I got back to Guitar Hero 3 for the first time in quite a while today, mainly to check out some of the free songs released recently. I Am Murloc is silly, but fun, and the Dropkick Murphys pack isn’t really my kind of music, but was still interesting to play.

I also retried a handful of other built-in and downloaded songs, and improved on my old scores on all of them, so at least I’m getting a bit better. It did drive home just how much harder GH3 is than Rock Band, even on medium, as I didn’t even come close to 100%-ing any of them.

And to cap off the night, I fiddled around in Guitar Hero 3 for a while. I hadn’t really played it since Rock Band came out, but there are still some songs in there that I like, so I gave them another whirl.

Also, just for kicks, I went back and redid some of the songs on Easy, trying to see if I could improve my score. I managed to FC a few more of them, and after 8 or 9 or so, I checked the leaderboards and I’d jumped from around ~83k’th place up to around 61k. On Easy albeit, but that’s probably as good as I’m ever going to do at any of these guitar games.

One thing that struck me though, was how cluttered GH3 feels compared to Rock Band. After playing RB for a while, it feels like the graphical effects in GH3 like the crackling lightning on the side of the fretboard and the note streak announcements just get in the way and distract too much.

I’m still trying to prepare for the transition to the Hard difficulty in Guitar Hero, so I’ve actually gone back to, uh, medium again. This time though, I’m taking some tips from various forums, and I’ll be playing the songs with just three fingers and not using my pinky at all. That should get me used to shifting my hand around and break me from mentally associating fret colours and specific fingers, which is critical for when the fifth fret is added and you’re forced to shift anyway.

I’m doing pretty well with it so far, and I’ve gone back and redone the first three tiers in GH2, five-starring all of them as well (though a couple took two attempts) and beating my old scores. Some parts that use blue notes heavily are actually easier now since I don’t have to strain my weak pinky to hit them, but quick G->B->G… transitions can be a bit of a pain since now I have to spread my fingers further.

I should also be learning how to alt-strum according to the advice, but it’s been difficult to try and learn both at the same time, so I think I’ll worry about that later. It’ll mainly be needed on the rapid note sections and just downstrumming is still good enough for now.

I also quickly popped into GH3 just for one thing: to finally get five stars on Raining Blood on Easy. It was the only song of the entire easy career that I didn’t five-star the first time through, and I wanted the achievement and unlocked guitar associated with five-starring everything. The song was still more difficult than its brethren, but I did manage to get a 3.04x multiplier on the first crack at it and the rewards are now mine.

It’ll probably be a while before I get the five-star-everything rewards on any of the harder careers, though…

I procrastinated a bit more on moving to the Hard career of GH2 by playing a handful more of the download and bonus songs in GH3 tonight. I even finally broke the 200k score mark with that new German song, albeit I dropped down to Easy to do so; I only hit something like 195k on it on Medium. There are still a whole bunch of other bonus songs I haven’t even tried yet, but the motivation just isn’t there as much as it is for the more well-known songs.

Right now I seem to be having the most trouble with rapid descending and ascending scales, and rapidly alternating pairs of notes. For the former, I always seem to lose my spot in the sequence and don’t get the timing right, and for the latter I just can’t keep in sync with which one I’m supposed to be on at a given moment.

I think I’m getting better at hammer-ons and pull-offs at least, though I still need to find a good song for practicing them.

I figured I’d better keep up my pretend-guitar skills, so I finally got back to finishing off the Medium difficulty in Guitar Hero 3 today. It was actually easier than expected, as I passed the remaining songs without any failures and even beat Lou on the first try (though it was pretty close at the end).

I then went back and started the Hard career mode in GH2, since it’s supposed to be a bit easier than GH3’s hard mode and would be a gentler introduction to having to use the fifth fret. It’s still a pretty harsh jump though, and it took me about four tries just to pass Surrender in the first tier.

I did eventually pass the first tier, but I really need to practice shifting my fingers a lot more. Too often I’m losing track of where they are and pressing the wrong fret when I think it’s the right one.

I finally got back to playing a bit more of Guitar Hero 3 today as well. My last session made my left arm a bit sore for a few days, this being perhaps the most exercise it’s seen in years…

I continued along the Medium career, and left off at the beginning of Tier 8, which is where things are really going to get tough. Raining Blood was the only song I didn’t five-star when I blew through Easy, so I’m not looking forward to that one.

The boss battle against Slash again took a few retries, though fewer than I needed for Tom Morello, at least. It again went to sudden-death-and-you-lose-for-no-apparent-reason a few times, but in the end I managed to save up enough attacks to make him fail during one of the solo-ish parts.

