We got a chance to catch up with Six-String-Samurai, our Winter Season Guitar Hero 3 champion to get his take on the game, the competition, and some of his personal likes and dislikes about the title.

GB: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where you're from? What do you do?

Samurai: I was raised in Granbury, TX (forty minutes south of Ft. Worth), and now reside in Austin, pursuing a film degree at the University of Texas. I hope to parlay that and some measure of programming skills into a career in the videogame industry.

To help pay the bills, I work at a local GameCrazy, selling copies of Guitar Hero by tapping the intro to Through The Fire and Flames for interested customers. Ideally, I'd like to nab a job as a tester at one of the many developer branches in Austin (Aspyr would be nice since they've been porting all PC Guitar Hero releases).



GB: Here's a two-parter; What's your favorite GH3 song? Second, if you could add any song to GH3 what would it be?

Samurai: Favorite song would be "Cult of Personality" or "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." I'm actually really bad at fast strumming, but am pretty good at fretting, which those songs have an abundance of. Through the Fire and Flames is a mixture of both, so it doesn't make the cut.

The second one...man, this question is impossible. I'll narrow it between Steely Dan's Bodhisattva and this guy: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ATub40Npxik





GB: Do you actually play the guitar, or any instrument for that matter?

Samurai:  I played trombone for six years in the band, but pretty much instantly gave it up when I got out of high school. I won the CPL GH2 competition in Dallas last summer, and the reward was a Fender Stratocaster (guess they were trying to tell me something).

(Quick aside, the finals had performance judging, which I absolutely hate, so I just stood there and played Jordan. Still won, so I like to think that proves my theory that the only reason someone dances around playing Guitar Hero in a competition is so the judges won't hear the plinks of missed notes.)

Anyway, I messed around with the guitar for a few months, but never got that interested. After playing Rock Band, I found which instrument I wanted to learn the real version of. Luckily, one of my co-workers is a drummer, so I took his practice pad to work on my form and accuracy. I eventually want to be a real drummer, instead of one who flails insanely on every single fill, regardless of whether it's Run to the Hills or Wanted Dead or Alive.



GB: Did you get your start with Guitar Hero 3 or have you been following the entire franchise?

Samurai: I first saw Guitar Hero at a friend's party in summer of '06, right when I'd graduated. He was always into rhythm games (and an actual guitarist), so it seemed a good fit for him. I remember glancing at it and seeing Spanish Castle Magic. Walked over, there, saw how it was played, and almost knocked the guy away from the controller, because I had to play the brainchild of videogames and rock-stardom, right then. Three months after that, GH2 came out, and that lasted up until the next summer, when I finally got good at Expert. Almost got bored enough to trade my merchandise in until I saw the magic of custom songs, which is in my opinion the real future of GH, since you'll never be able to get bored of the songs.

Speaking of which, if you never want to get bored with GH, check out scorehero.com, it is the be-all, end-all compendium of GH information.



GB: Of all the play-off matches you played, were the finals the toughest?

Samurai: The finals were the toughest, but not from a gameplay perspective. The team was one of the earlier ones from Fall 07, so they had multiple members (current signups for team creations have a one member cap). It was mainly one member who got the team up to 4th place, but he sent me a message saying I'd be playing the other guy. Was fine with that, the other teammate was a courteous dude, the match went well. After winning and leaving positive feedback, the other teammate who didn't play comes in and basically intimates I'm too intimate with Guitar Hero for my own good, so "go get a girlfriends hahahahaah." This stuff sets my teeth on edge, not even counting the irrelevant girlfriend thing, it's mainly he ridicules anybody he beats, downplays anyone he loses to by telling them they need to get a life, and blithely ignores the hypocrisy of what he's saying. Not to mention he chickened out of actually playing me!