ranking the guitar hero games in fully subjective order
Since starting an aggressive fat loss phase of dieting, I found myself needing some kind of intensive task to distract my brain away from food. Recovery from lifelong unhealthy consumption habits is a hell of a task. While I would like to spend all of my free time reading classic literature, contemplating the decline of America, and sorting through my endless pile of Magic cards, I end up too mentally taxed after work to do too much of this. As such, I've been playing through every Guitar Hero game available for the Nintendo Wii.
Here are all of the Guitar Hero games available for the Nintendo Wii in fully subjective order. I will not be including the Rock Band games, as I will leave those for a later post. Note that I play all of these games solo on Guitar as my preferred instrument. I have the drum kit but get it out less than once a year, and you could not pay me to take the vocal part of any track when playing by myself.
9. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith
Guitar Hero's first band-specific offering has a lot to answer for after Guitar Hero III. Unfortunately, despite my general appreciation for Aerosmith (likely an impact of going to Disney's MGM Studios multiple times as a child), the lackluster tracklist (only 41 songs) and boring story mode progression make this the game I go back to least. That said, playing Walk this Way feat. Run-DMC is probably worth throwing the disc in the console once every year or two.
Favorite Track: Walk this Way feat. Run-DMC
8. Guitar Hero: Metallica
Metallica's impact on metal cannot be overstated, but it hits a critical problem that all the band-specific offerings have in a lack of variety. This might be a selling point for Metallica fans, but the charts and tracklist leave a bit to be desired here. Additionally, the game has a fundamental difficulty curve problem. The joy of rhythm games is often in the progression of playing some simpler tracks at the beginning of a session before jamming some Cliffs of Dover or Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants near the end. Much of the Metallica tracklist has a pretty straightforward "play riff for 4 minutes" followed by "indulgent 740 hammer-on/pull-off solo in 8 seconds". It can get tired. However, if I decide I need the Super Meat Boy of Guitar Hero games on any particular evening, I'll boot up Metallica and fail Master of Puppets for the 17th time.
Favorite Track: Stone Cold Crazy
7. Band Hero
From one end of the difficulty spectrum to the other, Band Hero was Guitar Hero's answer to "we need songs that popheads want to play". Featuring in-game avatars of Adam Levine and Taylor Swift, Band Hero features a number of solid pop tracks. Unfortunately, Band Hero has the opposite problem of Guitar Hero: Metallica. Every Guitar Hero game starting with the "Guitar Hero 5" era ranks the difficulty of each track on a ten-point scale for each available instrument. Nothing in Band Hero ranks above a 6, which makes the game less compelling for me. Most of my joy playing these games comes out of either playing along to tracks I like or hitting-the-buttons-in-the-right-order-really-fast, and while Band Hero does well for the former, cannot really deliver on the latter.
One shout-out, up until this point, the story progression in GH was a simple "play all the songs in one setlist before opening the next one" and was not worth mentioning, but the GH5 era (including Band Hero) added more variety and choice to their story mode, allowing you to pick a custom setlist in some cases and not have to finish every song in a setlist to move on. Big improvement for me, who has no interest in playing "Rock Star" by N.E.R.D.
Favorite Track: Sugar We're Goin Down
6. Guitar Hero: Van Halen
The best of the band-specific offerings, Van Halen gets a lot of work out of the featured artist tracks, and unlike Metallica, the titular artist's charts have substantial variety. The story progression remains the boring "play all the songs in the prior setlist", and I mostly come back to Van Halen to play a couple VH tracks after hitting "Stacy's Mom", "First Date", and "I Want It All".
Favorite Track: Panama
5. Guitar Hero: World Tour
The first GH I played as a kid and the first game to introduce alternative instruments, World Tour did a lot correctly. The tracklist was the first to include all master tracks instead of the not-so-delightful covers featured in GH:III, and the difficulty curve had a full range from Nirvana's "About a Girl (Unplugged)" all the way to "Crazy Train". That said, World Tour still suffers from the pre-GH5 story progression problem, and the tracklist has a LOT of fluff. For every Nirvana, Ozzy, Modest Mouse, and Lynyrd Skynyrd track, there are five or six tracks with no juice. Overall, the turning point for the series and a solid game with an only-ok tracklist.
