I was surfing job sites within the industry and in order to be a Guitar Hero tester for Activision, it's REQUIRED that you be able to play and pass Raining Blood on expert. That's just unfair.

We've been breaking Captain Obvious out a lot lately.

Y'know.. I honestly do prefer RB to GH, but..

They ARE games. I don't see any problem with catering to a gamer mentality. They are not realistic music-playing simulators.

Also, the songs aren't fucking impossible. They're just impossible if you suck. Plenty of people can beat these songs on expert.

This unnecessarily difficult gameplay on GH3 led me to abandon the series. Activision and Harmonix can all stand around touting their wares on shared and exclusive tracks, but it all boils down to me as what's fun to play. GH3 was not fun. Was it challenging? Yeah, but it wasn't a fun challenge. It was a "what did they do to this game to make it so fucking hard?" challenge. So I stopped. Got Rock Band, and while the charts are easier than GH's legacy games, it's more fun to play, especially with friends.

@ Vanilla Gorilla

There's a difference between challenging the hard core audience and giving them a challenge that is all together ridiculous to expect from people.

Rock Band is far greater precisely for this reason. Guitar Hero is catering to the very specific uber-hardcore niche; the same assholes who posts on boards about how they can FC Raining Blood on their first try or how anyone who can't beat Through the Fire and Flames suck. Rock Band songs can still be hard...hell, the Metallica pack still kicks my ass, namely Ride the Lightning.

Vanilla Gorilla, are you referring to full band tier 6 or would you play a song with an individual instrument above tier 6?

That's why I quit playing Guitar Hero. I listen to alot of bands that are also in Guitar Hero, and as soon as they started throwing in extra notes and chords (GH3), I get thrown off.

Besides, I can't forgive them for making my girl Judy Nails into a slutty Bratz figure.

And this, friends, is one of the reasons that we now have WiiMusic. Why can't people understand that there IS a happy middle-ground? Guitar Hero III is ridiculously difficult, to the point where it's not that fun. I had thought that they were correcting that for GH: Aeroshit and World Tour? Did they change their minds?

Also, Rock Band rules.

This is completely unrelated to the post but i was wondering if there was anything behind the quote on the picture for this post. There is a radio station near where i live that has a morning show and one of the sound clips they use is someone saying F---ing thing sucks! Cause if there are other people in this community that listen to Preston and Steve I would shit bricks. On that note there is hard and then there is we love to torture our players w/ things that are almost infeasible w/ a normal human body.

Lately whenever a dev says the game will be easier for begginers, its means its going to be ten times as hard the last one.

i agree, there is only one song which i can't beat on RB, Green Grass and High Tides, and only because of that sustained three note hammer on thing. and the same thing goes for Free Bird from GH2.. i love the song, and i can do that technique on a real guitar, but i can't move my fingers fast enough to do it on the plastic controller..

i am one of the few ppl who got GH3 for the pc and i ended up having to fix that guitar multiple times after smashing it on the floor because of how rediculously hard most of the songs where on expert.

and even with GH: aerosmith, train kept a rollin threw in extra chords and such that i never new existed in the song... the RB version (although it's a cover) is more accurate to what the musician actually plays.

i saw a video today from e3 showcasing Van Halen from GH4. they played Hot For Teacher, which is a good song, but the guitar part had 2-3 extra notes thrown in the verse part and chorus...

GH got me so frustrated simply because i couldn't beat Reigning Blood, everything else in the original setlist i could do..i had to hack the game to get past it to have a shot at failing the lou boss battle, which imo is a crappy metal remake of a good song...

and then we get to Through the Fire and Flames, the most over-done rediculous hard song i have ever seen in my life.. impossible to get passed the first 5 seconds unless you were the flash, and then had one of the hardest solos i've ever seen, coupled with an imposibly hard ending part...

i forget which guitarist from Dragonforce tried it, but he attempted to do the song on hard, and didn't get passed 2%.. that should say something... if the person who wrote the song can't beat it, then it might just be too hard...

sry about the long post.. i had a lot to say about this subject..

RB is infinitely better...

@LarkOhiya - the problem is that when i play Stricken on Expert, i love it. Its true to the song; im playing chords when i should be playing chords, etc etc (and i know its more or less right, because i have the tab for it).

Until i get to parts of the solo. When im forced to play around 3 or 4 notes a bar that i know im not hearing.

