Why give two different addresses to mail this to? Strange.

And of course they say, "A traceable mailing method is highly recommended." You can't pay for delivery confirmation of a letter. What do they expect, certified mail?

At least you just have to send a copy of the receipt and not the original.

I'm just going to mail with my rental receipt and see what happens. Sure the total is only $7, but nowhere on the receipt mentions anything about a rental.

brilliant!!!!

WTF?? I typed brilliant in caps and it's shown in lower case?? I edited 3 times to make it caps & it won't do it...someone else please try this.

It's to prevent people from writing entire posts in caps.

FAIL! suckaz

This is funny and sad at the same time.

Kurt Cobain sings a Bon Jovi song.

There are lots of little things RB needs to take from this game...most notably the ability to create an infinite number song custom setlist that can be saved.

But...I am not feeling this setlist. I am now on the M's and only have 6 songs saved, one of which is a RB repeater.

Am I missing something with this 'save' thing people are talking about? What do you mean 'save' a song??

I have been too hard on this game. It is leaps and bounds more enjoyable than World Tour was. World Tour just made me sad. This game is actually fun to play.

I got home at 6pm tonight and played for four hours straight, all in career mode on either guitar or bass. Unlocked a bunch of stuff, played almost all the songs not in Rock Band, and my wife dug the track listing.

Now I will continue to hate on Activision though, for their idiotic review embargo (get the good word out there if it's good!) and the absolutely boneheaded move of giving Van Halen away for free.

I still won't play this as much as Rock Band, but it's a solid alternative to RB and will play the hell out of it until The Beatles comes out.

on all accounts. I'm really digging the challenges. It seems like they put the challenge on the best instrument for the song so that you are having the most fun you can with a particular song(if that makes sense). Giving out stars for challenges also gives you that urge to actually play the other instruments you usually don't. It seems like a good way to train you on the weak areas of your playing.

Love the Avatar support. It's quite satisfying to have my avatar with my Beatles Rock Band shirt rocking out in GH. Also a solid for the clean interface (while you play) and plain fretboard(finally).

Big thumbs down to the achievements though. Too many ones that I will never attain. The timing window is still fucked. Either that or the animation can't keep up. I swear I'm hitting strings of notes that I know I shouldn't be. Having the notes change to sky blue during star power still sucks. For normal notes it's fine, but distinguishing the purple is damn near impossible.

Another big thumbs down to the setlist (so far). Out of the 12-18 I've played(going through career) I've only really dug three of them. Then again I had the same complaint with RB2. Huge to Hurts so Good, Superstition & Sultans of Swing. All three are a blast.

So far I think it's a huge step up from World Tour but the setlist is holding it back for me. It does actually have me considering picking it up now.

Yeah I forgot to mention the avatar support. When I read about it at first I just thought "meh". But it's a great addition. I've always hated the GH character models.

Well after spending some time with it tonight, I feel like I should have sucker stamped on my forehead for getting this because of the free VH offer (and all the other discounts). Even with all that, this GH game may finally be the one that helps me put away GH for good. I definitely won't be buying any DLC anymore for GH.

This version is just missing something. It seems hollow (and yes, I understand the irony of typing that when I am playing on plastic instruments) and it feels like it has no soul or punch to it.

It might be the set list which seems to be the dullest of all the GH games so far. Hopefully it gets better but the first two tours in the career are woefully dull.

The songs sound like they were mixed underwater. They sounded awful so I checked the option menu and sure enough, you have to turn the Dolby Digital option on. So I did. And it did little to help the sound. I even put on RB for a few songs afterward to make sure something wasn't wrong with my set-up. This songs on GH5 sound horrible. The vocals are mixed very low and the instruments have no punch. Am I the only one that feels this way? I spent a lot of time with GH:WT over the weekend and it sounds leaps and bounds better than GH5.

Does it also seem there no punch to hitting short notes? It seems they changed the "flame" animation to a "flicker" and it just seems off somehow.

The charts are very, very dull so far. Maybe it's the set list but damn I was bored.

And what genius thought it would be smart to have a "wave" animation go thru the board while notes are flying at you? Granted it is only a few seconds but it's distracting as hell.

I'm going to finish this one up and then probably say adios to the GH franchise. This was it for me. I am no RB groupie but this release smells of cheapness. Thank god GH didn't get The Beatles or I would likely be weeping right now.

Unless this title somehow gets a lot better as you go along, I feel gypped at paying $22 for it (which was my average). Seems more like a 10 dollar title.

It's got a few cool things like the challenges, but those are not enough to keep me around. Ugh. Now we all know why they were throwing GH:VH with this. I should have been smart enough to recognize that and kept my money.

The reviews seem to be pretty good across the board.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/plat...tar%20hero%205

My initial thoughts are putting the game higher than expected for me. I really like the challenges, and they have multiple careers managed perfectly. My wife was going through her's before I got home today, then I jumped on to start mine with her playing along and anything we earned on my career also went to hers. (Star counts went to her total as well, which was also displayed, and when we went back to her career the score settings we got together were there.) It was completely seamless and really well done.

