mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

Demos

This week on Xbox Live, the demos for Guitar Hero 3 and Need for Speed: Pro Street were released. Being a fan of both series of games i gave them a try. Guitar Hero 3 really does not need any explination, it’s the same deal as the last two iterations, but looks a hell of a lot better visually, has a better set list and the gameplay is improved as well.

The GH3 demo came with five songs: Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Lay Down, Evenflow, Rock You Like a Hurricane, and The Metal. Out of that list I enjoyed all off the songs execpt for the first one, but I really dig Lay Down, the main riff is quite catchy and is stuck in my head at the moment. As I mentioned the game play is improved, by that I was referring to the notes and playing of the songs. At least with these five songs they did not seem to be cluttered with notes and felt more natural to play when you do follow the notes on screen. Also the hammer-ons and pull offs are a lot easier to do this time around, playing on Hard was fun, and even on Expert I managed to complete three of the songs. Usually I stay far away from Expert and just play on Hard but perhaps with GH3 I may just play on Expert more often!

The full game comes out Saturday, which odd since new games and or movies come out on Tuesdays, but anyways I’ll definately be buying it.

On to Need for Speed: Pro Street, initial thoughts are that it looks good, but the gameplay… well it was pretty much a standard racing game. Really did not feel like “Need for Speed” at all. The previous game, Most Wanted was good, but still had a lot of the car modification elements from the Underground titles. Not really a fan of that but still with Most Wanted, the guys at EA brought back the core gameplay elements from the first NFS game released from way back when, with the cop cars and all, but this new title in the series is just a racing game, well that’s what I judged from the demo. But I really do miss the classic NFS games with out the whole car modding fad that’s been growing ever since Fast and Furious hit theathers a few years ago. I think by far Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 was the best in the entire franchise. I still play it once in a while but I would really like to see a next gen version of that, featuring nice exotic cars being chased by twenty some odd cops and a helicopter!