Consoleation Additions: Rock Rules!

You’d think that I’d be going nuts with DSi talk, but I never got around to playing with it today as I had a bunch of other commitments before working last night, and I’m just too exhausted to break it out now and feed some impressions. I’ll do that over the course of the week.

What did happen on Sunday is another story of one step forward, two steps back in terms of my PlayStation 3– thanks to GameStop’s Game Days sales event. One of the biggest reasons that I’ve been keeping my PS3 around is because that’s where my music and rhythm games call it home. I have a ton of Rock Band song downloads and own both Guitar Hero and both Rock Band games for the platform, as well as two sets of instruments. When thinking about trading in my PS3 towards an Xbox 360 earlier this year, the fact that I had spent so much money of music games, downloads, and instruments for the PS3 made me reconsider. I didn’t want to rebuy everything and lose out on the tons of music downloads that I’d already spent money on. Guitars can be expensive, and that’s my primary instrument.

I found a copy of Guitar Hero Metallica for the PS3 earlier on Sunday, which continued that trend… but upon arriving at GameStop to pick up the DSi, I was told of a sweet deal: Buy a new copy of Guitar Hero Aerosmith for the Xbox 360 for $10 and get a wired Red Octane Xplorer guitar for free. I was sold; in fact, I bought two copies and scored two Xplorers. (I also got a preowned copy of Guitar Hero II and scored a new You’re In The Movies package for $20.) I simply could not pass up a deal like that as I’d wanted to play music games on the 360 but felt it was prohibitive because of having to buy instruments… until GameStop’s sale.

I was able to fit in a quick session of Guitar Hero II and used the Xplorer. I was not overly impressed as the guitar felt small and the accelerometer seemed to react late to Starpower tilts. Despite this observation– and despite Guitar Hero II consisting of mostly Wavegroup covers– I had a blast playing it. Seeing GHII in HD was pretty sweet, and the song additions versus the PS2 version are awesome. Possum Kingdom? Yes, please. I even sprung for a couple of the downloadable song packs on Xbox Live, which were pulled from the first Guitar Hero game. I enjoyed seeing Achievements get unlocked and felt like I was back in 2006 again as I remember plowing through GHII on my PS2 back then. I didn’t touch the Aerosmith game, although I will at some point to nail down some Achievements.

I also wound up scoring two games from Blockbuster as I made a stop there on the way to my karaoke gig. I got Guitar Hero III and Ninety-Nine Nights (N3) for the 360, spending $25 for both. With the purchase of Guitar Hero III, that gives me three of the five Xbox 360 games in the franchise — and two guitars– for less than the price of one new copy of Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero Metallica. That’s a pretty good haul overall. I’m not (yet) regretting my decision to buy Guitar Hero Metallica for the PS3, since using the World Tour guitar is considerably more reactive than the Xplorer. Trophies aren’t like the Achievement system, so there’s a good chance that I’ll at least try the X360 version… but that’s not a priority.

Look for more impressions in the coming days on my new Xbox 360 Guitar Hero experiences. For now, though, I’m off to bed as I’m beat.

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