I also had a bit of trouble with Knights of Cydonia (couldn’t find a good video of it on Medium though), failing a song completely for the first time in my Medium career. I was doing fine right up until the rapid hammer-on/pull-off section, and I’m still not very good at those. I managed to succeed the second time around just by strumming them like regular notes and being prepared by seeing the pattern the first time.

I also tried another song on Hard, and although I passed, it was…humbling. :P I’m really going to have to start explicitly practicing songs and techniques when I reach that point.

Tonight I finally got back to Guitar Hero 3 and plowed through the Easy career in one sitting, mainly to get it out of the way early on, raise some easy cash, and unlock all of the songs for quick play. In fact, I earned enough to unlock all of the bonus songs and buy Slash as a character, since it was easy enough to five-star every song for the full reward. Except one song, that is — Raining Blood, which I could only three-star. It’s infamous for being near-impossible on the Expert level, and I’m not liking what I see of it already.

In fact, the difficulty of the songs didn’t always seem to match up with what tier they were in. Some of the later ones might have had more notes, but still felt a lot easier for some reason. I can’t remember which ones offhand though; I whipped through it so quickly that all the songs kind of blur together…

After completing Easy, I went back to Medium and tried the Tom Morello boss battle again. (I’d also played it while doing Easy, but it was no problem there.) I could keep up with the song this time, but still failed multiple times because it wasn’t clear just what was supposed to happen at the end of the song when ‘sudden death’ was supposed to kick in. I’d finish my part, Tom would play for a while, I’d get the ‘drain’ graphic on my side of the screen, and then I’d fail a few seconds later, without even having the chance to do anything since I never got any notes on my side while all that happened.

The game finally took pity on me and gave me an option to bow out and skip this battle, but I figured I was pretty close and kept trying. I finally beat him by holding on to a couple of attacks and saving them until that last section where Tom plays by himself for a while, and by using them all in a row, he failed fairly quickly. The boss battles are still annoying and pointless though, since they don’t really wind up having much to do with playing ability at all.

After that I went on to five-star the encore song, Bulls On Parade, so I’m definitely feeling some improvement. I then also tried a few of the bonus and download songs like Putting Holes In Happiness and The Pretender, and beat them on Medium, but not very well. PHiH is full of a really awkward, rapid transition between green and red single notes and chords, and The Pretender has a lot of hand-shifting chord transitions that I’m still not good at yet, making it hard to keep a multiplier going.

Now to continue the rest of the Medium campaign…

I worked my way through the rest of the tiers in Guitar Hero 2 today, completing the Medium difficulty. I didn’t fail any of the songs, but it was definitely getting tougher near the end, and my overall score (especially in terms of stars and multipliers) was much lower on those. I didn’t do as badly on Free Bird as I expected, but damn, that solo goes on forever…

Next up I think I’ll do the Medium campaign in GH3 before coming back and trying Hard in GH2. And then Hard in GH3, and so on.

And now that I’ve unlocked all of the songs, there’s less pressure to try and move on to the next one, so I can start taking things a bit more leisurely and focus on practicing specific songs for a while. I found that a lot of my trouble was simply not knowing the songs. Knowing the beat because you’ve heard the song before is about the only way I’ve found to keep up on those long, repeated note sequences.

I ended the night with a couple more hours in Guitar Hero 2 and completed two more tiers on Medium, putting me exactly halfway through the campaign by the song counts. The difficulty seems to be increasing a bit, but fairly slowly. I’m still only three or four-starring most songs though, which is a bit discouraging when you hear people talk about how they just bought their first GH game but they were five-starring everything right off the bat so they just skipped straight to Expert… :P

Chord transitions are still throwing me off when they involve the blue fret, and I also have trouble when quickly jumping from green down to blue; my pinky seems to lose its place and I wind up hitting yellow instead. Red/blue chords are also a bit of a problem, as I have a bit of trouble quickly transitioning to them without also subconsciously moving my ring finger too and hitting yellow. One tip I’ve seen is that I should actually rest my index finger on the red fret instead and shift up to hit green, to avoid using the much weaker pinky finger. And it’ll probably help get used to shifting, which I’ll have to do eventually when the orange fret gets introduced anyway.

I also fiddled around with the bonus songs for a bit, and went back and made another attempt at “Push Push (Lady Lightning)” and beat it this time. I failed in the way-too-chaotic-for-me intro the first time around, but fortunately the rest of the song isn’t quite that hard once you get past it. On a lark, I also tried “X-Stream” in Hard mode and was amazed to actually beat it. I must have come close to failing a good half-dozen times though, saved only by a large number of repeated chord and note sections that were a bit easier. I found myself deliberately skipping some notes just to keep in position for the next chord section.

I also tried Jordan on Expert just for yucks, and made it to…4%.