$59.99   MPN: 95137 UPC: 047875951372 Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Features : More than 70 of the most legendary rock anthems of all-time Added multiplayer modes: arcade inspired Guitar Battle and the dual shredding co-op career Challenge the legends of rock and roll in boss battles Take those axe shredding skills online and rock around the world All-new tricked out venues taking you to hell and back Platforms : Xbox 360 Release Date:  28 October, 2007 Manufacturer:  Activision Availability:  Usually ships in 24 hours List Price:  $59.99   Accessories: Guitar Hero 3 Similar Products: Rock Band Special Edition Guitar Hero 2 Bundle with Guitar Halo 3 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare BioShock     Customer Reviews   GH2 GREAT! GH3 TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!! 0 STARS Rating: 1 First I'd like to preface this and say that I'm a HUGE GH2 fan. I play practically any game genre, I own all three next gen consoles and handhelds and in all honesty GH2 is in my top 2 favorite games of all time. With that said I bought GH3 (w/o the guitar) and to say I was highly dissapointed and dissatisfied is an understatement..... The good: absolutely nothing! EXCEPT from what I hear is that the guitar is better than RB or GH2. The bad: The songs. I'm not into metal / rock music but in GH2 I was exposed to a bunch of songs I've never heard before. Not only that but they were fun to play. And I actually bought many of them on Itunes. As for GH3, in my opinion, only 3 songs in total were remotely descent to play. Even songs that you think will be fun to play like welcome to the jungle, are not. Whoever chose these songs should be fired or is probably out there making Rock Band. When I played the campaign I found myself waiting for the song to finish already. The difficulty was raised up. I play on hard and yes, it is harder but not impossible to finish a song. The only thing I'll say about this is that it takes the fun away from the game The graphics - although less cartoony, look worse that GH2 (I guess that crew is out making RB too!) Only certain songs are able to be played in Co-Op. Guitar battle - yet another addition that takes away from the game. In closing, I don't write many reviews. I have a busy life, and don't have the time to write reviews. However I am so disappointed that I had to warn people like you NOT TO BUY THIS GAME! If anything rent it. The media feedback on GH2- on print and on podcasts has been overwhelmingly positive. After playing the game I have come to the conclusion that these people must have gotten exclusive deals / interviews, or are blind fan-boys. Believe me the SONGS ARE TERRIBLE AND THE GAMEPLAY IS BORING. BE WARNED SAVE YOUR MONEY RENT BEFORE YOU BUY!!!! Way, way, way fun. Makes me want to watch "School of Rock" at the same time. Rating: 4 Maybe it's my eclectic musical tastes, growing up with an organist for a mother I've always been a fan of metal because of the strong parallels to classical music, but the sound track is awesome on GH III. Metal, punk, pop punk, dinosaur rock... it's all there and such a blast. A sound track of the harder side of music from the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's. There are songs I've listened to for years, that I've found a new found enjoyment of through this game because you actually learn the song, between playing the bass or the guitar you pick up riffs, rhythms, and phrasing you never realized were there. I found "Easy" more difficult than "Medium" - differences in the rhythms. Hard is challenging and Expert is impossible. As a gaming fan I've been frustrated with a lot of the games these days because unless you're 13 and can camp out in front of the TV for days at a time, a lot of games out there are too big. GH III is great because I can go escape, rock it out, have a lot of fun, and 30 minutes later get back to work, pick up the kids, and other wise remain a responsible adult. My left hand is brutally cramped up, but no more so than when I was taking real guitar lessons. I'll agree with the commenter that said the GH franchise should bring in some "Average Joe's" and watch/observe/converse with them to try and "blend" the experience from Easy through Expert better - it would probably make the franchise that much more successful. But, while it isn't learning the guitar for real, there is a learning process and it does take practice. Start a career from Easy, play through, then go to Medium, play through, and go to Hard and you'll be surprised how "good" you've gotten. Jump into Hard right away and the game will suck -- unless you're already a master. As far as the "satan" concerns for some of the music, people need to realize that (for the most part) it was/is mainly a gimmick. It's about rebelling against the "establishment" and about the post-calvinist "black and white" of modern "christianity" - not religion or God, per se, but about the cookie cutter absolute and societal definition of acceptable and what "should be" versus reality. The bands that played that card were more about having fun and being/offering an experience of counter-culture than anything else (similar to the cardiologist that don's leather, skulls and a Harley on the weekends). Music is art and art has and always will be about pointing out hypocrisy in and through us all be it small or large - such things keep us honest, at least collectively. Curse words are edited out of all the songs, and the imagery in the game is "rock nostalgia" sprinkled with a lot of comedic effect. If we can't laugh at ourselves, where