This was a fairly recent pick up and has some what taken precedent over other games. Namely due to my childhood nostalgia running ripe once I saw it and because as previously mentioned, any relatively short handheld game is far easier for me to complete lately.
Now this is somewhat of a quick take review but this is due to being one of those games that there isn’t really a lot to cover. Also, if you have any experience playing any iteration of this series you’ll know exactly what it is.
So, like any normal guitar hero game this comes with it’s own imaginative way of electronically playing the guitar. This comes in the form of the grip and strap. This adapter plugs straight into the Gameboy Advance port of your Nintendo DS. It can be played left or right handed, so for me being a righty. I just tilted the DS anti clockwise and was able to play the four colour coded frets with my left hand and use the guitar shaped pick to strum the touchscreen in time to not create any dead notes.
This game only comes with 25 songs and a tiny campaign. This career mode comprises of five sections where you play bigger venues as your notoriety rises. Each block contains five songs to master. No boss type song either to prove more of a challenge.
Within each block there are four separate difficulties starting from easy going to medium, hard and expert. Again the usual for this series. I always start on medium as on easy you don’t tend to have to use the blue fret button and I don’t see the point in that. It took me only a couple hours to go through the entire thing not having to replay any songs. And for the most part medium didn’t provide much of a challenge unless I had to play red and blue simultaneously for a chord. Which more often then not my dexterity failed me.
The left screen acts as the stage and the tab then scrolls the notes to play, whilst the touchscreen has the guitar. In order to successfully play a note you have to hit the strings on the touchscreen as you press the fret. You gain a score multiplier for hitting a successful chain of notes. This can be further bolstered by activating star power, which does use the microphone niftily you can either shout into it or blow into to activate not losing your flow as you go along.
You can unlock alternate attires for the few characters you can pick and get some extra guitars to play on stage with as well. But for the most part it’s highly lacking. I know this is a handheld version of a console game but they did put half if not a third of the effort in.
The game runs surprisingly well, as I did think it’d have a chance to be laggy or not as responsive as it should be. You just have to make sure you full press down on the buttons as it won’t respond correctly and give you a miss. Ruining a nice long combo. The other thing to watch out for is if you’re in the zone to make sure you don’t stray too far from the guitar strings as you’ll be playing in time but still missing the notes.
Now the game doesn’t look like complete shit but, it does look it’s age. Fairly fuzzy around the edges and even for the hardware it’s on with the DS not being the most powerful console ever made. I think it passes muster.
My big complaint about the game is even though you can play each song on four varying difficulties, and there is a guitar duel mode where you use pick ups to stop a rival guitarist playing correctly racking up a bigger score, due to the lack of songs and only being able to play the guitar part of the song it’s not all that replayable as I can’t imagine you’ll want to keep playing the same few songs all the time. As for my music tastes it’s nowhere near heavy enough. It’s all but lacking in metal music. You do have Nirvana, Incubus, Ozzy Osbourne and Red Hot Chilli Peppers sprinkled about though.
Overall I rate this a respectable and Tasty 6/10. It’s an admirable attempt at porting a bigger more fleshed out console game series to the little handheld. If it’s there to play you may as well, but you’d probably enjoy playing something else if you can.
Released June 22nd 2008 on Nintendo DS.
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