#21. Guitar Hero II
Continuing this week’s theme of great music, good gameplay: Guitar Hero II, the first of the major rhythm games that caught and held my attention. After the flurry of World Tour playing in this household, I missed the music in this other game. A shame that one can’t port tracks between titles – not that there’s any shortage of rock to go around.
I’ve already talked about tipping points and popularity with World Tour, but Guitar Hero II makes me wonder in a more personal sense. Assume, as I have, that the game works because it makes you feel cool, lets you tap into that rock star fantasy with no more than a basic understanding of rhythm and the ability to push some buttons. At what point does each of us make the leap to feeling cool from “Okay, I’ll wear this bright red, plastic kiddie guitar- in front of my friends, no less – and pretend to play it.” Yes, you can buy more a more serious, adult guitar now….but this is the default controller, this flimsy, undersized anathema. I don’t think we could look less like rock stars if we tried.
And yet, that physicality is what makes the game work on a fundamental level. Holding a normal controller, as we do with every fighting, platforming, and shooting game out there, wouldn’t have anywhere near the same kind of gut emotional response for me that I get when I’m holding something that, for all intents and purposes, is a guitar. It’s one gimmick that doesn’t feel like a gimmick – rather, it feels necessary. And yet, it was embarrassing that first time to pull that cheap strap over my head and stand there as if I was holding a real instrument, and tap along to something written by Motley Crue or Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine.
I’ve thought this before, but “fun”, as we define it in practice, seems to have a large element of “potentially humiliating and patently ridiculous.”
Perhaps that’s part of it: that we do these silly things, and let other people see us doing these silly things, and are unashamed. There’s enjoyment in nonsense, in letting go of all things serious – and it is certainly not serious to play Guitar Hero. And yet, in the moment of playing, we take it very seriously, as a challenge we enjoy working through. Excepting, of course, those of us playing Buckethead’s “Jordan” on Expert. (That damnable track! If “Freebird” is the final boss fight, “Jordan” is that worthless optional boss that is so ridiculously hard, so laughably out of balance with the rest of the game, that the rewards for winning are by definition useless, and only the zealot uberfans even bother. …Maybe I’ll beat it this week.)
I’ll say as well that given the nature of the Guitar Hero series, I prefer the multiplayer experience. Yes, there is a duelling guitars mode in II, but it’s not the same as when three or four of us are “playing” together – in every sense of the word. I know my biases, and I’m certainly a singleplayer gamer by trade – but here, I’m not as deeply immersed or single-mindedly challenged as I am in my complex, highly narrative platformers or action games. Here I want to argue about which track to play next, to complain about Significant Tim’s lousy taste in classic rock, to save the band by hitting a perfect streak of notes at just the right time….It’s not as fun playing guitar by yourself. Although I’d still like the option, for those times when everyone else is busy or I just a few tracks to myself. Which says something about both the genre and the medium of music, I think.
Now, if they’d only start working on Jazz Hero… Buckethead’s got nothing on Charlie Parker.
