The final game in the Guitar Hero lineage, and it's an unexpected 5-year-later reboot that entirely changes everything, from the visuals and aesthetics all the way down to the actual guitar controller and gameplay. A reboot this radically drastic from the series it's from is a one-way ticket to being divisive among players, and as a big guitar hero fan I can't say I hated playing this but I sure didn't really love it either.

The visuals have 100% forsaken the funny wacky game-generated chuck e cheese bands with their goofy mocapped animations in place of having full FMV footage of some shmoes playing the songs at a concert with a huge crowd of people. There are tons of different fake bands that you play alongside instead of sticking to one central band or character like the previous GH/RB series did, and everyone is acting at 400% cheese levels. I haven't seen people move and emote in such corny ways since playing FMV games on the sega CD and 3DO, it really has that kind of energy. There's a level of complete disassociation when you finish a song and watch your first-person video feed walk to some random dude holding your next guitar for you as he swaps your instruments while giving you the fuck me look, or when you are playing a song and the video feed points to your band mates who are getting way too fucking into their performances. All with zero prior context on who these people are and why you are even playing with them. There are also two different video feeds that switch depending on how good you are playing, and the "U rappin awful" feed is way funnier than the "U rappin great" feed. Seeing the entire crowd and band of FMV actors look overly dumbfounded and disappointed in you as you biff your guitar solo never gets old under any circumstances. There's no subtle change between the video feeds either, it just kinda blurs everything as it transitions from one to the other so it's really like your character is completely drugged out hallucinating the most bipolar crowd in existence sometimes. The rest of the games menus and aesthetic carry over to the UI as well, as everything has that peak mid-2010s minimalism to it that you will either love or hate. The setlist is also certainly something, since like the original guitar hero games kinda came at a good time period where edgy rock music was pretty trendy as well as classic rock really never falling out of style, but by the time this dropped I feel like most mainstream music is more in the poppy, electronicy, hip-hoppy type mood so a lot of this games setlist can be pretty radio-core if you catch my drift. You play fucking Bangarang by skrillex with a guitar in this game for fucks sake. And the FMV band is still playing!!! You mean to tell me this NPC-ass crowd is getting super excited to hear some singer go "shouts to all my lost boys shoshoshoshoshoshoshouts to all my lost boys we rowdy" in person????? It's certainly a vibe.

The guitar is the main sticking point of this game, as we now have a 6-fret guitar with two rows of 3 buttons instead of a 5 fret guitar with one row of 5 buttons. Now you have to worry about your fingers vertical placement instead of just the horizontal position of your hand, and it certainly takes some getting used to especially if you are already intimately familiar with 5-fret like ya boi. Apparently they made it this way to both make it feel more like a real guitar (i have not ever learned how to play guitar so I cannot say how much more accurate this is) as well as to address some players complaints about their hands not being able to reach the orange fret (which honestly is pretty valid, when I was a kid I was stuck on medium because I couldn't comprehend shifting my hand a little bit to reach orange). It's certainly super humbling to plow through all the previous guitar hero games on expert without breaking much of a sweat at all to get absolutely curbstomped by this new control scheme enough where I had to crank it down to hard instead of expert. The 6-fret guitar certainly has a bit more depth in terms of the patterns that can show up as there are 3 different types of notes that can come down each row instead of the 1 in previous games, and I got discombobulated super easy with songs that frequently require shifting from the top and bottom row at a fast pace. The notes that require you to press both the top and bottom button on a fret weren't my favorite as I felt like I couldn't find a consistent way to press down between both that would activate the note fast enough while still being comfortable and practical with my hands. Sometimes only one would end up pressing down enough and it would kill my combo which ain't very cash money, and this might be a me thing or a wii U version thing but despite buying this game practically new old stock my guitar sometimes didn't feel as responsive as the other guitar hero guitars I've used. Maybe it has to do with the in-game timing windows or calibration, maybe it has to do with the port, maybe it has to do with the guitar but especially with strumming there were patterns I could do EZPZ on any other guitar hero on the same TV and settings that would like frequently drop while playing this one, it felt like sometimes inputs would be either late or drop which is def not something that's good for rhythm games where consistency is a must.

It's certainly a huge departure from main guitar hero and while I def can understand why it didn't catch on or set the world on fire the same way the original games did, I kinda respect the decision to change things up so drastically instead of just sticking to the same old formulas. There's also an online mode that was apparently pretty fucking cool where there were hundreds of songs that rotate around a drop-in drop-out online radio that you can play with the music video in the background which sounds rad as fuck, but the servers are down. Knowing me and my obsession with fan servers, I did discover, patch, and try and connect to the GHTV reloaded fan server that restores that mode alongside adding new custom songs to play, BUT I was a fool and bought this on Wii U, where in order to connect to the fan server you needed to still authenticate through nintendo network which just shut down so oops guess I got around to this too late. Luckily the dongle for the guitar is cross compatible with every console except xbox so if I want to try out the fan servers I just have to hunt down a PS3 copy of the game which isn't too big an ask. The six-fret guitar is also surprisingly supported in clone hero with its own small subculture of fans and custom songs, but to get it to work you need the dongle for the xbox guitar so I haven't been able to give it a go. Certainly a guitar hero game of all time for sure.

