With the holidays fast approaching, the question facing wannabe rockers and those who would buy gifts for them is clear: Rock Band, or Guitar Hero III?

It’s not as simple as it may seem. Both games have strong and weak points, and while they both have The Rock[1] in common, they are distinctly different games, and choosing which one is right for you or your favorite lil’rocker[2] can be a difficult proposition. Since we’re talking about a substantial amount of money here – though the GH 3 360 bundle has an MSRP of $89 and the Rock Band Special Edition has an MSRP of $160, both are in limited supply and are going for Tickle Me Elmo prices online – I thought I’d use this week’s Geek in Review to review both games, highlight their differences, and justify to my wife why I’ve played both of them so much in the last two weeks, I have a serious RSI in my right forearm and wrist.

Note: I have the Xbox 360 version of each game, so that’s what I’ll be referring to in this column.

Let’s begin with a few similarities: both games have outstanding set lists, featuring a good balance of current and classic rock songs at various difficulties. A big part of the fun for me in these games is unlocking new songs as I play without knowing what’s coming up next. If you’re like me, you won’t want to see the complete Guitar Hero III setlist, or the complete Rock Band setlist.

However, you may want to know that both games feature songs from Metallica, The Killers, The Rolling Stones, Weezer, and a few others. Only one of them has extra cowbell, though.

Both games also work with the wired and wireless Guitar Hero controllers on the 360, though I’ve heard complaints that there are some issues with the PS3’s wireless controllers, giving PS3 owners what they deserve for buying a big stupid blu-ray player with some gaming thrown in as an afterthought.[3] Both games regularly release new songs through the Xbox Marketplace, and so far, I’ve found Rock Band’s DLC to be vastly superior to GH 3’s.

Both games have fun career modes for single and multi-player, and since that’s where the similarities end, let’s look at them both on their own merits.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

This is the fourth Guitar Hero game (if you count this summer’s profoundly disappointing Rocks the 80s) so players know what to expect: pick a rocker, grab a guitar, and start working your way through setlists of increasing difficulty on your journey to Guitar Legend (which doesn’t sound as cool as Rock God, but if you get all the way to the end on Hard or Expert, you’ll feel like one. Trust me.)

What’s Back
Several of your favorite characters have returned, including Lars Umlaut, Johnny Napalm, Casey Lynch (who gets a serious hotness upgrade) and Judy Nails (who gets a serious boobies upgrade.) The rock store, where you can buy bonus songs, guitars, costumes and rockers has also returned. The basic style of play is unchanged, and Neversoft (which replaced Harmonix when they split off from RedOctane) did a great job with all songs. The hammer-ons and pull-offs function the same way as they did in GH 2, but the overall difficulty has been ramped up quite a bit. I read on the ‘tubes somewhere the suggestion that GH3 Hard = GH2 Expert, and I can mostly agree with that.

What’s New
The graphics have gotten a serious upgrade from the last time around, and it’s stylized without being too cartoony. There are a couple of new characters, all-new venues, and a new storyline with awesome cutscenes that tracks your band’s rise, fall, redemption, and . . . well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but it’s fun and cool.

Two completely new additions to the game are the Boss battles, and the Career Co-op mode. The Boss battles pit you against real-life rockers Slash, Tom Morello, and a mystery opponent, in a face off that replaces star power with battle power. When you play against these guys (or against a friend in multiplayer) you don’t get stars to increase your score and get the audience on your side. Instead, you collect different ways to fuck with the other guy, like the Whammy, which forces him to wail on the whammy bar before he can play any additional notes, and the Amp Overload, which causes his fretboard shake and notes to blink, making it insanely difficult to play them correctly. Personally, I hate the battle mode, but I also hate the Red Hot Chili Peppers and that damn screaming Emo music, so clearly I do not have my finger on the pulse of the damn kids today. Both of my kids (16 and 18) think Battle mode is awesome.

Career co-op mode takes the old co-op mode but gives you encores songs that can only be unlocked when you play with a friend, and an entirely different set of cutscenes. I liked it, because it added the sense of achievement I got while playing through the solo career mode to the fun I have rocking out with a friend (or, more frequently, one of my kids.) Unlike Rock Band, players don’t have to pick an instrument and stick with it, so you’re free to switch off between bass and guitar from song to song.

What Rocks
Nearly all of the songs are performed by the original artists. If you think that’s not a big deal, go play Guitar Hero II and report back. Five paragraphs, double-spaced, please.

Though the setlist is obviously focused on songs with blistering solos, it’s still a well-balanced collection of different genres and difficulties. Each song is accompanied by the year it was released, which is a minor detail that I nevertheless appreciated.

Poison frontman Brett Michaels did motion capture for all the male singers in the game, and I can honestly say it’s the first thing he’s ever done that I thought was awesome.

Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing. I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t spoil any of the setlist, but this song is so fucking awesome it deserves special mention in this section, because it’s not the sort of song that you’d expect to find in this game. Now, if they’d only give us some Bauhaus . . .

