Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the peak of the first wave of guitar-game fever, and on Wii it was sold bundled with a plastic guitar whose body took the Wiimote directly as its control unit. The principle is well known: colored notes scroll down the screen, the player holds the matching fret on the guitar's neck, and strums at the exact right moment. The longer you manage to play without a mistake, the higher your score multiplier climbs, and the stored-up energy can be released by tilting the guitar up, multiplying points even further. The campaign takes the player through a series of clubs and arenas, with increasingly complex songs along the way.

The third installment added duels against an opposing player, in which rivals send each other disruptive effects, such as a broken string or a locked fret, and the same principle also works in a face-to-face duel between two people at one screen. The songs are largely original recordings by well-known rock and metal bands spanning several decades, and the difficulty is scaled from four buttons for beginners up to an expert mode that already demands real practice. The Wii version also offered the option to play without the guitar, using a classic controller, though next to the plastic instrument that only feels like a fallback.

Technically it's a smoothly running game with a stylized, comic-book-exaggerated look for the stage and crowd, where everything is subordinated to the readability of the incoming note. The strength of the experience doesn't rest on graphics, though, but on the fact that a well-played passage creates an illusion of real performance that no other genre managed to replicate. At the time it was a massive commercial success that pushed music games into the mainstream for several years, before the market got flooded with too many sequels and accessories. Today the fun depends entirely on whether you have a working guitar; with one, it's still one of the console's best rhythm-game experiences. Finding a working instrument, however, gets harder every year, which is the main reason the whole genre stayed firmly tied to its own era.