Aspyr was cool enough to send us the PC/Mac hybrid release of Guitar Hero 3 last week, and I’ve spent some time with it this weekend on my PC. The good news? It’s the same great Guitar Hero you’ve come to know on the consoles. The bad news? Well, there isn’t much, so let’s get to the details.

Turn It Up

Guitar Hero has been an incredibly popular franchise in its short lifespan. With games on all major consoles, the PC, and now even the Nintendo DS, and another sequel due out fairly soon, there is no end in sight for this incredibly popular series. Most of us have at least played one of the versions on at least one of the consoles; personally most of my time was spent with Guitar Hero on PS2, and then more recently with Guitar Hero Aerosmith on the PS3. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with the PC version, but the port is surprisingly smooth, even on my 2.0GHz AMD X2, 256MB 7900GT, and 1GB of PC3200 RAM.

One of my first concerns was the guitar; was it wireless like the most recent models for PS3 and Xbox 360? Turns out it’s not, and in fact it’s the exact same guitar that came out with Guitar Hero 2 on the Xbox 360, right down to the 360 Globe button. This guitar is known as the X-Plorer, and it does well, but it’s not quite as ergonomic as the Guitar Hero 3 guitar for the consoles. That said, installation couldn’t have been easier, simply plug in the USB cord, Windows (I am still using XP), recognized it, and within ten seconds it was installed and ready for use.

The installation from the DVD, which by the way is a hybrid disc – meaning that it can be used in either a Mac or a Windows machine – is only about 4.3GB, so it doesn’t take long at all to install. Once completed, I fired up the game from the Start Menu and I was at the game menu in no time. A note about controls: you’re going to want to use the guitar of course, and you can start to use it immediately to navigate the menus. Or, for whatever reason, you can use the keyboard to play, but in limited testing, I can say without surprise that the experience is dampened.

The soundtrack on Guitar Hero 3 is something most of you are probably familiar with by now, but it includes many of rock’s biggest names, and more importantly most of the tracks are the real deal – very few cover bands are on this release which you can’t quite say for previous Guitar Hero titles. Seventy-three total songs make up the soundtrack to Guitar Hero 3, with forty-two of these being part of the main game, twenty-five more being bonus tracks, and six are dedicated solely to the co-op career mode. There are dozens of artists, including The Beastie Boys, Aerosmith, Metallica, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Living Colour, and many more.

Guitar Hero 3 features several new modes, too, including online play. The best new mode in my opinion was the Cooperative Career Mode, which lets you and a friend rock out through the Career mode together taking different parts of the song (one player does lead guitar, the other handles the bass and rhythm) and combining your efforts. Other modes like Battle Mode will set you versus someone else either locally or on the internet in a dueling battle. In single player, a new mode will have you dueling with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, and legendary rocker Slash, of Guns N Roses fame.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve already purchased a version of Guitar Hero 3, there is no need to get the PC version as it doesn’t really offer anything significantly different. You can turn up the video resolution, and things do appear a bit sharper, but if you’ve seen the game in HD on a 360 or a PS3, you’re going to see essentially the same thing here. Regardless, it’s not like you’re going to really have much time to look anywhere besides the middle of the screen as the notes fly by, so visuals aren’t a major concern. There are no new tracks on this release; it’s really just a quality port of a very good game, with little to no real difference.

That said, there’s nothing here that will turn non-Guitar Hero fans into adopters, but at the same time Aspyr deserves credit for making a quality port and offering it to PC and Mac owners alike.