![]() ![]() ![]() The visuals replacing them are cleaner, but also more complex and strange. In fact, all the cartoon elements of the old series are gone, including the bulbous polygon caricatures that you'd see flailing around in the background while you played. The neon explosions when your score goes up, the little multicolored meter telling you to use your "Hero Power," are totally gone. It's not just the color palette, but also a clearing of detritus. While the stream of notes on the screen is familiar, the cleanliness of the display is new. It's easier than playing a guitar, but the buttons are, after all, a whole lot bigger than strings. It almost evokes the very real feel of chords on an actual guitar. Playing on Easy has you fingering just the left, middle or right white (lower) buttons or black upper buttons in simple rhythmic combinations, but move it up to Normal or Expert settings and you're bending your hand to cover both rows. When playing Fall Out Boy's "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark," the familiar stream of cascading note cues still fills the screen, but is a little more staid thanks to the black-and-white color scheme. We're creating that illusion of playing guitar a bit more - still really, really easy to learn, but also difficult to master." The air-guitar finger-wiggling is something everyone knows, but how do you translate that motion to a controller? "We actually have six buttons in two rows. He was furiously wiggling the fingers on his left hand in midair while doing a Pete Townsend windmill with his right hand. "This is the universal air guitar, right?" asked Jamie Jackson, creative director of Guitar Hero Live during my demo of the game. The classic five finger buttons, though, have been replaced with six buttons at the far end of the neck. It looks slick and, in action, feels even closer to playing the real thing. Three black buttons on top of three white buttons, arranged tightly together and flush with the rest of the fret board. The whammy bar is still there to furiously tap during a sustained note, accompanied by a devoted "Hero Power" button to hit when you've hit a series of successive notes just right, boosting your score in the process. The basic shape and weight of the new guitar is the same. Harmonix set the standard for the entire music-game genre, from Guitar Hero to FreeStyle's own DJ Hero, with the original plastic guitar and its five primary-colored buttons located where a guitar's strings would be. Guitar Hero Live keeps the fundamentals of the classics - using a plastic guitar to play fake notes in a song when they appear in a scrolling bar on your TV - but it's different in every other way starting with its guitar. It's all thanks to a new controller and a wildly different look for the series' debut on PS4, Xbox One and Wii U. The studio has made a game that feels deeply modern, relevant, wholly distinct from Rock Band and somehow still rooted in tradition. FreeStyleGames has done so much more with its new game Guitar Hero Live. ![]() A 10-year anniversary reissue, maybe with some bonus tracks thrown in, seems like the best-case scenario for Guitar Hero coming back to life in 2015, a dignified archive for the nostalgic. A decade on from that original, and five years on from the last release in the series, Guitar Hero is an icon, but it also feels like a relic, a work hopelessly locked in its era. Ten years is an eternity for video games, especially so for games tied so closely to specific technology like Harmonix's revolutionary PlayStation 2 game was to its inner-rock-star-summoning controller when it came out. Guitar Herohas no business being relevant in 2015. ![]()
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