The core concept remains unchanged: At varying levels of difficulty, you play along with guitar-centric musical tracks using a guitar controller, enhancing the experience's realism. Neversoft has done a capable job of updating Harmonix's work while branding the game with its own character. Although obviously the product of a different developer that was charged with expanding upon the work of the originating developer, the result is far from hackneyed or inelegant, not nearly as obvious and surely not as painful, as, say, the difference between the Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 3 military shooter console titles. Basically, Harmonix and former publisher Red Octane wound up on opposites sides of the money fence, and thus their relationship dissolved.Īs the fourth game in an enormously successful series, Guitar Hero III is likewise a success, maintaining the now-familiar, game-suitable, on-screen musical notation system - a system refined from FreQuency's - and other core elements of gameplay, while adding some additional features and altering existing elements. Of course, there are always bitter rifts and differences in these creative relationships, but the change in developers has much more to do with the rather pedestrian acquisitions of some companies by other companies. Publisher Red Octane oversaw developer Neversoft in creating Guitar Hero III, and much has been made of bitter rifts and creative differences.
Guitar Hero merely cemented Harmonix's reputation as an innovative, important developer in the games industry.īut Guitar Hero III, the progeny of Harmonix's invention, is no longer a Harmonix game. Farther back in time, surely someone did indeed take a risk with one of Harmonix's crazy ideas for a video game, but by the age of Guitar Hero, the developer was a proven quantity in music-oriented games for consoles. If you cut out the specific control mechanism, forget the difference in music genres for included songs and nix a few other things, the main difference between Guitar Hero and its developer's earlier works was the addition of a special controller for playing the game, a unique type of console controller modeled after real electric guitars. However, Guitar Hero was created by Harmonix, a specialized development studio already claiming critical and commercial success with PlayStation 2 musical games FreQuency and sequel Amplitude. On their faces, Guitar Hero and its sequels are those sorts of games, wildly unique, upon which a publisher takes a chance and to which the gaming public avidly responds, making someone somewhere look like a fearless and insightful marketing genius.
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Although born and exalted to stardom on Sony's venerable PS2, the title is also the first version in the series for PlayStation 3, while a graphically enhanced and slightly expanded version of Guitar Hero II was released for Xbox 360.
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Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the third full iteration - fourth if you count the stand-alone but not sequentially named Guitar Hero Encore: Rock the 80s for PlayStation 2 - of a game franchise that very likely shouldn't have, by a roll of the game industry dice, ever seen the light of day.