I'm sure most of you have read my Guitar Hero 2 review and hopefully enjoyed it, well here it is, the new and improved version GUITAR HERO 3..

I wanted this game since it came out, I brought the second one back in September but without the guitar and found that to be alright, but a couple of weeks ago I got a call from my mum asking if I wanted Guitar Hero 3, she had managed to find it in Tesco's for £25 instead of £50. I of course said yes and the shop had made a mistake but had to honour it… I only got the actual game on Christmas day and have played it religiously since.

Packaging

If you buy the game with the guitar, and in this case it's a wireless guitar you get a 4 foot long box to carry everything in. With that you get the body of the guitar, the neck and stickers to make your guitar more unique. You also get batteries included and a thing to put in the front of your play station where your controllers usually go.

Wireless Guitar

This bit is a bit different to my other review. Before I played the game with just the controllers, this makes the game about £20 cheaper anyway and I thought at the time it's much easier but boy was I wrong. The wireless guitar comes with the body and neck and a whammy bar. On the actual guitar neck you have five buttons:

• Green
• Red
• Yellow
• Blue
• Orange

Probably the main thing you have different to if you play on a normal ps2 controller is the strum bar. It's pretty much just a toberone shaped thing stuck in the middle of the guitar body. This is pretty important, every time you play a note; you have to hit the right colour button and the strum bar at the same time.

The Game

This is pretty much the same but has one big difference which I'll get to later. CAREER
The main section is probably the Career. You can do a lot of different things on here including:

• Choose your character- each different character has it's different moves which are good for any band.
• Guitar and Guitar Finishes- choose a guitar for every different gig if you want and polish it off with different colours and finishes.
• Career Status Screen- Here you can see how you are doing, you can change your character and your guitar.
• Store- SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! All that hard earnt cash is available for you here when you want to buy new outfits, guitars and new songs.

CO-OP CAREER
The new bit for this disk is co-op career. Here you work together with a friend to thrash everyone and rock and there are even some new songs that aren't available on the single player mode. You have to play together to get the highest score possible and you have to work as a team to get through the rounds. If one player is better than the other, give them more of a challenge and let them get the harder notes by changing the difficulty.

QUICK PLAY

If you're bored and want to play quickly, go onto quick play and play some of the songs you have unlocked already.

MULTIPLAYER

This is pretty much the same as the second game. Here you can play with a friend like co-op career but instead you can do the following:

• Face-Off- play against a friend and see who comes out with the highest points.
• Pro Face-Off- play the same notes at the same time and see who comes out the best.
• Battle- This is instead of cooperative which they have put into the co-op career. Now you can battle each other and use little tricks to stop the other from playing well… including snapping strings.

TRAINING

This is a good thing for any player. You can either use the tutorials which will help any player or just practise those hard notes for the career.

Do you wanna be a rock god? THIS IS HOW

First off you have to name your 'band' if you will, mine at the moment is 'Bob' (don't ask). You can pretty choose anything you want, including your favourite bands, my sister's band is called 'The Killers'.

I found when you are playing with a basic ps2 controller you don't really need to know much about how to play a guitar or anything like that, but I think when you're playing with the wireless guitar you do. Just basic things like to make it easier; the higher you go up the fret board the lower notes will be obsolete so you can keep your fingers on them to make it easier.

You have to hold down the right fret button that corresponds to the note that is closest to you on screen for example: If you can see a red coming towards you on the glamorous fret board you have to put your finger on the correct fret and strum it when it gets to the lines of buttons closest to you.

I have only played easy on this one. By this time with the second one I felt like I could go up to medium, but I think the makers thought that they would give us more of a challenge and it's a lot more difficult that the previous two.

I'm sure most of you would have heard of a whammy bar, all electric guitars have them (except mine, it's snapped off) and this guitar is no exception. On the long notes, you can pull the whammy bar closer to the guitar and then out again to give the song your own twist.

At the side of the giant fret board there is a rock meter, here it shows you how you are doing. If it's on green your doing fantastically well, yellow signifies that you are getting there and red means that you need to come on a long way. Flashing red's the worst though, that means that you are bordering along painful.

Difficulty Settings

It's the same as before, you have four settings they are the following:

• Easy- This one should be called 'not easy'. It's much harder than the previous games; it's a lot more like a medium setting so I would advice people to PRACTISE first. You only use three fret buttons for easy mode.
• Medium- In addition to the easy one you only use one more fret.
• Difficult- Impossible in my opinion. I had a little go and just failed at the first hurdle. You use the finale fret button on this mode.
• Expert- pull off a lot of notes whilst completing complicating chords.

