Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

(Activision for Xbox 360)
By Mike Delano

Rock Band certainly has the edge in the hipness department, but when it comes to making the player feel like a genuine guitar god, there’s still no substitute for the Guitar Hero franchise. Much was made of new developer Neversoft’s idea to drastically ramp up the difficulty in the third installment of the series, but in doing so, they also gave players some immensely satisfying new tools with which to tackle the menacing new note clusters. The striking area of the notes were made larger and more forgiving, and hammer-ons and pull-offs, the advanced techniques for clearing tightly-packed note strings, became much easier for everyone, not just experts, to use. Since Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is essentially a stripped-down version of Guitar Hero III with Aerosmith songs, these helpful features remain, and the game is much better for it. The band’s songs are incredibly fun to play, whether or not you know them or even whether or not you like them, since the songs here that might not catch your ear on the radio are endlessly addictive because of the game’s note interpretation of Joe Perry’s battle-tested riffs and solos. The great setlist (filled out by killer “opening act” tracks like “King of Rock” and “Personality Crisis”) more than make up for the somewhat lame presentation, which in too many ways is reminiscent of last year’s underwhelming Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
(www.activision.com)