There's a secondary effect to the rising popularity of the Guitar Hero brand. Not only do the options for which songs can be put in the game expand, the number of songs in the game that have master tracks also expands. Guitar Hero II only had a handful of master tracks outside of the bonus songs. The rest were covers. Even though most of the covers were quite good, a cover just isn't as powerful as the real thing. For Guitar Hero III, roughly half of the songs will be master tracks.
Why not all master tracks? There's actually a few interesting details that make such a feat virtually impossible. For some songs, the recordings happened so long ago that the master tracks can't even be found. Other times, a song that everybody wants in the game has a long patch in the tune without a guitar playing. For these, a master track just wouldn't work. Can't You Hear Me Knocking, a Rolling Stones song on Guitar Hero II, is an example of this. The original recording has an extended saxophone solo. That section was removed when the tune was covered for the game to make playing the song more fun.
Here's a list of the tracks that have been announced so far:
Paint It Black: The Rolling Stones
Cherub Rock: Smashing Pumpkins
Sabotage: Beastie Boys
The Metal: Tenacious D
My Name is Jonas: Weezer
Knights of Cydonia : Muse
Rock And Roll All Nite: Kiss
School's Out: Alice Cooper
Slow Ride: Fog Hat
Cult of Personality: Living Colour
Barracuda: Heart
IGN had the opportunity to fly down to Neversoft's studios and give a few of these songs a test run. You can check out Slow Ride and My Name is Jonas for yourself in the video gallery below. We'll fill you in on a few others.
Paint it Black is a master track, brought into the game from the original four track recording. Playing along with the ghostly sitar riff laid down by Brian Jones over 40 years ago is simply awesome. Sabotage is also a master track and is pretty much designed around the co-op experience. The song is fairly repetitive and easy, which isn't too surprising given the song. Still, with the volume turned up, the classic is fun nonetheless.
The Living Colour song, Cult of Personality, is a track that people have been wanting in Guitar Hero for a long time. There was a slight hitch with it though. The master track was nowhere to be found. Instead of getting a cover, Living Colour came in and re-recorded the song just for the game. And they threw in a wicked solo that makes this song on expert just plain ridiculous.
Two new tracks are also being announced today, exclusively on IGN. They are:
Evenflow: Pearl Jam
Lay Down: Priestess
Evenflow is a much more fun song to play than the previous Pearl Jam song we've seen, Life Wasted, which was one of the 10 new tracks included on the Xbox 360 iteration of Guitar Hero II. It's also a master track, so you won't have to wonder how it will turn out other than note placement.
Lay Down is also a master track and it's one of those nice surprises that Guitar Hero games are known for. Priestess isn't a member of the rock pantheon so you might not have heard about them yet, but this metal song is a ton of fun to play. It's fairly fast and has a great riff to it. It isn't the toughest song to play, but the fast nature of it make it a nice choice for a Guitar Hero III battle.
Speaking of battle mode, we'll conclude our three days of Guitar Hero III tomorrow with an in-depth look at it and an IGN Weekly video preview.