Guitar Hero 5 was available for everyone to try out at the rAge 2009 Expo from the start on Friday. It’s out in a few weeks and there’s already been quite a bit written about it so I’ll just offer a few thoughts.

To my mind the new interface is infinitely superior to any other Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, and the advantages of it are particularly obvious in an expo setting. The game now allows players to join in or drop out at any time and change difficulty and instruments on the fly. So if you want to join in with someone already playing then you pick up a controller, press the start button to join, choose your instrument (guitar or bass) and go.

If you later want to drop out you press the start button and leave your highway in the pause menu, or can specifically choose to drop out. While you’re in the pause menu everyone else carries on playing as normal, so you can pass your instrument over to another player without stopping the fun for everyone. If you leave the instrument in the pause menu for long enough the game will just drop you out and adjust the other highways to make use of the full screen. If you’re struggling with the difficulty just drop to the pause menu and change it - no loading, and no interruptions for anyone else. In the mode I played there wasn’t even the possibility of failure as far as I could tell, so you can never cause the group to fail - you simply get a lower score than others.

If you want to set up a playlist you can choose to do so from the in-game pause menu, choose some songs and go. Another “feature” I love is that you don’t have to unlock any songs - they’re all available from the start. Finally someone realised that this is what most of us want: to play the songs we like - we don’t want to play songs by Children of Bodom just so that we can unlock the cool ones by Bon Jovi. Hooray for never having to play songs we don’t like! The songs on your playlist are played one after the other with very short breaks between them, and once the playlist is finished the game chooses songs at random until you choose one or set up another list.

Although the gameplay of Guitar Hero is not as fresh as it once was, the changes made in Guitar Hero 5 do make it even more suitable for social playing. It’s clear Activision have decided the die-hard fans are not where the market-growth will come from and have made the game far more casual-friendly. For some this might be considered to be dumbing the game down, but I see it more as focusing on its strengths. It’s always been about the joy of enjoying music together with friends, not competing to see who can be the best plastic guitar player. I can see Guitar Hero now going the way of Singstar - many releases that are feature-exact with different tracks.