Blessed by the Potato

I wrote a bit about Guitar Hero earlier, and have now managed to finish the game on “easy”. I have to say, I eventually started to get the hang of it and was just flying through the last few levels, despite the increased difficulty of the songs. I still had a lot of trouble with some relatively simple parts of songs: half-notes* are pretty hit-and-miss, the guitar just doesn’t seem to strum fast enough to hit them, and if I try to force it by going down-up it occasionally throws in a third strum. I have a hell of a time holding the rhythm on fast repetitive parts too, and I can’t tell if that’s my issue or the controller’s.

* – Edit: Wayfare tells me that my musical terminology is wrong and that the notes I was having trouble hitting and that I was calling half-notes are really 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32 notes.

Medium, I find, is a big step up from easy. I really wish there was an “easy plus” or “medium light” where I could throw in the blue fret without this hammer-on pull-off insanity. Though it took a few tries on a number of songs, I managed to get up to the Live in Japan set, and am just getting crushed by songs like Knights of Cydonia. I simply can’t do it, not even close. There isn’t even much of a work-up to it: what few furiously fast sections like that were in previous songs were really short, and there weren’t any that required quite so much in the way of change-ups across the board and then bam! you’re hit with this two and a half minute monster.

While it came later on for him, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation also seemed to find GH3 presented a brick wall of difficultly increase that was just frustrating and made the game seem a lot less fun…

Ah, well, back to being frustrated by DDR. At least with that I get exercise; though GH can be more of a workout than you might think at first, especially if you’re taken to doing flying leaps off the furniture, wailing out the tricky parts on your knees, and jumping up and down for star power…