Favorite Track: Spiderwebs
4. Guitar Hero 5
Now we're getting to the top tier of GH games. Guitar Hero 5 premiered all of the aforementioned story mode improvements, but the best feature of Guitar Hero 5 is its setlist. Some of my favorite tracks can be found in GH5. From simpler charts like "Plug in Baby" and "Smells like Teen Spirit" to the callus-inducing "Sultans of Swing" and "Spirit of Radio", Guitar Hero 5 is filled with bangers. If I had any critique, there may be too many easier songs near the floor of the setlist, but it's hard to complain about "Feel Good Inc." or "All Along the Watchtower" being too easy.
Favorite Track: Spirit of Radio
3. Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock
The premiere of GH on the Wii, Legends of Rock was the game that made GH the party game of the late 2000s-early 2010s. Through the Fire and Flames (a track I cannot get through to this day) became the bane of every middle school kid who liked playing with plastic guitars. Guitar Hero III's setlist may be a bit unbalanced (I could do with a little less Eric Clapton-era tracks), but all the charts are a ton of fun. The biggest detraction for III is the number of covers. Out of the 39 main setlist tracks, 19 of them are covers of varying quality ("Talk Dirty to Me" is pretty solid, "Barracuda" leaves some room for improvement). Overall, definitely a great debut for GH on the Wii.
Favorite Track: "Talk Dirty to Me"
2. Guitar Hero: Smash Hits
People joke that the best Beatles album is any of their greatest hits records, and I can't lie, they may have a point. In spite of the bad story progression and relatively small tracklist, Smash Hits takes the fan-favorite tracks from GH1, GH2, GH80s, and GH3, gets rights to masters, and publishes them all on one disk. "Just a bunch of really good songs" is not a compelling story mode pitch, but if I just want great charts, Smash Hits has "YYZ", "Message in a Bottle", and "Carry On Wayward Son" waiting for me.
Favorite Track: More than a Feeling
1. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock
Guitar Hero's swan song on the Wii is, for me, the greatest Guitar Hero game. I could go on about how good the tracklist is (probably on-par or better with Smash Hits), I could go on about how polished the quickplay mode is, but Warriors of Rock gets the 1st place slot for the story mode, full stop. It is one of the most batshit, camp, deranged story modes of any game I have ever played.
To provide a brief synopsis, the Demigod of Rock has been imprisoned by The Beast, a robot made out of stage parts, and you must take classic Guitar Hero avatars through magical-girl-transformation-sequences by playing songs to upgrade their Guitar Hero superpowers. Halfway through, you play through all of Rush's 2112 narrated by Rush to obtain the legendary guitar wielded by the Demigod of Rock, only to play through 4 more magical-girl-transformation-sequences, all to play three Megadeth songs against The Beast and save the Demigod of Rock.
If this all sounds ridiculous and camp and kinda lame, you are both correct and I don't care cause I love it. I can't help but want to see a punk rocker turn into barely-not-copyright-infringing Nightcrawler and an emo girl turn into a cyborg because I played fake-guitar-real-good.
Favorite Track: Bat Country
Guitar Hero and the End of Community
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk outlining what Guitar Hero games are the best, but I would like to conclude with a brief note about the end of the rhythm game era that may be worth pondering. While I play these games solo, it's clear that the Guitar Heros and Rock Bands of the world were always played as group games at parties. While I hate to suggest this is causal, there's something curious about the phenomena that Guitar Hero declined in the beginning of the social media era. As the financial crisis raged, maybe we retreated from the not-so-awesome college party where you may find plastic guitars and towards the internet. I don't think Guitar Hero is the answer to our current atomized lives, but playing games with people in the same room might wash your alienation away while clicking buttons along to washed rock-and-roll tracks, if only for an evening.