Shiny Wii Review: Guitar Hero III

Game: Guitar Hero III - Legends of Rock
Available: £59.99 from Play.com
Best for: The armchair rock star

I may as well lay my cards on the table now. I love this game. Like, *really* love it. My housemates love it. The cat who sometimes comes and visits my house loves it. The kids who hang around smoking and can see through my living room window love it (I might have to keep an eye on just how much they love it, actually).

As someone who really should have been headlining Glastonbury by now (had it not been for the complete lack of musical talent) and as someone who really doesn't have the patience to learn either an actual instrument or a complicated gaming set up, it's perfect. And it's also the perfect opportunity to find out who really does win in the battle of the batteries - if there's one thing Guitar Hero is, it's power hungry (more on this later).

If you haven't played Guitar Hero on the Wii before, it's simply a case of slipping your Wiimote into the provided "guitar" and then using the fret buttons to control the menus. Once done, you can create your character, dress her or him, pick them a guitar and choose a name for your band.

In career mode, you choose your level (um.. easy, obviously), and set to, completing three of the four songs provided in order to move on to bigger and better venues. For each song you complete you receive cash, which you can redeem against outfits, guitars and even new songs in the store.

If you're in easy mode, you'll only be asked to use three of the possible five buttons on the guitar, and there will be few chords. Obviously as you progress through Medium, Hard and Expert, there are more keys involved and more fancy finger work.

Song-wise, you might be surprised what you know. Songs I was 100% sure I'd never heard of turned out to be lodged somewhere deep in my brain, and there were several songs I knew from having an aged rock dad (Cream, Stevie Ray Vaughn - they really should bring out a Legends of Blues Rock). There's also a couple of current songs in the store for you to purchase, such as The Kaiser Chief's Ruby. A decent proportion of the songs feature the voices of the original artists, so it doesn't feel too kareoke-esque.

There's also Battle Mode, which will have you pitching your skills against the likes of Slash (Guns'n'Roses) and Tom Morello (Audioslave, RATM). Suffice to say, you want to get your easy mode down before you try to take this on. And to be really comfortable with RSI.

It's not perfect - you play the same games in the different difficulty modes, but with additional riffs and keys. It'd be nice to see variety between them. As you'd expect from a game titled 'Legends of Rock' there's an abundance of just that - rock, of the rawk kind. If you're more into your moddish indie rock, you won't find your favourites here.

Having said that, I still love it.

And as for the batteries? Well, I was trialling the two big boys, Duracell and Energizer. I don't know if it's because I've finally found my own killer app for the Wii and have been playing it tirelessly, or because the guitar drains more power (I suspect it's a combination) but you need to stock up something that's going to keep your Wiimote in juice - this thing chews through batteries.

I started with the Duracells (perhaps swayed by the drumming bunny image) and found that I could get a weekend's worth of play (about eight hours). The Wiimote does automatically turn itself off after a certain amount of time, but it's the kind of game you find yourself picking up and putting down regularly, which takes its toll - you'd certainly get significantly more time out of this if it wasn't for the guitar element.

Second up were Energizer, and as well as being a lovely silver/blue colour combo, they seem to be the hot tip when you're looking for Wii/Guitar power. So far, I've hit about the eleven hour mark, and they're not dead yet. Almost, but not quite, so you're looking at an almost 50% improvement on Duracell.

A quick and easy way of checking the battery power is to power off your wiimote, and then hit any button except the power button. The LED lights at the bottom will light according to how much power you've got left - more lights = more power. Hopefully, that means you won't be caught short again.