Something Original About Guitar Hero

Ignoring that I am way late in getting into the whole Guitar Hero phenomenon, I thought it appropriate to write a little bit about Guitar Hero.

I got the Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the Wii for Christmas. Apparently it has major issues with the sound, but I’ve been far too pre-occupied to really notice. See, while other Wii owners have apparently been recording waveforms and doing labour-intensive comparisons, I’ve been trying to precisely document everything I’ve felt as a first time owner of a “rhythm game”.

As a guy who has never had even a little bit of rhythm, the experience can sort of be summed up thusly:

• Pressing colourful buttons when the screen tells you to? Sure, that’s fun.
• Wait, hold on.
• HOLD ON.
• I have to strum?
• Oh, I get it.
• Fuck.
• Fuck.
• Fuck.
• Fuck.
• Yay!
• Fuck.
• Fuck.

That whole process repeated for days and days, until I got good. At Easy. Then there was a powerful but brief feeling of jubilation. Then I started Medium, and all that jubilation was replaced with a whole lot more Fucks. Don’t even ask me about Hard.

I still don’t really get why the game is fun. It definitely is fun, though — I’d never argue otherwise. But, like, I think of games like Zelda, where clearly a team of over a hundred people have spent over a year of their lives pulling all these pieces together, and have to wonder how a game where a half-dozen guys set a bunch of colourful bubbles to classic rock songs can really stack up.

But it does. It makes me feel like a rock star. A rock star who can’t ever use his orange button and always pusses out whenever the notes are spaced too closely together. But a rock star, nonetheless.