Played just a little bit of Guitar Hero III last night. Played it unlocking stuff on easy (wife wanted to play, and her wrist is still not up to 100% from her surgery), so your mileage may vary.

The new wireless guitar is awesome. It feels good, it’s responsive, and has the most accurate ’star power’ detection since the first guitar from the first game. So at least in this one area, it’s an improvement. The song list is also mostly good, although there is one tier where it seems your entire song list is 70s songs I could care less about.

Things I didn’t like:
1) Whoever thought it was acceptable to ship a rhythm game where activating star power causes a notable framerate hitch, throwing off your rhythm, needs to be taken out back and pummelled.
2) I was expecting to be shocked and disgusted by the ’strip club’ level – or at least be forced to pretend to be so for my wife’s benefit. Turns out, I got one entirely clothed dancer who … danced bored. Really, we’re playing Rage Against the Machine, and she’s dancing like she just downed a bottle of valium. I was actually insulted – because I could have sworn my rocking deserved better than that.
3) I think my wife counted 15 fonts used in different places. It felt like a bad MySpace page. Somewhere, an art director needs to be hit with a clue stick.
4) They replaced my beloved Pandora with a Japanese schoolgirl? Are you kidding me? God, she was awful.

And then we get to the boss fights. It turns out they are exactly as non-fun as I thought. Even worse, they are anti-fun. If these boss battles ever came into contact with actual fun, the universe would fold onto itself. This is a clear example of a place where design should have iterated on the idea, and then afterwards gone to a bar and shared a beer while talking about how collossally bad a game design decision it turned out to be. Instead, they shipped it.

Original comments thread is here.