The crowd stand before you, the lights are beaming down upon your face. They are drawing you on, more they shout, more. But you’re afraid. Afraid of their wrath in case you start missing the keys. You wonder, can you remember the tune; will you work again after this? Will you rise to fame and fortune, or fall back to the pits from whence you came.

You start thinking back to when you started out in the biz, all the promise that came with it, your fist meeting with that PR guy who smelled a bit like orange peel and actually looks like an orange due to 46,000 hours exposure on a sun bed. He said, in his husky smoke-filled voice, “Stick with me, generic teenager and I’ll make you a star, maybe.”

Sex, lemsip, rocks, and bread rolls, they would all be yours for just a simple song. So play honky, play for the love juice that comes your way.

Failing that, play Guitar Hero 3.

So you have the musical talent of a wasp with flatulence? So what if you look like something which fell out of the sphinx’s nose? So what if the only gig you will ever do in your life is waiting on tables at some fat people’s wedding? This game allows to change all that, and for a least 3 seconds, allow you to pretend you are a rock star, putting the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and that bloke from the Who to shame.

I do say 3 seconds because you have never played the game before you are in for a rather nasty shock. Because for once dear people, we people in PC land (the superior race, we will destroy you! BWAHAHA!) are not stuck with the mouse and keyboard. Oh No.

Activison and Aspyr have seen it fit to include…Excalibur (cue angelic music and loads of people bowing), with at least three working buttons, a metal stick that goes in and out and a flipper in the middle, you too have the crap novelty plastic thing that all console owners enjoy, and in a handy USB connection. What joy, what boundless joy we have right now; we should give them our first born!

And then you play guitar to songs on the screen strumming away when the different colours come down and it makes sound, you’re doing it boyo, you really are! And there are some real classic songs to play to such as “When You were Young” by the Killers, “Ruby” by the Kaisers, and “Anarchy in the UK” by a certain group of pistols. Just for that alone, you’re onto a winner surely?

Now, you may be thinking I’m about to strip naked, lube myself up with various oils cheaply purchased from Ann Summers, and allow the mighty manhood of Guitar Hero to rape me like a drunk person who won’t take no for an answer. Well, not quite.

I have been waiting for this game a fair while simply because of my experiences on the PS2 on a big screen at (someone’s) house in the bury of shrews. The first time I played, it was two player, we were both crap but it didn’t matter, it was something different, something new and the sad fact was, it was one of the reasons to want a console in the first place.

Games like this are never really produced for PC, simply because most hardcore fans turn red with bloodlust at the first sign of a game that uses anything but a mouse and keyboard. “You can kill this better” and “you have more fun” are some of the reasons given to me, but I don’t care. To me, a game is a piece of entertainment that you will enjoy, no matter what strange device you have to plug in to make it happen.

And now, it seems that the game makers have brought out to PC, I want to praise it in all its glory simply for getting on PC. But I can’t.

You see, if I was truly blinded by the fact I didn’t have to have a PS2 or Xbox 360 for the game, I would tell everyone to buy it now and forget the likes of HL2: Episode 2 or Crysis. But I cannot. There are small flaws to the game which mess the whole thing up like a baby’s used nappy. I can’t help but think of a thousand Jeremy Clarkson metaphors about cars which look pretty mean but have all the power of a smurf.

For a start, 15 minutes into playing the game at the Career point, I got annoyed to the point of wanting to get the DVD and send it to disc heaven where all the scratched discs from the past can be restored to their former glory and they frolic through the fields of clouds. This was simply because the game kept failing to register when I strummed with the buttons and then I started not to care and strummed when I shouldn’t have, this lost me more points and the crowd, which annoyed me more. So off I go and practise.

The tutorials are for people who it seems have only discovered electricity recently and are wooed by the shiny pictures boxes that produce things that talk to you. It’s all too simple, and you get lulled into a false sense of security, you start thinking, hey, maybe I can get the hand of it. It shows you one tiny bit at a time, try this bit, and wow you’ve done well.

