Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Rock Band

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
RedOctane/Activision; Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii

Rock Band
MTV Games; Xbox 360, PS3


The Beatles vs. the Stones. Blur vs. Oasis. Sharon Osbourne vs. Josh Homme. For decades now, rock fans have been picking sides in one music-world feud after another. This holiday season, we get the ultimate rock & roll video-game matchup: Guitar Hero III vs. Rock Band. Like its popular predecessors, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is an immensely fun test of how skillfully you can finger the multicolored buttons on a plastic guitar controller. Virtual shredders tired of the solo life can turn to Rock Band, which is all about teamwork, allowing up to four people to jam using an ersatz guitar, bass, mic and drum set.

GHIII doesn’t mess with the Guitar Hero formula much. Of course, there’s a new batch of 73 songs to play — including “Anarchy in the U.K.” by a reunited Sex Pistols and hits from Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. And this time around, most of the songs are the original recordings, and not chintzy covers (the same is true for the 40 tracks included with Rock Band). But the only major changes are the addition of an online-play component and supertough “boss battles” against digitized versions of Slash and Tom Morello.

Onscreen, Rock Band looks and feels an awful lot like GHIII, which isn’t surprising, given that Rock Band developer Harmonix created the first two Guitar Hero games. But the addition of the mic and drums — and the ability to team up with anyone online to form a global supergroup — takes Rock Band to another level entirely. The drum set is Rock Band’s pièce de résistance; on the harder levels, banging the pads requires near-Bonham-like precision.

Rock Band’s big drawback is that all this hardware doesn’t come cheap: The full guitar/drum/mic package for Xbox 360 and PS3 will set you back $170. (By comparison, GHIII, which comes with a single guitar, runs $99.) But if you can swing it, Rock Band is the way to go. The joy of forming an impromptu fab four and jamming along to Nirvana’s “In Bloom” ranks as the single most satisfying video-game experience of the year.