Mongo Nation

A huge leap forward for the genre

By Jeremy Azevedo

For people that have been playing Guitar Hero games for several years now, there is undoubtedly a feeling of “Tony Hawk Syndrome” creeping in by now. How many times can you experience a variation on the same theme without eventually growing tired of the entire concept?

Lucky for us, Neversoft was playing close attention to the way people actually play music games, and the resulting tweaks make Guitar Hero 5 the most enjoyable rhythm action game on the market. Nearly every complaint I’ve personally had with the series has been addressed here. For starters, the entire set list is available from the start. No unlocking or cheat codes are necessary for those who play the game solely at parties and have little to no interest in playing alone. Additionally, the currency system has been done away with, instead replaced with a challenge system that offers players more incentive to play through the career mode alone or with friends. This way, new characters, outfits, etc. can be earned instead of bought. Now you can watch Courtney Love dig up Kurt Cobain’s corpse and desecrate it by making him rap to “Feel Good Inc.” without having to slog through the single player mode for hours first!

Actually, to be fair, the single player mode isn’t much of a “slog” at all anymore. The career mode has been massively overhauled to allow you to switch instruments and/or difficulty, jump other players in and out and tackle the aforementioned challenges at your leisure. It’s an awesome way to get you to experience many of the songs in ways that you normally wouldn’t, i.e. switching to vocals or bass guitar when you normally wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. Some of the challenges even require a full band, again adding to the incentive to play the career mode with friends. Perhaps best of all, the streamlined new menu system shows you little entries for each song that outline why each individual song is an important piece of rock history or at least has the potential to one day become one. It’s a great way to familiarize oneself with some of the more far-out songs, and it’s a wonder why this feature wasn’t always present!

The multiplayer mode is equally improved from its predecessors in nearly every way. First of all, you can’t really fail out of songs, which was a major problem when playing with n00bs in previous editions of the game. In Party Play mode, for instance, you can jump in and out of the song, changed instruments or difficulty, go to the fridge for another beer or do pretty much whatever you want without disrupting the other players in any way. The game doesn’t even pause for them. It’s awesome. The ability to play whatever instrument you want, whenever and however you want makes GH5 so much easier to approach, while still remaining competitive for experienced players. If you’ve ever been stuck playing bass while some hot shot hogs the guitar parts, you’ll be happy to know that those days are over. You can even have two drummers, or two singers if you want. You’re really only limited by the amount of plastic instruments that you have and, if you are at a party, the amount of songs that girls know the words to. (The girls always want to sing for some reason, but only ever know like five of the songs.)

For those of you that enjoyed the GHStudio mod in World Tour, you’ll be happy to know that the entire process has been streamlined from top to bottom, with a completely different and way more effective user interface that will make song creation significantly easier, and hopefully encourage more original material to appear on the download service as a result. Another thing worth noting for World Tour veterans is that you can upload about 35 or so songs from that game into GH5 for a tiny re-licensing fee of 280 MS Points, or about $3 in genuine American dollars. All of your previously downloaded songs carry over for free, save for a couple of Jimi Hendrix tracks if I’m not mistaken. This really ups the amount of songs that you have to play with and eliminates the need to swap discs, which has been an annoying hold out for the series up until now. Rock Band has very little to brag about in terms of features at this point, unless you really enjoy spending a shit-ton more money on DLC, something I’m not particularly fond of m’self. Read the rest of this entry →

We talk with the punk icon about his latest musical endeavors and GH5

We were lucky enough to meet with Face To Face frontman Trever Keith at a Guitar Hero 5 preview party recently. For those who aren’t familiar, Face To Face was one of the leaders of the early 90s punk revival that included Green Day, Rancid, The Vandals, etc. Because the guys at Guitar Hero know what they are doing, Face To Face’s classic song “Disconnected” will be included in this year’s edition of the franchise.

We spoke with Trevor about having his song in the game, as well as some of the various new features he’s had the opportunity to see during development. While we were at it, we also caught up with the latest Face To Face news, his electronic mash-up group “The Legion of Doom”, and whether or that group will be having any involvement with the upcoming DJ Hero.

New DLC details emerge!

By Jeremy Azevedo

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now about some of the new features set to debut in Guitar Hero 5, not to mention what an awesome setlist is being assembled for the game. But reading about it and playing it are two radically different things, as I’m sure you can guess.

Having played the game myself last week in San Francisco, I can happily report to you that this is easily the most complete and enjoyable music game experience to date. I can think of at least five good reasons to make this claim, which I will outline for you here:

The Setlist

Newer songs in GH5 are well represented, with artists Vampire Weekend and Darker My Love making appearances that instill much faith in the developer’s musical tastes. Instead of using the most obvious bands and songs, GH5 digs a little deeper to find really great indie rock songs from bands that deserve to be in the game, like The Bronx. On the flipside of this, the classic rock songs that they chose to include couldn’t possibly be better. I don’t think there was a single person in the room that wasn’t stoked to play “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, “Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty, or “Sympathy For the Devil” by The Rolling Stones. There’s even a shit-ton of hard-ass metal in here for those who want to really cut loose and shred. (Might I recommend Children Of Bodom: “Done With Everything, Die For Nothing”?)

There was a time that I worried we were beginning to run out of great songs for these kinds of games, but that fear was obviously a foolish one. There are so many songs on here that I didn’t even get to, even in four hours time. I think nearly everyone will find something here to get pumped about, unless they’re like, mongo or something.

Party Mode

Master Chief jumped into this game to distract everyone while the dude in the white coat and hat stole all of the guitars.

The party mode is sort of the lynchpin of this whole operation. One thing I’ve always disliked about Guitar Hero is that, while I almost exclusively play it at parties, it’s always been somewhat unintuitive in that regard. The Party Mode removes pretty much all of the barriers that were present before, allowing you to jump in and out of songs whenever, switching instruments and/or difficulties on the fly. This is a godsend for people that wish to play through a song without getting failed out by some noob’s girlfriend at their next BBQ.
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We speak with Neversoft Project Director Brian Bright

Another year, another Guitar Hero game… Not that I’m complaining, but there sure are a lot of titles in the whole Guitar Hero/Rock Band family of rhythm action games. What will set this one apart from the rest? Well, as luck would have it, Guitar Hero 5 will have a number of new features and tweaks that should make it the ultimate party game, allowing any player to jump in and out at any time with any instrument they please, without even pausing the action! We talked to Neversoft Project Director Brian Bright about the new Jukebox, Party Play, and Rock Fest modes that have been deployed to enhance the Guitar Hero experience. Check it out!