Since I bought Rock Band (RB) for my PS3 a few months ago, Guitar Hero 3 (GH3) grew roots on the shelf. GH3 was my first fake-music game, and I enjoyed it very much. But the same source who prodded me to try Guitar Hero implored me to try Rock Band. And sure enough, I liked it more.

The multiplayer in RB would have been enough all by itself. Having my buddy over to jam on “March of the Pigs”? My wife singing “Call Me” at the top of her lungs? All of us laughing and cursing at how hard Boston music is to play and sing? You just can’t put a price on that.

(damn you Foreplay/Long Time! Daaaaaaamn Yooooou!)

But it’s not just the multiplayer–RB is simply better in every single way. The single-player game is better in RB. The note tracks are better. The graphics, the gameplay, the presentation, the customization, the buy-what-you-like content store, everything. I was blown away right out of the gate and the overall experience kept me locked for the months between then and now. It’s just more fun.

On a whim last night, I pried GH3 from the great videogame dusty-shelf-grave and gave it another try. You know what? Time has not been kind to GH3. Whatever nostalgia I felt was wiped out as soon as the cheesy graphics started up. Everything I remembered was true; GH3 is completely inferior. Even more so since I’ve been on Rock Band for months now. So the thought of Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Guitar Hero Def Leppard does nothing for me, even though I’m sure I would have fun in playing music from those bands. I’d rather buy the albums from Rock Band. And since I can’t have that due to exclusivity, I’ll just enjoy Nirvana’s Nevermind when it comes out.

I do enjoy the GH3 guitar more than the RB one (which is no big deal, since I play drums in RB). And there are maybe 10 GH3 songs that I desperately want on Rock Band: Barracuda, Even Flow, Rock and Roll All Nite, Ruby, etc. But that’s it. You don’t often see a competitor completely stomp the competition, but here you are.

I think that’s why Activision is desperately, blatantly ripping Rock Band for their own next Guitar Hero iteration. They might as well call it Guitar Hero: Rock Band.

Only Guitar Hero fans who haven’t tried Rock Band could still be fans of that game, and it’s just a matter of time before they do.

Way back in the day, I was a Sega person. Like everyone else at my college, I had a Genesis (Jenny), but I followed Sega into the Saturn (good system, far too expensive, some memorable games), and the Dreamcast (outstanding system, some fantastic games). Then Sega came to an end due to their own pricing, strange marketing, and lack of third-party support… oh, and the relentless PS/PS2 juggernaut. Afterwards, I had to find something else. On a weekend where my wife (girlfriend at the time) anticipated us being snowed in and unable to escape from visiting her parents house, we picked up a PS2. It was Sony who killed Sega, but the whole “love the one who defeats you” vibe is strong here.

That PS2 was good to us, both for that snowed-in weekend and the couple of years since. I’ve previously mentioned the number of cooperative multiplayer games that we enjoyed. The PS2 also had Katamari Damacy, one of the greatest games of all time. Also, any number of fighting games (Virtua Fighter/Soul Calibur), solid jrpgs (Disgaea), platformers (including the awesome and fun Ratchet and Clank series), video board/card games (cheers to Culdcept), and basically any single-player game you could ever want… as long as you could live without Zelda/Mario and Halo. Which we easily could.

(And as an aside, what’s the deal with Halo? The single-player game is completely average, and I’ve already played the Quake series and both the original and revised Counterstrike, which are better than Halo multiplayer. This is the same phenomenon that prevents me from enjoying any modern group-based reality show: I watched the first four seasons of The Real World during their original broadcasts. Everything else is a permutation or reaction to the original, with very little innovation. It just amazes me that in a world where Half-Life and its sequels exist that Halo can be that popular.)

So we got on the PS3 early, and it’s been even better to us than the PS2. Netflix plus Blu-ray plus excellent scaleup of normal dvds would have been enough to make it a good purchase. However, we’ve picked up a few games (Ratchet and Clank, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Ninja Gaiden) that really make the system sing. There’s also the PlayStation store that has demos, downloadable content, and complete small games (Pixeljunk Monsters, Super Puzzle Fighter, Everyday Shooter) that are the perfect cost-to-joy ratio. It makes me smile when I come home from work and my wife is trying to rainbow a level on Pixeljunk Monsters.

And we got on PS3 early, before Sony dropped two things we’ve come to love:

1. Backwards-compatibility! So we still drop in our PS2 Culdcept and relax to old-school good fun. And I’m planning on picking up PS2 God of War 2 now that it’s a greatest hit.
2. Card readers. When I lost the cable connecting our camera to my computer, my early-rev PS3 had a card reader and USB capability that bailed us out. Not ideal, but got us by.

It’s an excellent media machine, with easy connection to my computer for browsing photos and watching avi’s. Going through your photo album on a big HDTV with company over was surprisingly satisfying. It’s my preferred way to show photos now. Also, Blu-ray won. The PS3 is the best blu-ray player in existance, and will continue to be so because of the frequent firmware updates.

People complain about the lack of a huge catalog of games, but honestly I’m a new dad, work a full time job, and have a WoW habit. I’m happy with a few excellent games.