You can tell me to scale it back to Hard... when most of the songs are blatantly doing the wrong thing to make it easier. Your argument would be well founded if there was a difficulty beyone Expert, Insane perhaps. As it is, i just want to get to the point where i really feel im playing the song; no more, no less. With Guitar Hero as it is, i feel like itd be better just to learn the songs for real(which i do... but im lazy so it takes a while)>

Rockband is the obvious better game. However, I find both games to have very challenging songs, so I'm not about to give up on Guitar Hero just because a few songs are "impossible". And besides, Guitar Hero will always have a soft spot in me because it was the first to have the awesome take-home guitar hero controller. If I just turn back on the series because Rockband came out, I'll feel like a traitor. lol Either way, I just love both series. GH still has plenty of songs that aren't in Rockband. That's enough of a reason for me to still keep playing it.

Why do the Rock Band kids get so butt-hurt? Seriously, look at the amount of whine in this thread.

I guess I never found any of the GH III songs to be that difficult on expert. Sure, Raining Blood was annoying, but after practice mode for a half hour or so I passed it. And being a musician (a guitarist, to boot) I did notice how much they embellished the songs to the point where they weren't true to the recordings. It was my first GH game, and it was meh. Won't buy again.

I'm a Harmonix believer after I picked up Rock Band this summer. I don't give a shit how tough it is - I can beat Fire and Flames on expert - but I prefer Rock Band. There is plenty of challenge to be had if you look for it, but the game is fun even on some of the easiest songs. The incredible animations, art, and ambient noise and lighting, coupled with a couple of beers and a couple of friends, push this game far and beyond the GH III experience.

Plus you can sing and play at the same time, which is a great party trick. Yeah I go to lame parties.

Yeah, I'm going to have to not hate on GH3 too. Honestly rock band is fun, but not hard enough. I don't have 3 people that will come over and play fake music with me all the time. I play when I have a little bit of time to wait around. I'm not a GH3 pro... I can't beat fire and flames on expert, but I can beat 80-90% of the tracks on expert and it's that extra small percent that I can't do that keeps me coming back. It gives me a challenge and a few embellished solos aren't a turn off to me because for the most part the chart seems to follow the music.

I prefer the "realism" of Rock Band. Hard for the sake of hard is not fun.

Watch a professional run of One on expert. They'll get 100% in every section except for Fast Solo A. Because Activision had to be a dick and make it impossible to even TAP correctly.

And they decided to notate the SYNTH parts in TTFAF. I'm still astonished someone managed to FC that song. -.-u

"They ARE games. I don't see any problem with catering to a gamer mentality."

Because the whole premise of the game is that you're playing 'x' song. When they start adding notes that aren't there, you're no longer doing that. You're playing notes when there aren't any, and a song just happens to be playing at the same time.

GH3 ftl! RB FTW! woot! I'm just sad Tool signed up with Craptivision/RedOCTane\Neversnot instead of EA/Harmonix\MTV :( AM SAD!

Also, you have to realize one thing:
Neversoft's focus is video games. They focus on making the charts harder level to level.
Harmonix's focus is music and comprised of musicians. They focus on emulating the same movements.

Or, to sum it nicely:
GH3+: Dude, check out this high score!
RB: Dude, check this out! (Attempts to Angus Walk, trips, falls flat on face and fails song)

Although I must admit, there are quite a few songs on GH easier to play on the real guitar. 3s and 7s's rhythm section is power chords, and if you can play Thunderstruck, then TTFAF shouldn't be too daunting.

This may sound weird, but I may have bought the new Guitar Hero if it was JUST Guitar. I don't want two different games with bands to play with. Even though I have Rock Band, I still go back to Guitar Hero 3 quite often because I actually like the guitar parts better.

Suffice to say, I'm not buying GH4.

I do agree that GH is too hard for the sake of being hard (I gave up on the franchise after II), this argument has become sort of null with the advent of DLC.

I remember playing Guitar Hero and making it through most of the hard mode, then GHII kicking my ass on the first set of hard mode songs. I then let it collect dust.
But as long as they release songs of all difficulties for GH, the "hard for the sake of being hard" statement shouldn't be too much of an issue.

See: Jordan, Guitar Hero II. The main riff is the keyboard I believe, just adding to the fact that they throw random notes in there for added difficulty.