Babies    "Metal Heavy Lady" - Lions    "Mauvis Garcon" - NAAST    "Prayer of the Refugee" - Rise Against    "Radio Song" - Superbus    "Ruby" - Kaiser Chiefs    "She Bangs the Drums" - The Stone Roses    "Take This Life" - In Flames    "Through the Fire and the Flames" - Dragonforce    "The Way It Ends - Prototype     Key Game Features Become a Legend - Face off against guitar icons in insane bosses, including Slash from Guns N' Roses, and featuring original tracks recorded exclusively for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and defeat opponents to achieve legendary status in head-to-head competition. Gameplay Variety - Options include single player Training, Quickplay and Career Modes and local multiplayer Co-op Career, Face-Off, Pro Face-Off and Battle Modes. Incredible Track List - Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for PlayStation 2 features over 70 of the biggest and loudest songs ever compiled in a single game disc. Exciting Characters and Venues - Select and customize a wide variety of Guitar Hero characters as you unlock venues featuring over-the-top stage design. Guitar Hero II features three new Guitar Heroes: The rockabilly-greaser Eddie Knox, the beautiful (but tough) Casey Lynch, and the Scandinavian metal superstar Lars Umlaut. Fully Immersive Concert Experience - Realize a true rock concert experience with all new venues, incredible lighting effects, authentic instruments and sick character moves.

Customer Reviews

Great Game, not-so-great controller
The gameplay is GHIII is fantastic (The Boss Battles in career mode are a little silly, but they are thankfully optional). The track list is awesome and the songs are extremely well implemented and fun to play.

The wireless controller included in this PS2 bundle, however, is a big step backwards from the wired SG controllers bundled with GH I and II. I have experienced several random drops in response from the green and yellow buttons (not due to proximity from the receiver, I was less than four feet from the console). The buttons just stopped working. Also, the whammy bar is much closer to the strum bar, and my fingers on my strumming hand kept getting caught in it. Finally, the tilt sensor on my controller only worked intermittently, which was doubly frustrating because they moved to start and pause buttons directly behind the whammy bar, so the alternate method of triggering "Star Power" (hitting the start button) is almost impossible because you have to take your strumming hand off of the strum bar and bring it up and over the whammy bar. I'm returning the bundle and buying the stand-alone GHIII game, and I'm ordering a wired GH2-style controller directly from Red Octane.

Nothing new, a few flaws, but still fun
Neversoft's first take on the Guitar Hero franchise really doesn't make any changes to the formula Harmonix created with GH1 and GH2. This isn't really a bad thing since the GH1 and GH2 formulas are so great, but it would have really been nice to see something new for the series. Here's a breakdown of the game:

Graphics:
The graphics on the PS2 version of the game are really nice and definitely have more detail and flair than with the previous Guitar Heroes. Unfortunately, the frame rate drops and the song slows down and gets a little choppy when you use star power. This is really too bad because I usually try to use star power on the parts of songs that I find difficult and this really messes me up even more than I would regularly.

Gameplay/Guitar:
The gameplay pretty much follows the old GH formula, except for the fact that the window of time that you can a play a note in has been extended a little bit. This isn't such a bad thing because some of the later levels in the game would be nearly impossible without this small change. The Gibson Kramer guitar that comes bundled with GH3 is the first stab at a wireless controller for the GH franchise and unfortunately it didn't work to well. The first guitar I got was defective and wouldn't connect to the wireless adapter so I had to return it and get a second one, which did work. Since then my new controller has worked pretty well, but once I had to restart my PS2 to get the controller to work.

Set list:
This is where GH3 really shines. This is definitely the best set list yet. It includes songs like Paint it Black by The Rolling Stones, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns and Roses, and One by Metallica. Nearly all the songs are originals and they all sound really great. This is the best Guitar Hero set list yet. Unfortunately, there are a couple songs which you can only unlock in co-op, so if you don't have a second guitar you'll have to either attempt to play with a regular PS2 controller, or just forget about playing these songs. These co-op only songs aren't small songs either, a couple of them like Suck my Kiss and Sabotage are actually advertised as some of the top songs in the game on the box.

