Guitar Hero III makes a strong case for being the best Wii entry in the franchise.
This is the first Guitar Hero I ever owned. I'm sure I've never owned or played the original Guitar Hero game and I've played GH2 only a few times. But, even though I had rarely played a Guitar Hero game before I bought this game, but I was able to find out how to play. Basically it's like Dance Dance Revolution in that you have to play the music in time with the beat. But in Guitar Hero you use a guitar like controller, simulating the feeling of playing lead, bass, or rhythm guitar in a band. The notes of each song are shown traveling down the neck of the guitar. To hit them successfully, you must 'strum' the guitar (in other words, hit the strum bar on the guitar) and hold down the corresponding fret key (5 in all: Green, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Orange) in order to play them. If you are able to play a long combo of notes, the game's score multiplier will increase from 2x to 4x. By playing a string of glowing notes, you are able to build your star power meter. When it is at an acceptable point, lift the guitar in a vertical position (or just press the select button) to activate the star power. This will double the score multiplier to help you get a better score. Success or failure in hitting notes will cause the rock meter (which basically determines how well you're doing in a 'performance'). It is indicated by 3 sections and if you drop below the red section, you will be 'booed off the stage' (in other words, GAME OVER!).
Guitar Hero offers 4 different difficulty modes. Each uses a certain amount of fret keys on the guitar controller. The Easy mode uses only the Green, Red, and Yellow buttons. The medium mode adds the blue button and the Hard and Expert modes add the orange buttons. I can honestly say that I'm pretty good at this game, but I stick on the Medium mode because I will probably miss a lot of notes on the harder difficulty modes. I can only have my fingers on 4 buttons and have one finger behind the guitar and from what I see, in hard mode you have to move your hand around a lot and that seems a bit too complex for a game like this.
Like earlier GH games, Guitar Hero III features the single player mode where one player plays through a band's 'history'. Introduced in this entry is the co-op career mode, which allows for 2 people to play the career mode. I do recommend that you use 2 guitar controllers if you have the Wii version like me because even though you can use the Wii remote on its own, I still don't know how it fully works in a Guitar Hero game. A new part of the game is the boss battle feature.
This feature pits the player against in-game characters like Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machines and Audioslave) and Slash (Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver). The goal in this mode is to have your opponent drop below the red section of the Rock meter. But because your opponent is most likely good at guitar, this is very hard. To help you, powerups are available by hitting a set of glowing notes (the multiplayer version of Star Power, Battle Power). Notable powerups include an increase in difficulty, having one of the other player's guitar strings get broken, or changing the player's 'note highway' to fit a left-handed person's style (or vice versa if you really are left handed). After beating the boss characters, you are able to 'buy' them from the in-game store as playable characters. While in the store, you can also buy different guitars, outfits for the characters, and hidden songs. Probably the secret track that people know most is 'Through the Fire and Flames' by DragonForce. Whoever manages to get perfect on this song gets kudos from me cause, let's face it, it's freakin hard.
So, that's GHIII in a nutshell. Now, onto the review.
Right away, I can say that GHIII has the best soundtrack out of any Guitar Hero game. I think this is because the soundtrack has a good amount of songs that people should probably recognize. It also has a good mix of classic rock songs, alternative 90's songs, punk songs, and so on.
In all, GHIII is a good game. Even with the problems this game, mainly being it having a very steep learning curve once you move to the hard and expert levels (I recommend that you only play these levels if you a super expert at GH), GHIII continues the grand tradition of great gameplay that the series has been based on. It's the best GH game on the Wii. Is it the best of the original 3 GH games? Probably not, but it's my personal favorite just because I haven't played these two games as much as the third game.