Most gamers know by now that Guitar Hero III is far more difficult than Rock Band on guitar. I’ve played all these fake plastic rock games extensively, and here’s my rough estimation of the relative guitar difficulties in each one:

	Expert	=		Hard
	Expert	=		Hard
	Expert	=		Expert
	Expert	=		Expert

There’s been a massive inflation in Guitar Hero skill levels over time!

If you mastered Guitar Hero I on Expert, there’s no way you could finish Guitar Hero II on Expert without a lot of practice. Ditto for the Guitar Hero II to III Expert transition. Expert just keeps getting more and more challenging in the Guitar Hero series. I managed to finish Guitar Hero II on Expert — barely — but I have no hope whatsoever of finishing Guitar Hero III on expert. I fear for my life when Guitar Hero IV is released; they’ll probably add two more buttons to the guitar.

I was relieved, then, to find out that Rock Band bucks this trend; at its most difficult, it is roughly on par with the original Guitar Hero’s Expert difficulty. I always felt that the first Guitar Hero was the only game in the series to really nail the difficulty progression, so that going from Easy to Medium to Hard to Expert felt absolutely smooth and seamless. I’m happy to see the Harmonix developers realize that and back down a little bit from the endless skill inflation that the Guitar Hero series seems mired in.

Rock Band and Guitar Hero III have six songs in common. Games Radar compared the hard guitar note patterns side-by-side on these common songs, so you can see exactly why Guitar Hero III is the more difficult game:

Sabotage, When You Were Young, Cherub Rock:

Reptilia, Paranoid, Mississippi Queen:

It’s too bad they didn’t do this comparison on expert, where I think the differences are even more pronounced.

But the trend is clear: Guitar Hero III is awfully fond of difficulty for difficulty’s sake.