for those about to rock

"he heard one guitar / just blew him away"

ok, i promised a while back to devote an entry to this game, figuring i'd save the subject for whenever i found myself in an inspiration drought.

a month ago, i was trying to explain what makes it so great to my friend louie's cousin over some beers at red bones. unmoved by my gushing praise of the slick functionality of the fisher price-style guitar controller, of the translation of musical scores into on-screen cascades of notes that assault like descending space invaders and demand the same sharp reflexes to dispatch, of the smooth gradation in difficulty levels that ratchets things up closer and closer to the challenge of bonafide note-for-note accuracy, of the smart, varied song list and a range of contributing artists that runs the gamut from judas priest to cream to a host of boston-based groups (word, cambridge developer harmonix), he hit me with the make-or-break question: "why would i want to play it when i have the real thing in the other room?".

he had me there.

as i set out to write this, though, i realized that this question actually speaks to what makes the game truly great: the way it taps into the joy of playing music with a band, the transcendence of losing yourself in performance and riding that certain magic by intuition. you can't get that noodling around all by your lonesome.

granted, we're not talking flawless execution here: hammer-ons and pull-offs don't work as well as they should, some parts of songs are much harder to play in the game than in real-life and there's a glaring absence of the ability to single out tricky passages for practice, which ignores the fact that muscle memory is essential to playing guitar. but for all those times i've caught myself trying to employ vibrato on the toy guitar in the middle of a song, i can honestly say harmonix has delivered a brilliant, wholly-unique gameplay experience.

posted by jomilkman @ 9:02 AM