Does Guitar Hero let you fly a jumbo-jet by playing heavy metal with the flight controls? No, it does not.

User Rating: 8.5 | Um Jammer Lammy PS
There's something missing from all the new Guitar Hero / Rock Band games: lunacy. Sheer, unbridled lunacy, dripping from every corner of the screen. If you want to rock out like you're on every drug going and falling into a technicolour coma (a much closer experience to being a real rock star, really), then you won't do much better than Um Jammer Lammy.

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Pros:

+ Music: You'd certainly hope that a game based solely around music would have some good tunes: unsurprisingly, Lammy passes this with flying colours. There's a good variety of genres, not to mention the PaRappa versions of the songs that you can unlock, and you'll be hearing them in your dreams after a while.

+ Content & Longveity: There's a deceptive amount to do and unlock in the game, and chances are, unless you have the timing of a deity, you'll be coming back to it for a long time trying to finish every last bit.

+ Insanity: In case my intro didn't make it clear, this game is nuts. Words can't describe it; you owe it to yourself to give it a go, and see just how bizzarre it gets.

+ Satisfaction: You will feel like the spawn of Malmsteen when you finally beat that section you've been stuck on!

Cons:

- Short: Though there's still lots to do and unlock once you've finished it, you should breeze through the main story levels in just a day or two.

- Difficult Improvisation: Perhaps I just never got the hang of it, but improvising is very difficult to do convincingly, both sounding odd and often being punished in terms of score. This makes the free-form 'cool' mode a bugger to keep going.

- Picky Timing: That solo may have sounded perfect to you, but the game has a frustrating tendency to disagree. While newer games of this type let you see what exact notes you messed up on, you'll have no such luxury here, leaving you little idea how to improve.

- No Included Soundtrack: While you can unlock the backing tracks for all of the songs, there's no way to listen to versions that include an ideal version of the player input. The only way to do it is to save a replay of you going through a song perfectly, and that can be an exercise in frustration...

- Bitty Experience: Once you've finished the main story, it becomes quite bitty in nature, as you go back to clean up the high scores you missed originally.

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Overall, I'd pick this over the newer guitar games any day. It has its own unique songs, all of which are varied and great fun; it has a demented style and humour that overloads the senses; and perhaps most importantly, you won't feel like you're missing out on the fun by refusing to buy an awkward controller that you'll never use for anything else!