Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

We first picked up Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the Wii after playing it at the house of a friend. My brother had always been a fan of the series, but I myself had never played. It turns out that I wasn't too bad at it, and within a few weeks I am already playing on Expert Mode. The first thing you'll notice about GHIII is that the Guitar Controller has a slot on the back to insert the Wii Remote. It slots in quite nicely, although at first it was hard to get the wrist strap to fit correctly (you get used to it after a few times). The game itself is very nice. The graphics of the characters and audience are smooth and realistic, even for the slightly underpowered Wii. What bothers me is that Activision chose a different font and fire graphic for the "YOU ROCK" that appears after completing a song, which just looks bad compared to its XBox and Playstation counterparts.

The Setlist (which is Guitar Hero's term for Song List) is nice and full, with lots of catchy and classic rock tunes. You will be humming them to yourself for days possibly even weeks after each playthrough. You can also unlock new songs for purchase in the ingame store by playing Career and Co-op Career modes. An unfortunate short-sightedness on Activision's part was to not sell Guitar Controllers separate from the game, so you may have to find a friend who already owns the game to do any Co-op or Battle modes (which are lots of fun and highly recommended).

GHIII uses Nintendo Wifi Connection, Nintendo's free internet service, to support its online mode. Connection time is pretty speedy, and you have quite a few more options than most NWC supporting games give you. You can start your own match or join someone elses (which is all anonymous other than your names), or you can play with friends (which will require Friend Codes). In any of those options, you can choose to play Battle, Face-off, or Pro Face-off. They all seem to work fine, if a little bit laggy.

Now, amidst all of this good news, there must be some bad, right? Well, unfortunately, yes. It seems that sometimes when in a play session the Whammy Bar ceases to function. Restarting the software immediately cures this issue for the entire session, which leads me to believe that it is a software problem and not an issue with the controller itself. Another problem is that the game only has mono sound, so if you have stereo or surround, the quality of the sound is going to be worse than you expect. I have heard however, that Activision is releasing a remastered version of the game that fixes these issues in early 2008, and that the remastered version will be offered for free to all owners of the game, so don't let these small cons dissuade you from purchasing a brilliant game that will be in your Wii's Disc Channel for a long time to come!