Some of you noticed I was playing the Guitar Hero III demo last night and messaged me to find out about it so I thought I’d give everyone my thoughts on it. First off, for those who are not aware, there are two places to get your hands on the demo. The first is in the December issue, number 77, of Official Xbox Magazine on the demo disc. That is where I got my copy. The other place you can find it is on the Tony Hawk: Proving Ground game disc.

The demo has 5 songs and the tutorials on it. If you’ve played Guitar Hero II the tutorials are pretty much the same with the addition of one explaining how the battle mode works. Basically, in battle mode your star power becomes battle power you can use to make it hard for your opponent to play. The two attacks the demo shows are “break a string” and “overload amp.”
With the string breaking attack you have to keep hitting the fret/color for the broken string a few times until it is fixed. Until you do that you can’t play any notes of that color. The overload amp attack seemed to make the window for playing the notes smaller, but I could be wrong on that one because I only used it on the opponent in the tutorial and did not have it used on me. I’m still undecided if I like the Boss Battles thing they’ve added for Guitar Hero III. I know it is a video game and boss battles are a classic video game thing, but part of what I like about Guitar Hero II is that you can just play it for fun and as you get better you level up and unlock more stuff. I think the Boss Battles may take away from that a little, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

So, not to what I’m sure everyone is curious about. The songs included

• Lay Down (by Priestess)
• Even Flow (by Pearl Jam)
• The Metal (by Tenacious D)
• Hit Me with your Best Shot (as made famous by Pat Benatar)
• Rock You like a Hurricane (as made famous by Scorpions)

I had a lot of fun with these songs. I was able to get 4 starts on two of them and 5 starts on two of them my first time through. For me this is really good because until last week I did not own Guitar Hero II. I had played it at a friend’s a few times, but not enough to get good or anything. I could be wrong but it seemed like these songs were easier to play than the ones I’ve been playing in Guitar Hero II recently. Not a lot easier, but a little. It could be they put the easier songs into the demo though. Either way, I had a lot of fun playing these songs and I look forward to when Guitar Hero III is released.

I did notice a couple enhancements I really liked. First, on the screen where you choose which song to play it shows not only the song title, but the bang and release year. I’m not good at remembering song titles so this is a nice addition for me because it helps me recall the songs better. Also, the graphics looks better. They’re not a huge leap ahead of Guitar Hero II on the Xbox 360, but they are better.

After playing the demo (a couple times) I promptly put in Guitar Hero II and started playing because it was a lot of fun and I needed something to hold me over until Guitar Hero III is released. I was looking forward to Guitar Hero III already because it has more songs and looks to be a lot of fun, but now I’m really excited about playing it soon.