To start our playtest, we hooked up the game (running on a beefy Dell XPS laptop), to a 50" DLP and surround sound speakers. Our TV is a little old, so we needed to do some tweaking to get the lag calibration right, but that opened the door to see two new features. The first, which will be present in all versions of GH3, is the ability to manually set a video offset in milliseconds. Rather than just having GH2's lag calibration tool (which sometimes turned into a mini-game of its own), you can now skip right to whatever setting you think is right. The second feature, which will be exclusive to the PC and Mac versions, is an additional audio lag calibration feature, designed to compensate for delays that might occur with certain sound cards. We never needed to touch the feature for our playtest, but it was nice knowing that it's there if needed.
With the game running on the big TV, more than a few people poked their heads in thinking it was the console version of Guitar Hero III. Graphically, the games look identical, with the ability to turn certain settings on and off depending on whether you're more interested in eye candy or performance. On the controller side, you can simply plug an Xplorer from the 360 version into a USB port (a bundle will be available for the PC version), and you're ready to rock.
Wanting to give the PC version a workout, we ratcheted everything up to Expert and went with mostly upper-tier songs: Muse's "Knights of Cydonia"; Living Colour's "Cult of Personality," complete with a newly recorded solo; GnR's "Welcome to the Jungle"; and arguably my favorite track in the game, Eric Johnson's instrumental "Cliffs of Dover." With the PC version running smoothly the whole way, this all built up to my climactic challenge: taking on the bonus track of Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flames."
