I continue to rock

I got Guitar Hero III for the Wii for Christmas, and as I found with Guitar Hero II, I rock. I played a bunch of different songs on easy mode and I must say, I kicked serious ass. During Alice Cooper's "School's Out", I blew the very first note, than hit the next 170 in a row, then messed up two more in the solo, than nailed the rest of the song. I missed three notes out of about 275. I was over 90% on every song, and over 95% on most. I might just be the world's greatest Guitar Hero III player.

On easy mode, anyway.

After getting all cocky, I played one song on the medium difficulty level, and my inflated ego started to deflate back down to it's normal size. I think I was still over 90% on that song (but only just), but it was significantly more difficult than easy mode, and I had to work a lot harder. I'll have to play a few more songs on that mode, but someone at work did confirm that the jump from easy mode to medium mode is pretty big. I haven't tried hard or expert modes yet, but I should probably at least try those before I crown myself king.

The game is seriously cool. Not only is there a whammy bar (which I use far more often than the on on my real guitar), but you can do hammer-ons and pull-offs, and even play chords. No sliding though. The graphics are cool — if you have time to look at anything other than the streams of notes coming at you, you can see the guitar player playing the song (i.e. strumming at the right time and such — haven't checked to see if the fingering is correct), and the singer's mouth is even sync'ed to the lyrics.

I read an article once where the author wondered if the next generation of guitar players might be starting out now with Guitar Hero, and I don't think it's all that far off. Obviously you will not learn how to play the actual guitar or read music or anything like that by playing this game, but it's pretty good for teaching rhythm and it's good as a finger exercise as well.

We also got Mario Galaxy and Lego Star Wars for the Wii, and I haven't quite finished Super Paper Mario yet, but I'm not sure how much playing of anything other than GHIII I'll be doing in the next while...