Product Description

The 1980s were a crazy decade when big hair, tight clothes and fresh attitudes ruled the music scene; represented in Guitar Hero™ Encore: Rocks the 80s™. Play totally awesome songs from the 1980s with Guitar Hero characters decked out in sweet retro outfits. Turn off that tape deck on your boom box, pick up and play Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2369 in Video Games
• Brand: ACTIVISION
• Published on: 2007-07
• Released on: 2007-07-24
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: PlayStation2
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .75" h x 5.00" w x 7.50" l, .38 pounds

Features

• KILLER 80s SOUNDTRACK: Pick up your axe and rock out to tracks ranging from New Wave to Hair Metal. Every song will have you tapping your feet and banging your head!
• AWESOME CHARACTERS: Play as your favorite Guitar Hero characters decked out in awesome 80’s outfits.
• CO-OP MULTIPLAYER: Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s puts 2 players closer to the rock experience, enabling players to play cooperatively with one person on lead guitar, and the 2nd on bass or rhythm guitar.
• CHALLENGE A FRIEND: Jam against a friend in two competitive multiplayer modes.
• PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT: Master those 80’s hits using the awesome Practice mode. Play any part of any song or even slow down the songs to really nail those difficult sections.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
The Guitar Hero series has quickly become the premiere rhythm based gaming franchise, and with Activision now publishing the series, prepare for a yearly blitz of Guitar Hero games. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's, compiles thirty songs from said decade. Many bands and group from the era; ranging from hair metal smashes like Poison and Ratt to legendary metal pioneers Iron Maiden and Anthrax, are featured here, along with songs from Asia, Twisted Sister, the Dead Kennedys, and Skid Row to boot. While many of the songs are incredibly fun to play, Guitar Hero Encore suffers from the fact that there isn't anything here that you haven't seen before. Combine this with the fact that the game is selling for the full list price and only features thirty songs with basically nothing else new, and you get one disappointing overall package. There's no unlockable tracks either, and some of the featured songs (like cuts from White Lion and Faster Pussycat) could have been done without. All in all, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's isn't bad one bit and offers a decent amount of fun for veteran players of the series, but the game is a disappointing quick cash-in attempt that doesn't offer enough bang for your buck to warrant the price tag.

Great Idea, Bad Execution
As a big Guitar Hero fan (I own the previous two installments) I was very excited that Red Octane was making an 80s version for us children of the 80s. Oddly enough, I didn't hear about it until literally the week before while doing some random research; it appeared as though Red Octane was barely advertising this and I think that was mistake no. 1.

Rock the 80s has a diverse track list that many a child of the 80s can enjoy. I personally enjoyed I Ran(So Far Away) by A Flock of Seagulls and Radar Love and my buddies got a kick out of Turning Japanese. However, that is where the fun ends. I bought it three hours ago and already I earned everything. As an encore I'm not surprised that Red Octane changed very little of the gameplay from Guitar Hero II but it seems as though they left out all the good stuff.

You can only purchase one additional character (Grim Reaper) so the other bonus characters are gone. This is sad as several of my buddies played exclusively as certain bonus characters. They also took out the bonus track section severely limiting songs. Red Octane barely edited the loading screen advice leaving most of the advice from Guitar Hero II on there.

On a few plus sides, I'm glad they kept co-op mode and many of the bonus guitars. I also wish they would've chosen better songs from certain groups (I think We're Not Gonna Take It would've been a better choice by Twisted Sister) but this is a criticism I have of the other Guitar Hero games.

Overall, I'm glad I waited in line to purchase Rock the 80s as I loved playing songs from my childhood but this could've been done a lot better with better bonus materials and less Guitar Hero II look-a-like but I should have expected as much when I saw "encore" under the title. An 85% overall with massive room for improvement.

Fun, but basically more of the same
Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80s as a sequel to GH and GHII doesn't really measure up. It's still a fun game, mostly for people who grew up in the 80s like myself, but overall it really adds nothing new to the series. While GHII evolved the game quite a bit adding new multiplayer options and updating the hammer-on and pull-off functionality to make it more usable GH80s does nothing other than add a few new tunes to the mix. Barring a few tweaks the graphics are mostly the same throughout and the engine also remains the same. Apparently there are no plans to put this version of the game onto the XBOX 360.

Overall the songs are a lot easier to play through all difficulties with the exception of certain ones like Seventeen and Play With Me. For those who had a hard time progressing past the Medium difficulty this might be the right version of GH for you to break into Hard or even Expert. The songs themselves sound pretty decent overall and there are no glaringly bad vocal covers.

Songs by the original artists are:

"I Ran (So Far Away)" - A Flock of Seagulls
"Because, It's Midnite" - Limozeen
"The Warrior" - Scandal
"I Wanna Rock" - Twisted Sister
"Electric Eye" - Judas Priest

This will be the last GH game from Harmonix as they move on to do Rock Band. GHIII will be developed by Neversoft Entertainment.