Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (PS3)
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the first in what will presumably be a long line of one-band-centric Guitar Hero installments. No matter how big a fan of the Guitar Hero franchise you are, if you're not a fan of Aerosmith and their banal brand of arena rock, then playing the game will be about as much fun as a enduring a peach schnapps hangover.
alt="Steven Tyler and Joe Perry"/>One lesson that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith taught me is that, while a bum track or two on any Guitar Hero game doesn't usually kill the experience -- you suck it up, play through it, and move on to the next track (the Allman Brothers Band's "Jessica" from Guitar Hero II still haunts my dreams) -- having to play the songs of one band, back to back to back (to back to back), can be a terribly trying experience.
Honestly, what do the words "Living it up while I'm going down" even mean? And yes, now you'll have that annoying song in your head for the rest of the day. Welcome to my hell! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Presumably to break up the Aerosmithotony, Neversoft included a pair of "opening act" tracks at the beginning of each of the game's six sets. I found myself actually looking forward to these tracks, anxious to play something -- anything -- other than yet another Aerosmith track. Heck, even covers of The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night" and Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" are as refreshing as a jigger of chilled peach schnapps on a hot summer day.
alt="Aerosmith on stage" />Nothing says "awesome" quite like having dice and playing cards decorate your stage.
Guitar Hero fans: You know the drill by now. Grab the Aerosmith-branded plastic guitar (or, if you want to save money, dust off the old guitar that shipped with Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock), and fire up the game. Hit the strum bar as the multi-colored notes scroll towards you, pump up your Star Power meter, keep your multiplier at x4, then unleash said Star Power by tilting the guitar at a 90-degree angle.
Voila -- you're a rock god.
But Guitar Hero: Aerosmith had the curious effect of making me feel less like a rock god, and more like a roadie who'd wandered onto the stage after an Aerosmith show and got the chance to fool around with Joe Perry's guitar.
While music is obviously a subjective experience, even Aerosmith's fans can't argue with the fact that that nearly all of their songs are approximately twice as long as they need to be. The band drags them out indefinitely, adding needless jams, solos and countless choruses, giving each track -- and the band itself -- an unearned air of self-importance.
alt="Aerosmith drummer"/>Drum solo brought to you by ... that other guy.
My guess is that even the Blue Army -- it's what Aerosmith's fanbase calls itself -- will have trouble stomaching such a big, unadulterated dose of Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and those other guys (whose names I can never recall).
Aside from the fact that the tried-and-true formula is starting to show its age, there's nothing on the gameplay side of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith that I can point to as particularly flawed. My problems with the game are more conceptual. Imagine being able to download "Rocks," "Toys In The Attic" and "Get Your Wings" in their entirety via the Net, ? la Rock Band. Wouldn?t that be a swell way to 1. free up Neversoft to focus on Guitar Hero IV, and 2. satisfy the Aerosmith fanbase out there at the same time?
After having read all this way, I'd hate to send you kids home empty-handed. So let me tell you a quick story about one of my visits to Harmonix up in Boston a couple of years back.
Harmonix had brought in a few members of the press to loiter around the offices, drink all their soft drinks, and to get a closer look at Guitar Hero II, which was in development at the time.
Harmonix employee Daniel Sussman took us all out one night to some terrible Boston dive bars. After several thousand beers, Sussman casually mentioned that they were trying desperately to come up with a name for a new character in the game. Naturally, being the helpful sorts that we are, and wanting to all be part of videogame history, we immediately began peppering Sussman with potential names. We tried various combinations of our own names; for example, former PSM editor Kaiser Hwang was there, and one possibility that Kaiser and I cooked up was "Kaiser Jones."
As our time at Harmonix waned, we became increasingly desperate, making lame excuses to stop by Sussman's office to loft a few more name candidates his way. In the end, what Sussman and Harmonix settled on was "Casey Lynch," which was the actual name of a former Alternative Press editor who was also in attendance on the trip.
I was, quite honestly, mad as hell when I learned that Lynch would forever be immortalized in Guitar Hero II (and III; and in the Aerosmith version). To this day, I still feel that "Kaiser Jones" was a far superior candidate. The damn fools. The one sliver of a silver lining: Casey Lynch is a man in real life -- an actual man, with two kids and a wife and stuff -- but in the game, "Casey Lynch" is a stick-figure-thin rocker chick.
The lesson here is this: Sometimes in life, when you win, you lose. And sometimes, you're just living it up when you're going down.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
