I grabbed a copy of GH3 yesterday and Deb & I spent about 2 hours working through the first 3 sets of co-op career Sunday Night.
Co-op career is certainly a cool feature. Basically it’s like the older co-op mode where one person does guitar and the other does base.
The graphics are a little snazzier, but given you spend 99.9% of your time glued to the frets, it doesn’t really matter. I actually don’t really like the new crowd meter…takes more time to glance and grok - the old one was much easier to read.
The characters are all more pimped out and detailed.
They seem to have added a lot more guitar sounds based on the song. It seemed like most of the GH2 songs had your guitar sounding basically the same. They’ve tweaked this and on some of the songs, hitting chords isn’t as satisfying as it used to be.
We played in medium. I haven’t been playing much lately and I’m still barely good enough to pass Hard songs, so that seemed to make sense.
My main impression is that the game is, generally, a little harder than GH2. The scales at medium seem to move a little faster. In GH2 I felt like the jump from Medium to Hard was HUGE – way faster scales, way more notes, an extra fret. Now it seems like the scales are faster and some of the note transitions are tougher in Medium. May be a while before I think I've got the stuff for Hard again.
I also noticed they’re throwing some odd off-tempo songs at you. I found Sabotage REALLY hard – maybe because I was playing bass, but here are some slowish note tempos that are really hard to stick to.
I’ll need to play some solo stuff, but we only got one 4-star song. I’m not sure I’d be getting 4 stars on my own either…but I used to regularly nail medium songs without blinking on GH2, but I’m not so sure now.
It’s cool to be able to buy w/o guitars, since we already have two of the damn things. Thanks guys for not forcing this one - if I had to buy another guitar, I wouldn't have run out and bought it. This way was a no-brainer.
Definitely some good songs in the list though. Welcome to the Jungle – of course. Slow Ride is kinda fun. Mass Murder (AFI) is great. Rolling Down Rodeo is solid as well. Haven’t done Holiday In Cambodia (Dead Kennedys) but looking forward do that one.
Some nits, but all-in-all, good times.