Is this becoming a videogame blog? Sure seems like that's all I've posted about lately. Oh well, it's what's been occupying the majority of my time.

I picked up Guiter Hero III: Legends of Rock for the 360 the other day. I haven't gotten too much time to play it, what with making 3D screenshots in Halo 3 all the time, but here are my initial impressions (as well as those of some of my fellow Guitar Heroes).

The Good

• The guitar controller is improved over the GH2 Explorer model. The fret buttons are a bit softer (less "buttony" I guess) and the raised ridge on the center yellow button is easier to feel. The Xbox Guide button and directional pad have been moved closer to the neck making it unlikely to hit them accidentally. The slightly longer whammy bar feels good, and the strum bar, though still very "clacky" sounding, has a better feel--I find I can hit multiple notes a bit faster (it "rebounds" faster?) Plus it's sexy black and wireless, to boot!
• Load times have improved a bit.
• They are finally leveraging the multiple buttons on the fret to navigate the set list menus, instead of having to endlessly scroll ("downloaded" and "bonus" songs are on different "tabs" for instance, accessed via the yellow and blue fret buttons).
• The hammer-on/pull-off notes are easier to see.
• There is now a note streak counter and popups telling you how many you've hit in a row (though some may consider these popups a bit annoying and you really don't have time to glance over at your counter whilst playing)
• The Boss Battles (of which there are only 3) seem to be cooler than one might expect.
• Casey Lynch is hotter in this one.

I haven't played too much of the single-player and as such a majority of my complaint deal with how they handled the co-op play. Co-op is what made me run out and buy Guitar Hero 2 within minutes of seeing it. I was disappointed that they took a few steps backward...

The Bad

• The leaderboards are still clumsy and awkward, and may be more poorly implemented than in the previous game.
  
• The one flaw of the guitar is that, instead of using the rechargeable battery packs like every other wireless controller for the 360 (which, I admit, is limited to the gamepad controller and the racing wheel), it only takes regular batteries. I personally think the rechargeable battery packs are great and I don't understand why they wouldn't have made use of them.
• The animated scenes between the sets are cool to watch at first, but it would be nice to be able to skip them when playing on a different difficulty, or for them to be different if between, say, easy and expert.
• There seems to be a larger emphasis on "battling" in this title than on jamming. I'm much more interested in cooperative guitar play than head-to-head competitive play.
• Local co-op career is laid out in a slightly confusing way... I'm still not sure how it is keeping track of scores, but it looks like it is based on the lowest level of the two people playing sets the career level (though, if so, why wouldn't you both just play at the same level, other than the obvious boredom factor from having to play at a lower level than your skill). The implementation could have been much clearer.
• They've done away with the breakdown of stats for each player in co-op which, I think, is a huge design mistake and I'm incredibly disappointed. Part of the fun in playing co-op, at least for me, was being able to see how we both fared on different sections of the song. It helped you get a feel for where you needed to go back and practice and gave you a better sense of how you performed. You don't even get an indication of how many notes either person missed, just one average percentage score. So they basically took an existing feature of GH2 that worked really well and dropped it for no reason. A really crummy decision, I think. Here's hoping they wise up and release it in a patch.
  
• They online co-op setup should have been handled differently. Currently you set up a session and have to set a number of songs that will be played (1, 3, 5 etc., always an odd number from a list), a set difficulty level, and a set assignment of who is lead and who is rhythm/bass. Once this set is done you have to completely set up the online co-op game again to continue playing more songs or change any options. This is cumbersome and quite frankly ridiculous. The co-op should have looked exactly the same as it did/does in the single player. You should be able to choose any song to play at any difficulty and any guitar/bass combination. You shouldn't have to be locked into your choices ahead of time. What if I want to spend the next two hours with my buddy playing co-op and jumping from song to song, trading off who plays lead and who plays backup? What if I want to play expert on some and hard on others? Why can't we just pick these options as we go? Another really strange decision by the development team that makes me think they threw co-op in at the last minute and didn't really think about how it is played or how it should work.
  
• Also, when setting up a private co-op game, there is no hotkey button for inviting a friend (usually the yellow Y button on the controller). Instead you have to hit the guide button and navigate.
• Also, also... there doesn't appear to be a way to play a co-op career online. Why? Because we would have wanted to do that, I guess...
  
• When playing online co-op they also should have done something about the volume balance between the players. When you are playing bass, you are sometimes drowned out by the sound of the lead guitar, making it difficult to hear the part you play. This problem is somewhat understandable when you're playing in the same room, but when you're playing over live, there's no reason that the person playing the bass shouldn't hear his part louder than the lead line. You can go into your audio options and tweak a couple of settings to try to account for this but you shouldn't have to--it would have been trivial to implement and its amazing they overlooked it.
  
• Some of the Achievements are pretty lame. Achievements should be, well, about achieving something. But ideally those achievements should be fun and not chores. "Button Masher" and "Buy A Guitar Already" for instance, are really dumb: the first requires you to win 15 consecutive online matches using the gamepad controller instead of the guitar, and the second requires you to finish the hard or expert career using the gamepad controller. The question is: Why would I ever want to? Isn't that why it comes with a guitar?
• The GuitarHero website, which was supposed to allow you to link to your game to view scores and compare with your friends, etc., still isn't working right after a couple of days of the game being out. How hard is it for these companies to get their act together--they could have predicted the number of people who would buy the game and want to go to the site. All they had to do is consult with a network expert, load test their software, and put in the requisite number of servers.
  
• Finally, Judy Nails, my favorite avatar from GH2, is no longer cute and sassy. She's now more punk and, well, kinda "chunky". She looks like a linebacker in drag. Why, Neversoft, WHY?

Oh well, it's still fun, but they could have done better.