CVS2: funny edition

for some reason when porting capcom vs SNK 2 to the remainder of the 6th generation of consoles they didn't just do the straight-port of the arcade game like the dreamcast and PS2 versions and instead did... a marginally different straight port??? like by all accounts and purposes this is still CVS2 and there is still true love to be makin' here, but there are pretty much two very important changes they made with the EO edition. Firstly, they did mildly change the balance in some aspects that are slight enough for someone like me to not be assed enough to personally know off the top of my head or notice while playing, but apparent enough to make this game completely unviable for serious tournament play compared to the actual arcade so good job guys. The second and headlining feature is the new special EO-ism. Basically capcom saw the gamecube and xbox controllers and were like hell naw playing a 6 button fighter on these shits would be miserable (the dreamcast controller was okay but the xbox controller is where they draw the line???) So the EO-ism (short for Easy Operation or some shit like that) functions like a simplified control option. It puts basic functions like attacking, grabbing, rolling, etc to their own unique buttons and more importantly binds all your specials to the right analogue stick. Which direction you push the stick and how far you push it determines which move you do and its strength, and there's no semblance of a cooldown or limitation to how much you can use it so get stick flicking and spam the fuck away. You haven't seen the light of god until you've played shit like EO guile where you can be a machinegun of chargeless sonic booms and flash kicks, or rushing the fuck down on someone with EO blanka. EO-ism takes a literal fucking sledgehammer to the delicately crafted game balance and it's really fucking fun seeing CVS2 devolve into a borderline kusoge. There's still AC-ism as an option as well that reverts the controls to the purist 6 buttons of fighting the way god intended so really it's not a bad version of CVS2 if you can't get the arcade perfect ports and aren't going to be trying to win your local tournaments or anything. The xbox port also has xbox live support which is brought back up through insignia, so you can even still fuck around with your EO-ism yuri that's color edited to look like she isn't wearing any pants online with other people in the current year of our lord. and people say gaming isn't fucking back

JAM AND HYPE IT UP

I played a little bit of this ages ago when browsing through gamecube kiosk demo disks as normal people do, and while I remember the vibes being interesting the game played like hot ass so I hard passed. Recently though by watching a lot of rebeltaxi and having this games insanely banger 2000's ass japanese pop punk theme song stuck in my head for the past few weeks, I knew that I had to at least give the game a reasonable go. I'm honestly glad that I did because while this game certainly ain't perfect, it does do some interesting things and really doesn't play nearly as bad as I remembered it to.

It's a cartoon-themed skateboarding game with the primary gimmick of having there be designated stage hazards that you can intentionally run into and maim yourself to both keep your combo going and potentially reach new places. The base controls aren't really a clone of THPS, but they take enough things from it to make the controls feel familiar like how manuals mostly work the same way and how combos have the same general type of flow. It's certainly easier to rack up a crazy high score than THPS since grind and manual balance management is a lot more lenient, and when you activate a stage hazard you get this whole meter that keeps your combo no matter what so it's trivially easy to get some ridiculous scores, and it feels pretty alright to do so. The game is structured kind of like an arcade fighting game as each character has their own story mode of generally the same events, but a run is like 40 events long so it's really not the most snappily to replay game unfortunately. While scoring is fun the game does also have a bunch of dumb bullshit events that you have to do like battles where you can attack another player with projectiles aimed by the C-stick (there will be no chance in hell you can properly aim shots on a moving skateboard firing in the distance at another person moving on a skateboard, the CPU has no problems whatsoever though so good luck), and "races" which are where you have to hit as many hazards as possible to earn medals or earn debuffs that you can send on your enemy. The race events are the worst because there's no rhyme or reason to which hazards will earn you what, and not even any guarantee that the debuffs will hit your opponent instead of you so it's honestly complete RNG bullshit whether or not you will win, and sometimes the game doesn't even show you where the finish point is in the event where you DO happen to get everything you need. There's also "simon says" events where you need to hit certain hazards and that's equally as RNG based since sometimes the hazard you need to hit might be in some insanely-hard-to-reach location, wasting way more time than needed just to keep the score flowing. The game emphasizes being familiar with each of the levels over everything else, which while that's definitely fundamental for any skating game it's doubly important here. If they like halved the event types to 20 or so then I probably would have bothered to do full playthroughs with every character.

As for the vibe though, man this is that good early 2000s shit. I don't really know if this game counts as cel shaded or whatever but it certainly is colorful and very animated. While the game was pretty much designed and created entirely in Japan the general artstyle was (to my knowledge?) made and supervised by Spumco, the studio behind Ren and Stimpy. It gives the game a very unique blend of like colorful cartoony colorful visuals reminiscent of many jpn-developed dreamcast and PS2 games + the raunchy, grotesque spumco humor + dialogue and writing that def feels translated from japanese jokes + the aforementioned bitchin' soundtrack of japanese pop punk and some damn smooth electronic music, and it all just comes together to make something extremely of its time.

It's one of those games where really you should just watch the intro cutscene and your instinctual reaction to it will pretty much determine how much you will really fuck with this game because if you are like me really any of the downsides this game has are going to be completely drowned out by screaming YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH at the vibes. i miss the 2000s