Guitar Battle Attacks

This is a new portion of the game. On Guitar Hero 3 you can battle stars like Tom Morello and the famous Slash by raising the guitar up you can beat them using the following attacks:

• Broken String- break the opponent's string, they have to rapidly tap that broken string until it's repaired.
• Difficulty Up- This increases the difficulty for your opponent.
• Amp Overload- makes the screen shake.
• Whammy Bar- They have to move the whammy bar fast.
• Power-up Steel- Steals their attack before they use it.
• Double Notes- Doubles how many notes they have to play.
• The Lefty/Righty Flip- Swaps the notes around on the chart to how they would see it. Impossible to play.
• Death
  Pictures of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2)

  

  Giant Fret Board

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  Drain- In sudden death it drains your opponents metre.

Songs

Unlike my previous one I'm not going to give you a list of which ones are fantastic and which ones aren't. I think the whole lot are great, with a great mix of new ones and old classics.

I'll still give you the list of the songs though, so here it is:

1. Starting Out Small

"Slow Ride" - Foghat
"Talk Dirty to Me" - Poison
"Hit Me with Your Best Shot" - Pat Benatar
"Story of My Life" - Social Distortion
"Rock and Roll All Nite" - Kiss (Encore)

2. Your First Real Gig
"Mississippi Queen" - Mountain
"School's Out" - Alice Cooper
"Sunshine of Your Love" - Cream
"Barracuda" - Heart
Guitar Battle vs. Tom Morello (original composition)
"Bulls on Parade" - Rage Against the Machine (Encore played with Tom Morello)

3. Making the Video

"When You Were Young" - The Killers
"Miss Murder" - AFI
"The Seeker" - The Who
"Lay Down" - Priestess
"Paint It, Black" - The Rolling Stones (Encore)

4. European Invasion

"Paranoid" - Black Sabbath
"Anarchy in the U.K." - The Sex Pistols †
"Kool Thing" - Sonic Youth
"My Name Is Jonas" - Weezer
"Even Flow" - Pearl Jam (Encore)

5. Bighouse Blues

"Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys*
"Rock You Like a Hurricane" - Scorpions*
"Same Old Song and Dance" - Aerosmith
"La Grange" - ZZ Top
Guitar Battle vs. Slash (original composition)
"Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns N' Roses (Encore played with Slash)

6. The Hottest Band on Earth

"Black Magic Woman" - Santana[1]
"Cherub Rock" - The Smashing Pumpkins
"Black Sunshine" - White Zombie
"The Metal" - Tenacious D
"Pride and Joy" - Stevie Ray Vaughan (Encore)

7. Live in Japan

"Before I Forget" - Slipknot
"Stricken" - Disturbed
"3's & 7's" - Queens of the Stone Age
"Knights of Cydonia" - Muse
"Cult of Personality" - Living Colour (Encore)†

8. Battle for Your Soul

"Raining Blood" - Slayer
"Cliffs of Dover" - Eric Johnson
"The Number of the Beast" - Iron Maiden
"One" - Metallica
Guitar Battle vs. Lou (The Devil Went Down to Georgia - Steve Ouimette)

Graphics

In my opinion Guitar Hero 2 had better graphics but I think the music makes up for it in this one.

If you look at the likes of The Sims on ps2, the graphics are pretty terrible and Sims is probably one of the most well known game there is... they obviously have more backing but Guitar Hero beats them hands down.

The graphics are pretty hard to explain, they're realistic in the way that they move just like we do etc but they still and always will be cartoonistic. I think the way the programmers have designed the people is amazing, they look and play the guitar fantastically. It's realyl amazing how they pulled it off. I think it's probably one of hte best set of graphics on any games. Pretty impressive.

Soundtrack

The best yet. Unlike the first & second one it actually contains people you know from the likes of metallica to The Killers and the Muse to Slipknot it's just fantastic. It gives a whole range of the best music from the world.

Overall

This is the best yet. The music is fantastic and in my opinion you do need a guitar for this particular one. However if you buy it from most shops they are selling it for around £50, so you are literally paying £20 for the actual guitar.

If I were you keep an eye out on Ebay because to be honest I don't think this game is worth £50 even though it's probably the best game I've ever played.

This will be loved by the whole family, but remember it's not easy.

I hope you enjoyed this review and please please please

RATE & COMMENT! I really appreciate it, especially criticism.

Thanx. Kirsty xxx