New guitar hero!

It turns out that our utilities company gives out argos points each year- we've been with them for 5 years and didn't realise-so when we called up last time to check something the guy on the phone was like "You do realise you have £50 worth or argo points here, right?"

We thought it was high time we spent them so we bought the new guitar hero (As we were so addicted to the old version at uni and it's such a good social get together ice breaker, it seemed a shame not to have it any more just because we had a new console).

The new version is very different to the old one in 5 significant ways:

1) It's much much more complicated to play- as it has 6 buttons and you use them all even on easy mode. It's do-able but much easier if you've ever played a string instrument. There is a tutorial at the start. For the love of god, do the tutorial!

2) The music is ever scrolling- different channels and themes at different times of the day. far more song choice and new music added all the time, however, to "free play" and pick songs you have to earn "coins" to pay for them. You get coins for playing songs so it works out OK it's just a bit of a drag.

3) It has the real music videos on, so it is designed to leave running in the background- It's like it was made for house parties! (Although, the big downside is that you have far less control over the songs- with the old version, you put the "metallica" version on, you know what you're getting. With this I seem to have to play an awful lot of songs I don't like and I don't know- Hopefully it'll learn the preferences and adapt the play lists accordingly.

4) It has real festival footage- you can either play the 24/7 rolling music "live" or on a "TV channel" with the videos. Live is pretty weird. I'd like to know where it was filmed!

5) So far the music is pretty "up to date" and gets updated with new tracks added daily. I would like to see some NIN, smashing pumpkins and APC though as they were on the Xbox 360 versions but have been omitted from this one. Bring back the 90s! We miss them!

At £75 I think it's OK. It's more challenging, it's a level up, it's constantly updated so we won't have to have 10 different versions anymore but I think it's going to take some time to match the sheer volume of retro, trashy and nostalgic songs it had before. It feels a bit like they wanted to divorce the old concept and make this into something far removed from the south park ridicule. What they've actually done is made this so difficult that I might as well be playing rock smith and learning actual bar and arpeggiated chords rather than playing them on guitar hero.

There is no way I could play this game drunk!

Or whilst eating pizza!

I am enjoying it, I'm learning about the kinds of music those young people listen to. I will have to up my game to get back to snacking whilst playing. I preferred the level of control and choice the older version had, but maybe they'll get there with this one.