{"id":71,"date":"2007-11-14T13:49:03","date_gmt":"2007-11-14T20:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriknovales.com\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/11\/14\/fake-plastic-guitars\/"},"modified":"2007-11-14T13:49:03","modified_gmt":"2007-11-14T20:49:03","slug":"fake-plastic-guitars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"Fake Plastic Guitars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I rented <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Guitar_Hero_III:_Legends_of_Rock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Guitar Hero III<\/a> the other day, figuring that I should play it, form an opinion of it, and get it out of the way before <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rockband.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rock Band<\/a> shows up. After playing for a bit, I have to agree with a lot of the criticisms that I have seen leveled at the game:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The difficulty curve is very uneven. There are some songs in later tiers that seem quite easy in comparison to earlier songs (including Slow Ride, which seems to be a very strange choice for a first song).\n<li>The boss battles, while sounding neat on paper, don&#8217;t work very well in practice. Part of it may be that dueling stringed instruments now have <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dueling_Banjos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">unsavory associations<\/a>, but they are just not very fun.\n<li>The art direction has gone more towards <a href=\"http:\/\/media.xbox360.gamespy.com\/media\/899\/899096\/img_4954652.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;x-treme,&#8221;<\/a> and away from the friendlier, more whimsical styling in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harmonixmusic.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Harmonix<\/a> versions of the game. It&#8217;s difficult to find a character to use that I actually like, and I think this is a fairly big problem in a game that is, when you get right down to it, all about wish fulfillment.\n<li>The Guitar Hero series <strong>still<\/strong> has terrible tutorials. I can&#8217;t understand why this is still happening. It&#8217;s understandable that for the first game, the developers were under tremendous time pressure, and it&#8217;s hard to produce a quality tutorial on a compressed timescale. But now, Guitar Hero has a huge amount of resources behind it &#8212; there&#8217;s no excuse for them to still be copying the terrible tutorial structure from the first game, and there&#8217;s <em>absolutely<\/em> no excuse for not being able to fully explain game elements like hammer-ons and pull-offs in the tutorial. (The tutorial for GH3, if I am not mistaken, completely omits the fact that you can only perform those moves on notes that have their outline removed.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s still Guitar Hero, which means it&#8217;s still fun, but this third installment (first for the new developer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neversoft.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Neversoft<\/a>) is personally disappointing. The song selection this time around is decent, but I would say that there are more songs in the career mode that I think are stinkers than in either of the first two games.<\/p>\n<p>As I played through the career mode, I became more and more frustrated when the controller would not register a fret press when I was clearly holding down the button. Acknowledging that I must be a poor craftsman since I was blaming my tools, I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/game-talk\/showthread.php?t=39901\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this short post<\/a> about some simple mods that could be done to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B000NUIYK0?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theperbloofer-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B000NUIYK0\">360 Xplorer Controller<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0px;border-top-style: none! important;border-right-style: none! important;border-left-style: none! important;border-bottom-style: none! important\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=theperbloofer-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B000NUIYK0\" width=\"1\" border=\"0\">.<\/p>\n<p>For starters, I decided to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grownupgamers.com\/forums\/showthread.php?t=11775\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">put cardboard under the fret buttons<\/a> to help with responsiveness when the buttons were pressed in certain ways. I followed the (fairly complete) directions in that linked post, but hit a couple of snags that I figured I would note in case it saves anybody else some time.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a moment of mental weakness, I traced out the wrong side of the button on the cardboard. This resulted in cardboard backing that barely fit into the bracket for the button, and produced a lot of friction and resistance &#8212; basically, not usable.\n<li>After fixing that oversight, I reassembled the guitar, only to discover that the cardboard backing I used was too thick, and the buttons were perpetually being pressed! I had used cardboard cut from a shoebox, but I wound up slicing it thinner (in half, roughly) to get something that would work. My recommendation would be to <strong>test the action of the fret buttons during each stage of the reassembly process<\/strong>, because it gets progressively more snug as the various pieces are reattached, and it&#8217;s a pain to have to undo 16 screws <em>again<\/em> because something got messed up.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This mod resulted in a decent improvement in the response of the fret buttons &#8212; I would endorse making these changes for anyone using the Xplorer controller, as it definitely helps reduce the frustration factor of the Guitar Hero games. I don&#8217;t have any issues with the responsiveness of the strum bar, so I probably won&#8217;t be changing that, but later on I might try my hand at <a href=\"http:\/\/forum.guitarherogame.com\/Default.aspx?g=posts&amp;t=5164\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">making the whammy bar looser<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I rented Guitar Hero III the other day, figuring that I should play it, form an opinion of it, and get it out of the way before Rock Band shows up. After playing for a bit, I have to agree with a lot of the criticisms that I have seen leveled at the game: The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}