WII U DONGLE GUITAR HERO LIVE SERIES

Structured into two ‘channels’ (with a third to be added sometime after launch), GHTV livestreams blocks of scheduled, always-running music in programmed playlists with names like ‘90s Blockbusters’, ‘Metal Mayhem’, and ‘Pop Workout’.

WII U DONGLE GUITAR HERO LIVE SERIES

It’s also the part that could prove the most divisive for series fans, given it completely does away with the traditional approach to song DLC. I Want My GHTVThe online-only GHTV mode is where the real depth of Guitar Hero Live lies.

But GH Live ultimately only served up an evening’s worth of shallow entertainment that I burned through as fast as I could mainly just to unlock its 42 songs (the only ones actually on the disc) for the quickplay mode. Rock Band’s trick of getting audiences to sing along has been appropriated by GH Live, only in this instance you can actually look out on a sea of real faces singing back at you, which does feel pretty fantastic. The live performances are technically impressive, but you never feel connected to your bandmates.In fact, I felt more of a relationship with the crowd. I didn’t feel like part of the band I felt like a total stranger. So little context is given between sets – just some brief radio DJ banter and a few fake fan tweets – that when you’re just shunted from band to band every three songs there’s never any sense of camaraderie on stage. No, the problem is that I simply didn’t care about them. The problem with GH Live is not the overly cheesy vamping of the live-action bandmates around you, nor is it the way they dynamically chastise you when you flub a solo. This is the mode that drops you into the shoes of the guitarist in about a dozen different fictional bands across two music festivals, experiencing each three-song mini-set as a first-person shredder. Stage DiveMy enthusiasm for this exciting new era of Guitar Heroism took a temporary dip, however, once I hopped into the career mode, GH Live. Not only does this reconfigured button grouping keep your fretting hand rooted to the one spot, meaning your eyes never need to leave the screen, it just feels like a better approximation of actually playing the guitar - especially on the upper difficulty levels where the chord shapes and ascending and descending hammer-ons and pull-offs feel particularly analogous to the real thing. It takes time to adapt from coloured buttons to monochrome, but it's ultimately a change for the better.Yet at some point during my first late night it suddenly clicked, and now I feel like it would be a real step backwards to ever return to the old five-button design. At speed, it was tough for me to distinguish one black button from another, and hopping back and forth between the two rows almost always ended in me fumbling the transition and killing my multiplier. As someone who’s been playing GH games since banging out those first few power chords of I Love Rock and Roll in the original, I initially struggled to get to grips with the new button layout.

Developer FreeStyle Games has refreshed the Guitar Hero experience considerably by adding a sixth button and splitting the frets into two rows: three black buttons, and three white. Peripheral VisionIt all starts with that new controller. The sum total is a largely enjoyable return to the stage for the series that once started a music game revolution. This daring new streaming service works in tandem with a substantially redesigned guitar controller to compensate for a disappointing career mode and underdeveloped local multiplayer. Are you ready to rock? Well you’d better be, because Guitar Hero Live practically insists that you remain glued to the fretboard 24/7 with its addictive, always-on GHTV mode.

Wii u dongle guitar hero live