What Sucks
The audience. They didn’t put anything new into this subroutine to improve on the crowds in GH2. Everyone moves around in exactly the same way, looking like one person replicated over and over again, sort of like a gathering of Ron Paul fanatics.[4]

The vocal on Pride and Joy is so bad, Zombie Stevie Ray Vaughn was recently spotted prowling the Texas countryside, looking for revenge.

When you go from the penultimate setlist to the final setlist, the difficulty explodes, and songs cross over from “challenging-but-fun” to “oh my fucking god why can’t I get past 90% on this?” I suppose it gives a sense of real accomplishment when you finally make it to the final boss battle, but I just found it demoralizing. That’s not to say the songs are bad. Three of the songs in that setlist are my favorites in the game, even if they’re so damn hard to play I want to smash my controller like I’m a member of The Who.

Finally, my biggest complaint about the game: there’s advertising everywhere, and while I don’t mind that sort of thing where it makes sense – like Ernie Ball strings, and Gibson guitars – there’s stuff that feels totally out of place, like all the Pontiac crap in one level, or obviously intrusive, like the cans of Red Bull that seem to end up littering every single stage.

Guitar Hero III continues where Guitar Hero 2 left off, and it rocks just as hard. I can say with complete confidence that if you like any of the games in the franchise, the latest installment won’t let you down, and will seriously rock your socks off.

Rock Band
Because Rock Band exists in a world that’s already seen four Guitar Hero games, is seen as a natural competitor to that franchise, and wouldn’t exist if not for Guitar Hero’s success, it’s nearly impossible to let it stand entirely on its own merits. No matter what, it’s going to be compared to Guitar Hero, which is a shame, because while there are similarities, Rock Band is an entirely different game, that’s satisfying to play for entirely different reasons. It's not just Guitar Hero with extra instruments; it's much more.

Rock Band takes Guitar Hero III’s career co-op, and adds singing and drums. There’s a solo mode where players can choose one of the different instruments and work their way through different setlists, but it’s not nearly as fun as multiplayer. In fact, to steal a phrase from Penny Arcade’s Tycho, this game needs to be played with other people, because that’s where it shines.

Bass and guitar is exactly what you’d expect, and if you’re familiar with their Guitar Hero counterparts, you should feel right at home. Rock Band isn't nearly as forgiving as Guitar Hero 2 and 3, though, and the hammer ons and pull offs look and respond very differently than what you're used to. This will probably put some people off, but I adjusted fairly quickly.

Rock Band ships with a guitar that’s modeled after the Fender Stratocaster, that is decidedly different than the controllers you’re used to. I like it, but it takes a lot of getting used to. This is one of the many areas where Rock Band’s comparisons to Guitar Hero hurt it: the controller looks and feels good, and has a nifty 5-way switch that lets you apply effects like echo, wah wah, and chorus to your solos. There are also tapping buttons high on the neck that can be played without strumming during solo sections, but players who are unwilling to adjust to the new axe won’t ever get to enjoy those little tweaks.

Players who choose to sing will get a microphone and will be scored on pitch and annunciation. Unlike some other karaoke games, you can’t just hum your way through songs and expect to get a good score, so if you don’t know the words to a song, find someone who does. We had a lot of fun setting up a rudimentary mic stand (built from a box kite tube, some bungee cords and a chair, naturally) and taking turns singing while we played guitar or bass, but at the more advanced difficulties, you’ll want to focus on just one instrument to get high scores and unlock new gigs. And singers? In some songs, you’ll get to bang your microphone like a tambourine . . . or a cowbell. Yeah, that’s right: a cowbell.

The drums are my favorite instrument, and I’ve heard real drummers say that if you can play the drums in Rock Band on Hard, then you can play the drums in real life. When you drum, you’ll see a vertically scrolling section just like the guitar and bass players. You play notes by banging drum sticks on colored pads that sound like toms, snares, crash and ride cymbals. There’s also a foot pedal that thumps like a bass drum. The best part about being a drummer is releasing Rock Band’s version of starpower, which is cleverly called “energy.” When you build up enough “energy,” your section will switch to four glowing vertical bars of color [5] indicating that you can imrpovise a drum fill. This is so much fun, because it gives wannabe drummers like me a chance to play along with a real song, and then add whatever flourish we feel like bringing to the song before hitting the crash cymbal and sending our score into overdrive.

Rock Band lets you do all of this with 58 songs – 51 of them by the original artists – and a shitload crapton of downloadable content, which Harmonix has pledged to keep updating every week from now until the end of time. Already, they’ve released songpacks from Bowie, The Police, Metallica, and Queens of the Stone Age. Eventually, players will be able to purchase entire albums, starting with The Who’s Who’s Next.

What Rocks
Multiplayer, baby. It’s all about the world tour, where you get to name your band, give it a motto, and fill it with characters you and your friends have created.

The loading screens are pictures of your band in action, and they add a level of realism to the “I’m in a rock band” fantasy that will put a smile on your face if you’re willing to commit to it. I squeed a little bit when I saw a loading screen with my band’s name – and my character – on a billboard.

