One of the additional strategies in the game involves something called "Star Power". As you nail a string of consecutive notes, your score multiplier increases and when you hit notes that are shaped like stars you will build up Star Power. You can extract even more Star Power by using your whammy bar on held notes that are shaped like stars.
Once you have enough Star Power accumulated, you simply tilt your guitar upright (detected by gyro sensors inside the guitar) and enter Star Mode for a limited time, where your point multiplier doubles. Part of the strategy is knowing when in the song to use your Star Power in order to maximize your points.
First and foremost, with a game like this, you need a solid line-up of tracks to shred to. Guitar Hero has this in spades... literally, from Motorhead's Ace of Spades to songs from guitar gods like Cream, Boston and Hendrix, to modern rock bands like Helmet, Audioslave, Franz Ferdinand and Sum 41. They've got just about every aspect of guitar rock covered.
You should be familiar with almost all of these songs to some extent, and although the songs are not original recordings, it's surprisingly hard to hear a difference in most of them. (A couple are a little off... Bad Religion's Greg Graffin has a distinctive gravelly voice that is apparently not so easy to mimic.)
Although they probably could have gotten away with just the music and sparse visuals in this game, Harmonix also added full 3D scenes of your fictional band playing on-stage to accompany your performance. The animations are interactive and respond to how well you are doing — when you're really nailing a solo your character will pull off some sweet moves on stage and the crowd will cheer you on.
There are also fluid camera cuts and movement to simulate a live concert video. It might have been even cooler to have the likenesses of the actual bands performing on stage, of course the licensing fees for that probably would have been ridiculous.
The thing that stands out most about Guitar Hero is the fact that when you play it, you look and feel like a real rock star. You actually feel like you're playing the notes. If you miss one, the guitar sound will cut out briefly, and an out of tune note will ring instead. You can instantly tell just by listening how well someone is doing at any given point in the game.
Article comments