Wii Review: Guitar Hero-Aerosmith

As great as Wii Sports and Wii Fit are, I’m not sure I’d still be in love with my Wii as much if there was no Guitar Hero. The third installment of the uber popular game has been the most played game on my console and still is the most popular game for afterbars, parties, and shindigs. While I still play all the GH3 songs over and over again the announcement of a new “edition” of the game made me all tingly. Of course that quickly dissipated when it was announced it was to be an Aerosmith-centric edition. Now I’d be lying if I said I didn’t purchase my fair share of Aerosmith cassettes back in the 80s but it goes without saying that I’ve got little love for the Alicia Silverstone, Armageddon version of the band that’s played Super Bowls and Orange Bowls. My partner on the other hand was thrilled as she could look past their most recent crap and focus on the old 70’s blues rock that made the band. So it was off to Best Buy this weekend to pick up a game that turned out to be about what you’d expect.

GH-Aerosmith has enough tweaks and trims that it can justify the fact that it’s a stand alone game. My biggest concern was I was paying $50 for a bunch of new songs using the exact same stages, guitars, and characters as GH3. The game definitely gives you some new stuff including Aerosmith itself. Career mode is similar to GH3 except that you need to complete certain songs to move forward instead of picking and choosing. The stages are all centered around Aerosmith’s career, and starts out at the high school they first played and ends at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In between you get some ego stroking crap from the boys.You open each stage as one of the normal GH3 characters (although there are some fresh new looks and styles) and play two “opening” songs from the likes of the New York Dolls, Joan Jett, Lenny Kravitz and so on. Once completed you take control of Mr. Overrated, Joe Perry himself and he’s joined by the rest of Aerosmith. The game certainly hits the mark when it comes to Aerosmith as all the character models are very realistic. Steven Tyler moves like the doped up rock star you’ve come to know and love. Perry hams it up ever chance he gets and the drummer even has that obnoxious teenage haircut he’s held onto for the last 20 years. The game looks fantastic compared to GH3 on the Wii so its nice to see the developers actually put in a little effort. I was distracted from playing a few times by the camera movements and backgrounds which is a compliment to the environment. Not all the tweaks work, specifically the glaring omission of co-op career play. I’m guessing they decided they couldn’t fit that many people on a stage or Joe Perry said he should be the only playable career character right off the bat. Either way, as a two guitar family, we were very disappointed that we could only use Quickplay together.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned is that I don’t hate Aerosmith as much as I thought. With 25 plus Aerosmith tracks I’m finding myself enjoying a lot of the deeper catalog stuff from the 70’s and I gotta admit playing Love in an Elevator is pretty sweet. The “opening” band stuff is a nice mix too and I especially gotta give the developers credit for the Run DMC tracks. On both King of Rock and Walk this Way, DMC takes the stage and its an absolute blast. I found myself rapping and playing all at the same time.

The end verdict is that this game is pretty much a must for Wii owners who have exhausted the GH3 playlist. I’d imagine that people with other platforms might want to stick to replaying GH2 or the 80’s edition. Either way this is a nice way to tide us over for Guitar Hero World Tour which is expected to hit in October (read Rock Band done GH style…aka better) and the Metallica edition coming early 2009.