Career/Co-op Career:
The regular career is exactly the same as the past GH game except for the addition of some little cartoons after every set and three boss battles placed throughout the sets. The cartoons are cute but really add nothing to the game. The boss battles are quite fun and challenging, but since there are only three they don't really make up a big part of the career. Also the songs that you play during the boss battles are only playable in single-player career, so as awesome as it sounds to battle your friend to either Tom Morello or Slash's solo filled battle song, sorry, but you can't. The co-op career is really good and it's really fun to be able to play through the career with a friend.

Overall:
Guitar Hero 3 is basically the same as GH1 and GH2, it has the best songs of all the GH games, and the controller is flawed but it is nice to be able to play wirelessly. It's too bad that there's nearly nothing new, but it still includes all the fun of the other guitar hero games.

Some flaws, but overall a great game
I come to Guitar Hero 3 for the Wii having played Guitar Hero 2 on the PS2 at Expert difficulty. Sometimes formula can be a bad thing, other times it's not. This is one of those "not" times.

The game plays basically the same as its predecessor, and on top of that it's got a better set list. After reaching 5-star level on nearly all the songs at Expert difficulty in Guitar Hero 2, I found that the list of songs that I actually just enjoyed playing was very short. That's not so much the case with Guitar Hero 3, which has a larger collection of songs that are both fun to play and to listen to.

There are flaws, though. It seems to me that the new developers decided that they needed to tweak the Hammer On/Pull Off controls a little, and the result of this tweaking was that there were many times throughout the game where I instinctively didn't strum because two notes were close together, but one of the notes inexplicably required you to strum. Although this increases the difficulty, it feels awkward and forced (you could, after all, just do away with HOPOs altogether rather than making them unworkable at seemingly random times).

I'm not a big fan of the boss battles, either. The battle mode seems a good idea for balancing multiplayer Guitar Hero, because Guitar Hero 2 suffered significantly from the fact that an Expert player could hardly help beating anyone playing on Medium in the Face-off mode, at least not without putting down the guitar, which isn't exactly fun. However, the battle mode really has no place in the single-player career mode, where all I'm looking to do is play some songs.

It doesn't help that the boss battles are not very well executed. The final boss battle had me stuck for quite some time, simply because the battle power-ups that I was getting weren't very useful against the opponent. When I finally got the right power-up, defeating him was trivially easy. That means the battle was far too dependent on randomness, which isn't really fun in a game that's good precisely because it depends completely on skill.

Add on top of this the fact that, for no obvious reason, the songs that you play in the boss battles can't be accessed away from those battles. That means there's no way to just play these songs. You've always got to be worried about defeating an opponent who's messing up your ability to play. Along the same lines, certain songs are only unlockable by playing multiplayer mode. I wouldn't call that a good idea in any case, but it's especially annoying on the Wii version, because there currently is no guitar available for separate purchase, which means you must find someone else who owns both a Wii and Guitar Hero 3, and most people I know who have the game have it for PS2 or XBox 360.

The game is still lots of fun even with these flaws. There are some good new features to balance things out, such as the ability to play the game online (though again it seems that more often than not when I go looking for an online game, there aren't any available). I think I like the Wii guitar controller better than the PS2 controllers for Guitar Hero 2, in part because they seem more responsive. A number of times when using the PS2 controller and strumming very rapidly while attempting to deploy Star Power, I have had the controller frustratingly not register my movement despite holding the controller vertically. I haven't noticed such problems on the Wii.

As far as difficulty goes, if you played Guitar Hero 2 on Expert, then it won't take you long to get through Guitar Hero 3 on Expert, either. Some of the songs are still difficult (and some will cramp your hand), but because the gameplay mechanics are the same (and that is a good thing), if you're good at Guitar Hero you're good at Guitar Hero. You won't have too much trouble with the vast majority of the songs in the game.

All in all, if you liked Guitar Hero 2, you'll probably like Guitar Hero 3. If you didn't, why are you reading this?