Then you try the songs to practise on. At full speed, even on easy, I struggled. It took a fair few hours to come close to play the songs it first gives you at a remotely crap level. Perhaps this is because I have the reaction time of a corpse, and if you suffer from such a condition, this game will rob you of your dignity and your pride, leaving you to think that you are unfit to do anything and you end up contemplating a career at McDonalds. (Now I await the complaints and a career at McDonalds is actually rewarding. I worked there and never got a star, that’s how little I care.)

Moving on as I was saying, at times the game seemed hell bent on not acknowledging my actions, notes just drifted past at speed and there was nothing I could do. This seems to be also due to slowdown at various parts of the game while playing, when you are in your stride and the things stutters to the point you lose where you are, and therefore lose the plot, instead you end up just pressing any buttons to try and get back into the rhythm.

I wonder why this is, considering the mighty computer beast covers the unbelievably high system specs that are required to play this on the PC, which leads me to ask the question: Is the game really running the cure for cancer code or looking for extraterrestrial life in the background because I fail to see what would cause the fecking thing to need requirements that high, and even then it still stutters? It’s rendering lines with coloured circles coming down the screen with some skinny student bloke dancing away in the background. How difficult is that?

The game does feature multiplayer, and when someone is actually online to play against I would love to tell you how the co-op or the battle mode goes, but it appears there is no one at all that wants to play online, rather methinks preferring to keep their shame to themselves.

And just for the record I want to say Battle Power and the boss battles enrage me to the point of turning green and smashing everything in sight thanks to the gamma powered rage you get from playing against the bosses who never put a foot wrong it seems and it taunts you like Nelson from the Simpsons. Insert Swear word here.

You see, the aim at this point is to put them out of joint by getting power bits and then using them when they play, except they are perfect at playing and even when it gets to the red “you are rubbish” bit for the boss, the song ends and he wins anyway. Yet another point to lose your calm too. Actually this game is sounding like it’s not for the easily annoyed. That said it makes you come back for more…

The controls themselves can be the most interesting to say the least, after you of course you have the guitar controller, but you can also play with a keyboard and mouse on your pc or laptop but surely that loses the fun? After all you want to play with the big plastic thing and not want to type away at your leisure.

That said, when space is at a premium on the train and you fancy a session, the last thing you are going to do is whip out the controller and jump up and down on the seat while playing “Number of the Beast”, frightening the business man who just wants a glass of port and to read “lords and ladies monthly”. That’s where the keyboard comes in, but even then methinks it won’t happen.

But for all the downsides, the fact is I got to strum along to Ruby. That is worth its weight in gold. Maybe it’s not the bloodbath fighting against alien hordes to rescue the bikini clad beauty from the clutches of the evil Ocean Finance salesman, but it is enjoyable none the less.

Maybe because I have the reactions of a cake that I was unable to fully enjoy the game, but I guess that’s the point, you can’t be fantastic straight away at it (unless you are a freak), it requires a bit of work and I guess that along with playing along to some of the best music makes up for some of the flaws. Some mind you.

So using the outstandingly amazing 1-10 system used in the podcast (where 1 is complete nuts while 10 is the dog’s nuts, with 12 being given for nuts of unquestioning perfection) I hereby award the game:

The game needs technical polish, no boss battles and some actual multiplaying instead of offering it and then no-one is there would be a change but despite those, Guitar Hero is actually fun. And that counts for a lot. But don’t play if you get easily annoyed, you will be committed.

Edited 6th April 2008
Don’t play this game on Windows XP. During testing of various versions of the Windows operating system to see which was the best for people’s needs at the moment, namely Windows XP and Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit, performed some time later after this review, the performance for the game was found to be terrible and basically unplayable this brings the score down to 5 at best. The score will still stand if you have the game under Windows Vista.