It’s finally here, the video game I dedicated my Web site’s color scheme to for July. Then again, I only received one complaint on how “painful” it looks.
First, GH 80s is an expansion for GH II not an independent game as Vice City was to GTA3. Sadly, it’s a minimal expansion because all the cool features I loved in GH II aren’t present: bonus songs, outfits or characters to purchase; there’s only five guitarists to choose from not eight; and all the venues are the same but with Eighties skins slapped on. If this were a computer-based game, GH 80s would be a plug-in that initializes when GH II starts. I know the developer completed this pretty quickly so some corners had to be cut yet the $40 price tag is a bit much when the rest of the accompanying band looks completely the same as it did in the previous game.
Now that all of my immediate complaints are out of the way, it is still an awesome sequel with 20-30 more songs to keep my friends and me amused for hours. I think it will maintain the momentum of excitement for when GH III and Rock Band arrive for the PS3 this Christmas. A quick fix at least. The song choices are a mixed bag as always, mostly Hair Metal or New Wave tunes which are the dominant clichés of the Eighties. Even if the modifications to Axel, Judy, Pandora, Izzy and Johnny are superficial skins (because their moves are still the same), they are pretty funny: Judy has all the early Madonna gear, Pandora has the Mike Score bird hair (A Flock of Seagulls) and Axel has the shiny, bright-colored baseball jacket people used to have. It would’ve been cool to see what they could’ve done with Eddie, Lars, Xander, Clive and Casey.
If you’re fanatical about GH as I am, then this is worth it and it will prolong the PS2’s usefulness a while longer because this expansion is exclusive to the console. I think they’ll probably port it to the Xbox 360 eventually unless Harmonix/Activision finally gets their online downloading setup working.