And I pretty much love the setlist so far.

(Although the sound is pretty horrible. You can't hear anything. I noticed that problem with Smash Hits too. Not good.)

You aren't the only one. I was getting ready to post about it. I keep my receiver on a certain level for gaming and I had to turn it up quite a few notches and it still didn't sound much better. I didn't know that there was a DD setting though, I'll have to try it out.

I really enjoyed this game. Played it for a few hours tonight, will try out more stuff later. I'm not happy that "Shout It Out Loud" is a shitty re-recording that makes KISS sound like a cover band trying to keep quiet in their garage.

I played for a while on drums today.

WHY THE FUCK DOESN'T GH:5 HAVE SYMBOL SUPPORT FOR THE ROCK BAND DRUMS?

That's my big complaint. The symbols still pick up the hits, but they just mirror the yellow/green pads. Also, the hitting of the yellow/blue pads at the same time to activate star power is fucking weak. The fills (which sometimes appear at the end of songs) sound hollow and nothing like the Rock Band fills.

As a drummer, I'm staying away from this one. On the guitar, I'm sure it's fine, but I'm not a guitarist, but as a drummer, Rock Band is miles ahead (yes, I know, it's not 'Drum Hero').

Only played a tiny bit so far but the general feeling I get is that this is a big improvement over the previous GH games.

I hope they updated GH:VH to use this engine but I unfortunately doubt it.

Sounds exactly the same as GHWT, GH:SHits, and GH: Metallica. They all have quite a few annoyances for drummers. I hope they extend out the amount of notes you can miss before it fails. At expert there are plenty of songs you can go from full green to fail in under a second, so half of the time you don't even have a fucking clue on what went wrong.

THIS.

I'm a much better drummer than guitar player on Rock Band, but on GH:M, I could only advance through the game on guitar and half the time I didn't think I was even hitting the right buttons. I'd really hoped they'd corrected this for GH5, but it appears I'm in for more anger management problems.

I agree with the audio complaints as well. The vocals always seem to dominate, then the drums, and then the guitar/bass tracks (which is what I play) are muddled in together way in the background. In Rock Band I love playing bass because that track becomes slightly louder and I can focus on it. In GH5, there were a couple times I didn't even realize I was playing bass until an open note scrolled by.

Oh and the font used in the game sucks. I know that's no big deal, but, it sucks.

Okay, what the fuck?

Got the game yesterday. After a healthy rogering, the wife and I played it last night. To be fair, we're RB groupies to the Nth degree, but we don't instantly hate GH. We pretty much have every GH game ever released (including Aerosmith and Metallica) EXCEPT for Smash Hits. We were overall very disappointed with GH:WT (and decided against purchasing any DLC for it) but enjoyed the hell out of Metallica. We were hoping GH5 would be more like the latter and less like the former.

So we played for about 2 hrs last night. Verdict? GH5 is SEVERE improvement over GH:WT in almost every conceivable way. It's feels lighter, faster, more intuitive, and more fun. Since I don't have (and WON'T have) a large amount of DLC for this franchise, customizable setlists/party games have zero interest for me (that's all covered in Rock Band, where I have hundreds of songs available.) The bonus challenges are pretty nifty in a take-it-or-leave-it way. Totally dig the Avatar support. Switching difficulty "on the fly" is nice (although if you do it mid-song, you have to start the song over again). Haven't used multiple same instruments on a song yet, but I like the idea. I'm not huge into Achievements or "unlocking" instruments, outfits, players, etc; I just want to pick up and play, period. So to that end, GH5 is a success. Mostly.

Down side? For me, it's still inferior to Rock Band. The vocals are still a mess, according to my wife (who is a top-rated Expert vocalist on leaderboards in RB). The timing window is sometimes wonky and capricious (I play Hard/Expert guitar, Expert bass, and Hard drums, always calibrated, and the window veers from forgiving to merciless to "Dude WTF I totally hit that note!!") The setlist isn't very compelling at all. A few highs, many lows, and a whole lotta mediocrity. I agree that the song mixes are murky and lack range and punch. And yeah, there's a sense of ho-hum, "Yeah we've all seen this before *SO* many times..." In the end, would the player have been better off with the on-disc licensed music released as DLC instead of a new $60 disc? Perhaps, although the gameplay improvements in GH5 are pretty significant to warrant a new release.

Basically, GH5 is the game that GH:WT should have been. On its own, it's a really good game. In the context of Activision's release strategy and philosophy towards how to handle their "franchise", it's really freakin' annoying. GH5 is a very solid $40 game. At $60, only hardcore GH fanboy junkies should bother with it... but again, with the offer of a free VAN HALEN game, it's a strong value right now.

Did anyone figure out how to link the game to their guitarhero.com account? It won't let me select GH5 from the dropdown box on the web site.