There is a group of Sartell high schoolers who spend their time after school playing Guitar Hero because they just can’t get enough of it. 

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently at my friend Jon’s house (he’s a Sartell senior) with some other friends, and we always spend time playing Guitar Hero because it is an incredibly fun and entertaining game.

Guitar Hero was developed and released by RedOctane, Harmonix Music Systems, and Activision in 2005 after they designed the guitar shaped controller. At least one new Guitar Hero game was released every year from 2005 to 2010. In 2008 with the release of Guitar Hero: World tour, the franchise began to offer drum kits and microphones on top of guitar controllers to add another exciting element into the already exhilarating games. Development of the games sadly stopped in early 2011 due to the rhythm game community moving onto touch screen devices.

I have had my own experiences with Guitar Hero, specifically Guitar Hero 5. I think it is a very fun game to play either alone, or with friends. I could honestly spend all day playing the game because of how enthralling it is. There are a few game modes such as casual or competitive, but my favorite mode is the type of quick play mode that you can get right into without selecting anything else. It just sends you song after song, and you don’t have to spend too much time thinking about what song you want to play. Most songs are fun to play on standard difficulty and typically they are hard enough to be fun and challenging, but not too easy to make it boring. You can also select between bass and guitar within the game, my personal favorite being guitar because of the constant stream of notes and multitude of different rhythms.

That being said, there are just a few issues that I have with the game. First off, there is a bit of latency when playing notes. You can definitely adapt to the difference, but it is a little off-putting and weird to get into. My only other issue is that the difficulty rating varies even on just normal difficulty. It sometimes feels like normal difficulty is more of a hard difficulty, which the songs do list the difficulties for each instrument but I wish it would be a more constant rating.

Overall I have very positive feelings about Guitar Hero. It is entertaining  and difficult enough to be fun and not frustrating. The negatives are definitely not enough to deter me from playing the game, and it shouldn’t stop you from playing the game either. I would suggest that everyone plays a Guitar Hero game for both entertainment and nostalgia. I would give the game a 7.5 out of 10. You can find Guitar Hero 5 for Wii on Amazon here for around $60 normally, and you can find the guitar controllers here for around $65