The Blog for the Sports Gamer

While attending a live fantasy football draft on Sunday (I’m an expansion team in a keeper league, so it wasn’t pretty for me), I got my first indoctrination into the much beloved world of Guitar Hero. I’ve read more praise for this game than, quite possibly, any title in the last twenty years. And for the first time, I actually regret not owning a Playstation 2. I played just three songs, Sharp Dressed Man and Bark at the Moon on Easy and another track on Medium (the title of which, I don’t recall) and suddenly I’m looking on eBay for a cheap PS2 purchase. I sit in the car listening to my Tom Petty mix CD and seeing the beats show up in the game’s interface in my head and thinking to myself, “I could totally play this.” Too bad I’m so damn cash poor after the week in Florida because if not, I might own this game already.

Maybe this is just stating the obvious, but even having played just three tracks in the game, I think I understand the genius of Guitar Hero now. It’s not just any one thing that it does well. It’s that it takes something incredibly complex (playing rock on the guitar) and makes you feel like you can just walk up and rock out for real. That brilliance in its design can’t be understated. The game makes you feel like you can play. Not just play, but play at a high level. And for somebody like me, who is as untalented -musically- as youc an get, that’s just amazing. The Easy mode is an incredibly simple way to get indoctrinated and to the novice player (like me), just watching the Expert level makes one break out into a cold sweat, thinking, “I could never pull that off.” But even on Easy, when you get on a groove and you’re hitting every note and you suddenly you’re really hearing the music and not just trying to keep up with symbols on the screen, it’s like amazing. It’s like hitting the perfect golf shot.

If you’ve got a PS2 and don’t own this game yet, shame on you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.