Guitar Hero madness, yet again

[Nev]

Finally picked up the proper controller for the game. Oh my Jesus, it's very hard, even on Normal. The fifth-rank songs are vicious. And the sad thing is that I know how much harder a real guitar is to play...

On the other hand, it's very fun...I particularly love "playing" the Exies' "Hey You", Boston's "More Than A Feeling", and The Slip's "Even Rats". The company that did the covers of the songs are really quite good - same guys that did Karaoke Revolution's songs, and they're even better this time around.

[Agent 57]

The game doesn't really begin until you get to Expert, but the progression in GH is so excellent that you don't really notice.

But after you start playing on Expert, whenever you watch newbies playing on medium or (god forbid) easy, you'll wonder how you ever managed to stomach playing the game on a mode that was that boring.

[Zeus]

I'll second that motion. Expert is on a completely different level than the others and the last couple of sets of songs are much harder than the first 4 sets, especially the last two songs, which are insane

[Nev]

Whoa now, guys. I can barely beat Normal as it is (just did the other night). Hard is already kicking my butt slightly.

I do wonder now whether or not the game would be an aid to playing actual guitar, though. The chord positions in a real guitar are much more brutally difficult than on the controller, and obviously one can and does go up and down the fret-neck on a real guitar, but a lot of the other motions are pretty similar...

[Agent 57]

Actual guitar players have said that GH is fantastic as a finger exercise, but realistically it's not much more than that.

I actually was inspired by the game to start taking guitar lessons again (I dabbled with it a little in college) for about a month and a half, and believe me, pressing five large buttons on a tiny neck and flipping a single strum bar back and forth doesn't translate at all well to pushing down on/strumming strings on a real guitar. Sure, GH helped when doing scales - having the dexterity to easily go 1-3-4-1-2-3-1-4 was nice - but it certainly didn't make my fingers any longer or the pads of my fingers any smaller, which was basically my downfall and the reason I stopped. (Hey, when you have to perform all sorts of contortioning to simply play a G chord without damping the A string with your middle finger, you know you're not really cut out for the instrument.)

[Zeus]

Whoa now, guys. I can barely beat Normal as it is (just did the other night). Hard is already kicking my butt slightly.

I do wonder now whether or not the game would be an aid to playing actual guitar, though. The chord positions in a real guitar are much more brutally difficult than on the controller, and obviously one can and does go up and down the fret-neck on a real guitar, but a lot of the other motions are pretty similar...

The only aid would be in being able to move up and down readily and teaching you to use the pinky like a normal finger when holding down chords and frets. Maybe in being able to read tablature, but very little when you consider it's essentially one string and 5 frets on the thing.

Other than that, it's basically useless to help you actually playing a guitar, although the game does a specatcular job of making feel like you're playing one