are we? Just have fun for crying out loud. Personally, I'd rather my daughters listen to Slayer than watch most of what's on TV. It's a fun, fun, fun, game. A Step Backward Rating: 3 A note to any official Amazon guys - you might want to merge this review set with the bundle on 360. Okay. Now, I'm a fan of the franchise. I own a lot of it. All of it, actually, and twice on 360 and PS2 for the immediate predecessor of this installment. So, hopefully you will trust me when I say that I am a fan of the gameplay and the franchise in general in this preface. It's kind of baffling what's happened with this game. Neversoft has certainly recognized some of the shortcomings of its predecessor, but have somehow managed to not solve even one of those issues, and have, in fact, introduced new problems to be addressed. I'll do this as a sort of point-by-point thing, to keep it organized: 1. Medium-to-Hard. In Guitar Hero 2, the jump from Medium to Hard was only slightly more enjoyable than stepping in front of a speeding bus. The main reason this was such a problem was that the game was very, very poorly designed for getting players over that average-to-hard hump. For one thing, the initial two difficulty settings compel you to adapt your grip on the fretboard to leave your index finger on the green button, pinky on the blue button, and keep each assigned to its place. With the introduction of the orange button, that's no longer really a viable strategy if you want to avoid crippling the weaker side of your hand. Additionally, in 2, upon reaching hard difficulty, the speed of the notes down the fretboard doubled, the fifth button was introduced, and chords and note orders increased in complexity. Those three things were enough to make hard a no-go for a lot of people in principle where a gentler slope would have taken care of that. In response, Neversoft has tried to reduce the impact of the change in difficulty by making the Medium notes move just about as fast as the Hard difficulty ones. Unfortunately, instead of making the Medium to Hard transition easier (still very difficult because of the whole hand-training thing), it just makes the Easy to Medium transition much more jarring. Hard is still so hard that I barely want to try it at all. 2. Uncomfortable Play - I swear, the designers have put some of these songs together specifically to be painful for me. Seriously - playing Knights of Cydonia I thought I was going to cripple myself. On Medium. These guys really need to get some bad players into the office to see if they're not making something dangerous. I should not find out that I'm bad at a game by giving myself a repetitive motion injury. 3. Guitar Battles - This is a new problem for the single player. Guitar battles in multiplayer might be a good idea. I don't honestly know. Seems more interesting than a score-off to me. Unfortunately, in single player, because of the way the attacks are set up, they're really just an exercise in coin flipping. Some of the attacks are utterly crippling to the computer player while others, in addition to having a large delay before they become effective, essentially have no impact whatsoever. If you get the good attacks while you're trying to play, you'll win. If you don't, you lose. Whether you're any good or not is really not of much relevance. That's bad. Guitar battles in single player, for me, tended toward exercises in frustration at the computer not giving me the tools I needed to succeed and not having any other recourse to win. They need retooling. 4. Cooperative Campaign - This is a wonderful idea. It really is. But what half-brain decided that there should be exclusive tracks squirreled away in it that I cannot get to? That's right - I am totally unable to unlock those tracks, because I cannot play the cooperative campaign online. I'll confess - I'm old. My friends are married and have families. The only time I'm going to have somebody with another guitar at my house is if I throw a party, and I'm not really a party kind of guy. That's not a good reason to keep me from playing frigging Sabotage if I want to. I will grant that they have made the songs themselves available in online coop play, but nothing I do online seems to unlock anything for me to practice (and I SERIOUSLY need to practice Helicopter before I try THAT again). Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I'm going to assume I know what I'm doing. 5. Song List - Guitar Hero 2 was pretty good in this regard. It had a good sampling from a broad spectrum of rock (maybe a little light on new stuff). Guitar Hero 3 seems to be making a point of digging in the dustbins of rock history. It's not that the songs are bad, but many of them are outside of my experience, and that puts me off. I'm a child of the 90s. This game seems to be a schizophrenic effort to appeal to younger people than me and to older people than me. Some of the songs also puzzle me. Kool Thing? Really, guys? I can't even tell what I'm supposed to be doing there. It's barely a song. There's better Sonic Youth. There's a distressing number of songs where the lead guitar is nearly invisible, and that makes it kind of hard to play. The number of master tracks is also disappointingly small, compared to its soon-to-be-released competitor, Rock Band. Don't get me wrong - the game is fun for what it is, but there's just so much here that could have been done better. Should have, really. I hope Neversoft takes some time on the next installment, puts in a fifth difficulty level (between Normal and Hard), and works out the kinks in their new stuff.