PS3 gets a big thumbs up.

There was a time in the last six months when my wife and I needed a break from the World of Warcraft. I keep up on the gaming internets and came across news that a former project leader (Bill Roper) had left Blizzard and went to found his own company (Flagship Studios). This company’s first game is Hellgate London (HGL), a top-tier online multiplayer game in the spirit of Diablo, by the producer of Diablo. It’s post-apocalyptic, magic-using, gun-shooting, demon-fighting. It’s levelling up and getting better gear. When I list it here, it STILL sounds like a no-lose prospect.

After trying the beta, we were skeptical due to the amount of bugs. We didn’t have a lot of experience with beta versions, so we believed the company’s constant reassurances that they were ironing those bugs out. We figured this must be how it’s done. So my wife and I each got the Collector’s Edition of HGL, because the CE came with a minipet and we’re suckers for minipets. My best friend did, too. We’re all gamers, we were looking forward to dive into a new game that we could all play together.

Unfortunately, HGL sucked.

I could go into great detail explaining why it sucks, but to choose one iconic example, anytime you have around a 50% chance to lock up your machine (not your game, your machine) from ascending an escalator in the main city that you are frequently required to pass through… you should look into delaying the release of the game. This is just one problem of maybe 100 that were painfully obvious and stupid, and directly impacted gameplay. I started to keep a list, but gave up.

I’m sure there are many reasons that the game was released long before it was ready… no official word from the company, of course. From them, we got impassioned letters to the community along the lines of “Seriously, we’re working as hard as we can to fix this!” However, their best intentions don’t mean that this pile of incomplete game fragments was worthy of trading for my perfectly functional pile of cash.

The game had frequent crashing, bugs of all kinds (gameplay, network, ui, game balance, controls, video, audio, you name it) that make it unplayable. An example: there’s a character class called Engineer which is the design cousin of a Marksman. A Marksman is your generic first-person shooter. The Engineer is just like the Marksman, except less effective but to compensate they get a robot pet whose equipment/upgrades vanish every time you log out… and a baseline pet has marginal utility. Whoops! Ha ha. They hadn’t got to fixing that by the time I left, which tells you something of the severity of other problems they had going on. Or does it?

Meanwhile, the company continued to say tantalizing things about upcoming fixes (yay!) while trying to sucker people into their subscription scheme (what?!). Rule of thumb: don’t ask for more money until you’ve delivered on what you originally sold.

And speaking of the subscription: halfway through a horrible launch of an obviously unfinished game, with huge, obvious bugs that prevent the basic playing of the game, HGL comically barreled ahead with their first subscription event! This of course meant shutting off the world servers for a surprisingly long time because… something went wrong in switching on the event! On the bright side, due to lack of subscriptions (you don’t say!) they decided to make the first event free for everyone, not just subscribers. The event had something to do with Halloween, but one of the key parts was that you had to collect random pieces of crap to assemble into a new voodoo-doll minipet. Sweet! Let me give that a shot. Okay, I need 6, 3, and 1 pieces of different kinds of doodads. Hey, I’ve got my 6! Time passes. Hey, I’ve got my 3! End of game. Hey I’ve got 50 of what I need 6 of! These things stack in twos? What a pain in the ass. Time passes. Ok, I’ve owned a couple hundred of these things, and my inventory has to be cleared out all the damn time. Ok, I’m all set with this event, let me get back to the story… oh wait, I can’t avoid them? They’re everywhere! My inventory is at the mercy of voodoo doll doodads!

So there was hardly a part of the game that worked correctly and steadily. But wait, there’s more!

Never mind the broken game implementation, the company compounded this with broken game design. An example! As your character progresses, you can gain special abilities equivalent to talents in world of warcraft, and when you select certain abilities you unlock the ability to purchase even better special abilities. Pretty standard stuff. Unlike world of warcraft, however, these selections could never, ever be reassigned. Your character was locked into these choices for all time. Now, remember that the game was incredibly unbalanced in month one. Once they got over things like, you know, not crashing all the time and other core things, they were going to reexamine the gameplay and rebalance it. Part of this rebalance was an obvious reconfiguring/shuffling/overhauling the abilities… wow, so not only is it broken, but you’re telling me that I’m stuck with these beta versions? Gosh, I hope you give me a good character when you redesign me! The implicit answer is “This game is hardcore, just start over with a new character and then choose very carefully.”

Well, no.

And so, having seen the competition, my wife and I returned to the loving embrace of World of Warcraft, which is still fantastic and getting consistently better in virtually every way as it goes along. When I rebuilt/upgraded her computer and then mine, HGL didn’t get the reinstall. I’ve written off Bill Roper, Flagship Studios, Ping0, and of course everything to do with HGL. An amazing waste of money. In fact, this experience has become the hype cure-all:

“Wow, I’m really looking forward to D&D 4e,” I say. “Maybe I should preorder it.”
“You think it’ll be as good as HGL?” my friend says.
And I grumble while he laughs, and he’s right.

(Although I did preorder D&D 4e. Mearls for Overlord.)