Customizing your band and characters. There are countless graphics to choose from, so you can design an original logo (perfect for the inevitable T-shirt sales) for your band. As you progress through the game, you can customize your characters with tattoos, haircuts, and costumes. There are so many options, you can make your player look like a reasonable recreation of you in real life[6], or you can mold yourself after your ultimate rocker (I made myself look like Elvis Costello, because I don’t want to go to Chelsea.)

The Big Rock Ending: At the end of certain songs, you’ll be presented with an opportunity to blast out one of those huge endings that brings the house down. What makes it really cool and fun is that you get to just wail away on your instrument to build up a huge bank of points . . . which you only get to collect if you hit s randomly-assigned note or series of notes at the end of it all. If your whole band pulls it off, you can get tens of thousands of points and a huge cheer from the audience. If any one of you misses it, though, you won’t get the points, and you’ll just hear crickets.

The artwork is magnificent, and the set design in each venue rules. In some songs, your lead singer will even leap into the audience, just like a real rocker.

When you are really rocking, the audience will actually sing along with you. This is seriously cool, but if you have 5.1 surround, it cranks up to 11 on the awesome scale, as it seems to come from all around you.

What Sucks
There are some minor annoyances in multiplayer. For instance, if I start a session as a guitarist, I can’t switch my character to drums for one song without signing out and logging back in, and if I’m the band leader, I’m stuck with one instrument for the life of the band. That’s stupid, and the game would be much more fun for casual players if we could choose what instrument we’d play at the beginning of each song.

To unlock new venues, your band must amass a certain number of fans. The number of fans you gain each gig is determined by the difficulty level of each member of your band, so you reach “fan caps” where the game comes to a halt until you can successfully play at a higher difficulty level. For some players, this isn’t bad at all, and is a good motivator to try harder levels. For casual players, though, it totally sucks. I know plenty of people who love to play on Hard, but have no interest in playing on Expert. The way I understand this, unless Harmonix removes the fan cap (which I think they’ll have to do, eventually) some people won’t ever be able to experience the entire game. That’s just fucking retarded. Not everyone wants to play the game on Hard or Expert settings, and preventing those people from enjoying the game the same way Hard and Expert players do is stupid and wrong.

There is an even bigger problem, though, that almost breaks the game for me: it’s infuriatingly repetitive in multiplayer career mode, especially at the beginning. As you advance through different cities and unlock new gigs, you’ll be faced with challenges, where the audience randomly picks songs for you to play. The RNG that decides the songs is thoroughly fucked, and frequently results in forcing you to play the same song three times in 30 minutes. If it’s a song you love, not such a big deal; but if it’s a song you hate – like Wanted, Dead or Alive, for instance – you’re screwed. If you’re trying to introduce new players to the game who are used to Guitar Hero’s “one and done” approach to playing songs, it can be a massive turn off. In fact, this problem has driven both of my kids and all of their friends away from Rock Band. While some people claim that playing the same songs over and over again is realistic and more like being in a real band, I totally disagree. I’m not looking for a perfectly realistic recreation of being in a band, I just want to experience the fun of playing songs that I’d never be able to play for real with my friends. I want to play Don’t Fear the Reaper and Won’t Get Fooled Again, and I don’ t want to have to play Celebrity Skin fifty fucking times to get there.

I have a solution to this, though: the game should ask itself if a particular song has been played in the last two hours. If the answer is yes, it chooses a different song for your band to play. See? Done and done.

Those two annoyances aside, I just love Rock Band. I love the feeling of pointless accomplishment I get when I see I’ve gotten 100% on a solo, or improvised a particularly wicked drum fill. Mostly, I love the way Rock Band lets me pretend like I’m in a real band, playing for real people on a real world tour. In fact, to fully enjoy it, you and your bandmates should totally commit to the fantasy, and rock out as hard as you can while you play; it’s the only way to unleash the game’s full potential.

The bottom line.
These are very different games, and I like them both for very different reasons. If you have friends who can consistently get together with you to play, Rock Band destroys Guitar Hero. If you’re going to be playing alone, or if you’re buying for a teenager who thinks the greatest achievement in life is getting 5 stars on Buckethead in Expert mode, mashing guitar buttons like we used to mash Street Fighter buttons, then Guitar Hero III is a clear winner.

Whatever you choose, you’re going to get a great game that’s a ton of fun to play. For those about to rock, I salute you.

[1]That would be the music type of The Rock, not the kind that wants you to smell various things which are cooking.
[2] I say “lil’rocker” because it conjures up images of those adorable, chunky plastic toys, and let’s be honest: that’s how people view us when we’re shredding our balls off during a solo on Expert.
[3] Yeah, that’s won’t arouse any passions, will it?
[4] I’m feeling randy today. Ron Paul supporters and PS3 owners? Look out, Truthers. You’re next.
[5] I hear that’s fairly common for real drummers in real bands, especially if your name was John Bonham.
[6] That’s clearly not me. It’s Posh. Durr.

Wil Wheaton’s band is called Zombitis: Dawn of the Shred. He’s currently accepting applications from potential groupies.