Thursday, April 12, 2007

Score Whore: Guitar Hero II (360) and Campaign Mode

There's only one reason I'm writing up this post: I'm ranked about 4,500 in Campaign mode out of 225,000 players.

I don't deserve to be there.

There's no way I'm in the top 2% of the people on the leaderboards in terms of skill. I'm not a bad player--I'm probably in the top 15%, certainly--but no way am I in the top 2%. I'm just not that good.

However, I do understand how scoring works, although I have to give my friend John Harwood (still in the top 1%) credit for mentioning this first.

You may think that the best way to get a high Campaign score is to bash through on Expert mode, as long as you can pass the song.

Harder mode=more points. Right?

If you're a great player, and can totally dominate a song in Expert mode, then yes. Otherwise, no.

No no no.

Look at how the scoring system works. With a possible multipler of anything from 1x to 4x (doubled in star power mode), the entire scoring system is almost totally dependent on the multiplier. And the leaderboards take your best score on each song, regardless of difficulty level.
So here is, by far, the most important thing to remember about your campaign mode score: accuracy is more important than difficulty level.

Like anything else, that's not an absolute, but here's what I mean. I have a 100% score on Message in a Bottle on Medium, which was worth 252k. On Hard, I have a four-star score (around 90% accuracy, I believe) of 168.

It was much harder to get a four-star score on Hard than to hit 100% on Medium, but my score is much, much higher on Medium because there's such a premium on accuracy.

It's going to vary by song, but in most cases, getting 99% or 100% on Medium is better than getting 90% on Hard, for example. And it's much easier, relatively, to get that accuracy level on Medium--there are fewer notes and no notes on the orange button, so no hand slide.

Here's sort of a large-scale comparison. On Medium, I've five-starred all the songs, and my total score is 7 million points (yes, I added it up--I'm a loser). On Hard, I've five-starred 21 songs, four-starred 15, and three-starred the other 12 (mostly in the last two sets).

My total score for that difficulty level? 7 million points.

I haven't methodically gone back into Hard and played every single song for every point I could get, so I could probably gain another half million points--eventually. But there are plenty of songs on Hard that I am never going to five-star, particularly in the last two sets, and for all of those songs, my score is going to be much, much higher on Medium.

Here's another example at the set level. I compared my total score for each set, listed the difficulty level of the highest score, and listed the total difference between difficulty levels.

1. Hard (349k)
2. Hard (85k)
3. Hard (17k)
4. Hard (97k)
5. Medium (76k)
6. Medium (2k)
7. Medium (186k)
8. Medium (267)

That's not a straight line depreciation, but it's pretty close. And those last two sets alone on Medium are worth almost half a million points compared to Hard.

You can see what the final mix is going to look like for me--the first two sets with Expert scores (eventually), the next three or four on Hard, and the last two or three on Medium.

Here's the catch, obviously: you have to play through Campaign mode on Medium. But when you score 300k points on Freebird, you won't be complaining. Plus playing through Medium (which I didn't do on the PS2 version) has really improved my rhythm as well as my focus.

As an aside, the progression from Medium to Hard to Expert is brilliantly done. The way that songs are deconstructed and then rebuilt in layers is remarkable.

Now the blah blah blah that you already know:
--don't step on star power sequences by activation your existing star power. You might play through the song once without activating any star power just to see where the sequences are.
--try to activate star power when your multiplier is already high.
--also try to activate star power in a chord-heavy section. Double points.

You've seen those star power tips in a hundred places already, probably, so no need to mention them further here.

One more thing: in quite a few of the songs, playing will be very straightforward except for one or two sections. Don't forget practice mode to help you with those. The best players don't really need it, but the rest of us slugs do.

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