This past Monday, a group of ScoreHero members was flown out to visit Neversoft's Southern Calilfornia offices to play/test Guitar Hero III:
Legends Of Rock. Upon arriving, we were led to Neversoft's spacious mo-cap area, where we each had our own plasma screen and wireless Les Paul setup to demo as much of the x360 version as our hands could take over the span of about 5 hours. Now that we've returned to our respective homes, we're proud to bring back some exclusive info about the game, which is being announced on ScoreHero before anywhere else.

Pictures of the after party at the hotel!

First up: the Grim Ripper will be returning as a playable character along with some old favorites from the Guitar Hero series, and a couple of new characters. The list of characters so far is:

Characters

Axel Steel
Casey Lynch
Grim Ripper
Izzy Sparks
Johnny Napalm
Judy Nails
Lars Umlaut
Xavier Stone
Midori (new)
Slash (legend)

Venues

We also have the list of all-new venues that will be appearing in the game over the 8 tiers, which are:

Backyard Bash
Mitch's Moose Lounge
Video Shoot
Ye Olde Royal Odeon
Shanker's Island
Desert Rock Tour
Kaiju Megadome
Lou's Inferno

Songs

Last, and certainly not least, we have FOUR brand new songs to announce, exclusively to ScoreHero:

- Suck My Kiss - Red Hot Chili Peppers (Master Track!)
- La Grange - ZZ Top
- Number Of The Beast - Iron Maiden (Master Track!!)
- Through The Fire And Flames - Dragonforce (Master Track!!!)

(which is in addition to the already-announced songs

Alice Cooper - School's Out
Beastie Boys - Sabotage (Master)
Foghat - Slowride
Guns N' Roses - Welcome to the Jungle (Master)
Heart - Barracuda
Kiss - Rock N Roll All Nite
Living Colour - Cult of Personality (Master)
Muse - Knights of Cydonia (Master)
Pearl Jam - Evenflow (Master)
Priestess - Lay Down (Master)
Rolling Stones - Paint it Black (Master)
Smashing Pumpkins - Cherub Rock (Master)
Tenacious D - The Metal (Master)
The Scorpions - Rock You Like a Hurricane
Weezer - My Name is Jonas (Master)

It should also be noted that over 50% of the main-tier songs are master tracks, and over 70% including the bonus tracks!

Through this post, everyone who attended the session will add their own comments on their playtesting, but before then, some general information on the game:

- One of the biggest gameplay changes was with the system for hammer-ons and pull-offs. Rather than being based solely on the timing of the notes, Neversoft is able to program certain notes to be strummed or hammer-ons. The general guideline is, if a note is strummed on a real guitar, it will probably have to be strummed in-game. When a note is a hammer on for a real guitar, you'll probably be able to do a hammer-on for it in-game. This provides a much more realistic feeling to the charts.

- After our lengthy demo session, we sat down with some of the guys from Neversoft GH3 team in order to provide feedback on how the game was coming along, and what would be nice to see changed before release. We sat in for two hours and were able to discuss all parts of the game from top-to-bottom with the developers. It's an understatement to say that all of us who were out there are very eagerly awaiting the release of the latest game in the Guitar Hero franchise.

- "Through the Fire And Flames" is REALLY hard. We'll leave it to the individual posters to tell you how many times they failed it at 1-3%.