Wii Want to Rock 'n' Roll All Night

My reasons for buying the Wii are pretty straightforward: 60% to make myself more popular with friends who would suddenly want to come over for Wii parties, and 40% to play Guitar Hero 3. Wait, maybe those percentages should be switched around. Well, either way, Guitar Hero was a major factor, and I quickly got bored of the starter games while waiting impatiently for my copy to arrive. But it finally arrived, and now I can rock! Sort of!

I’m sure you’re familiar with the general concept, but basically, it’s a musical rhythm game where you use a guitar-shaped controller (which you click your Wii remote into) to strum along with color-coded notes in time to what you see on the screen. The better you do, the more points you earn and the more money you receive, which you can spend on extra characters, fancy outfits, rockin’ guitars, and bonus songs to play. You can play by yourself or with a friend in Career mode, noodle around for fun in Quick Play, sharpen your skills in Training tutorials, or battle your friends (as long as they have their own guitars).

The box contains the game, the guitar controller, and a guitar strap, plus instructions for both game and guitar. It does NOT contain a remote, so you’ll need to have a Wii console plus at least one remote to play this game. You can buy additional guitars a la carte, and more GH Wii games are on the way, including an Aerosmith one that should be out any day now. Apparently there are plans to eventually have downloadable content too, but as far as I know, this isn’t available yet.

To describe game play in more detail for those who are new to GH, you hold the guitar controller like a real guitar, with a guitar strap over your shoulder if you choose. Your left hand rests around the neck of the guitar, where there are five buttons, which correspond to your four fingers plus one extra evil one. On Easy, you use only the first three buttons; on Medium, you add your pinky; and Hard adds that last button, which requires you to move your hand back and forth. Your right hand controls the strum bar and the whammy bar. The screen shows a row of colored buttons that corresponds to the buttons on your guitar, and a series of notes that scroll toward you from the back of the screen. When each note hits the front line, you need to be holding down the appropriately colored button(s) and strumming the bar at that exact moment. Some notes are sustained, so you hold down the fret buttons as long as the notes last. If the sustained note is long, you wale on that whammy bar to distort sound and rack up points faster. When you screw up the notes, you’ll hear horrible squawks and twangs from your guitar (thanks to the remote housed within), and if you screw up enough notes, you’ll FAIL and get booed off stage.

There’s an assortment of playable characters to choose from, some that you begin the game with and some that must be unlocked through boss battles. You start with Johnny Napalm, Judy Nails, Axel Steel, Izzy Sparks, Casey Lynch, Lars Ümlaüt, Xavier Stone, and Midori. Playable characters that can be unlocked include Metalhead, Elroy Budvis, Tom Morello, Slash, and Lou the Devil, though even after you unlock them, you still have to buy them, and they cost a grip of cash. I usually play Midori, an adorable candy-colored J-pop girl, and outfit her with the star-shaped Apollo guitar or the cat head guitar.

In Career mode, there’s a dialogue-free narrative storyline that unfolds in cut scenes between levels. Your band begins as a garage band that signs on with a producer named Lou, who urges you to make a video, which becomes an Internet sensation. Becoming successful, the band tours in England, then rebelliously chooses to play at a jail to counteract rumors that you’re “selling out.” A Burning-Man-esque desert rock festival venue leads to a concert in Japan, but when the band tries to get out of their contract, Lou reveals himself to be the devil, and a final battle for the band’s souls – and to win the game – commences.

Each level in Career mode features five songs, and you must successfully play through four of them in order to move to the next level (sometimes fighting a boss first). You can always go back and complete the songs you didn’t finish, or replay them in order to improve your score. The saved profile will include stats on your note accuracy percentage, your longest streak of correctly played notes, and so on, if you really need to know. Once you unlock a song, you unlock it everywhere in the game. Bonus tracks appear on a separate screen once you buy them from the store, and anyone can play those whenever.

Several real-life musicians appear in the game as characters, including Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave) and Slash (of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver). Slash and Morello both wrote and recorded original battle music for their boss-level battles. Once you defeat them, they’re unlocked as playable characters. Guitarist Steve Ouimette plays the Devil for the final battle, and he re-recorded a metal version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” just for it that is extremely fun to play.

The soundtrack features such songs as "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones, "Cherub Rock" by The Smashing Pumpkins, “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam, "The Metal" by Tenacious D, "My Name is Jonas" by Weezer, "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse, "Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss, "Talk Dirty To Me" by Poison, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benetar, and my personal favorite, the poppy, groovy “Cliffs of Dover” by Eric Johnson. It also features re-recordings of "Anarchy in the U.K." by Sex Pistols and "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour. This version is notable for having more of the original tracks and less of that “as made famous by” than previous editions. Trust me, even if you’re looking dubiously at that partial track list and thinking “butt rock,” YOU WILL LOVE IT. I wouldn’t call myself a Foghat fan by any stretch, yet you’ll find yourself bobbing your head and murmuring, “SLOW ride... take it EAS-AY,” along with the game.

My prediction came true: as soon as people heard I’d ordered it, they started asking if it was here yet and when they could come over. I had a group of people tracking my UPS shipment as eagerly as I was! Now that it’s here, though, all I want to do is selfishly race home, unplug the phone, and play until my hands curl up into twisted, arthritic little claws. Yes, I... want to rock ‘n’ roll all night... and party every day. I even plan to break the guitar controller down and take it with me on a plane to visit a friend, so we can battle in person together. GH3 may not be the very best $70 I’ve ever spent, but it’s pretty darn close.