Inevitably, discussion about any GH game devolves into song selection, and while I'd consider myself only a mild Aerosmith fan, the choices are decent. Perhaps the best part is that the band's more popular sugar-coated hits aren't here... you won't find yourself slogging through endless ballads like "Amazing" "Crazy" or "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing." Instead, most of the choices lean on the band's '70s-era classics like "Draw the Line," "Sweet Emotion," and "Toys in the Attic," or later hits like "Livin' on the Edge" or "Love in an Elevator." Even lesser-known songs like "Bright Light Fright" and "Nobody's Fault" are somewhat fun to play through. (I'd also like to thank whoever got "Beyond Beautiful" in the game, one of my personal "unknown" favorites from the band.)
The non-Aerosmith songs are a varied lot, ranging from standouts like "Dream Police," "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Cat Scratch Fever" to more questionable choices like the Clash's "Complete Control" (which has barely sold a lick as DLC for Rock Band). Thankfully, there are only a few cover versions here (now clearly marked with credits like "covered by Wavegroup"), and they never stray into the realm of horrid covers seen in previous games (particularly Rocks the 80s).
As was the case with Guitar Hero III, the PlayStation 2 version of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the ugly duckling of the bunch. But then again, if you're still clinging to your PS2, it probably won't come as a surprise that the on-stage Aerosmith characters and many other elements of the graphics look jagged. Thankfully, the actual fretboard and notes look fine, and the frame-rate never dipped during our playtesting, so it's not a game-killer. The other downside of the PS2 version is that there's no online functionality, so you'll have to deal without the leaderboards or online play of the other versions.
Outside of the main setlist, there are nine bonus songs that can be unlocked, all either by Aerosmith or solo efforts by guitarist Joe Perry. On one hand, it's an improvement over Rocks the 80s, which had no bonus content of any kind, but other than a few songs like "Pink" and "Let the Music Do the Talking," it feels like filler content, and not what you expect when you pay a full price for a game.
And that's really what feels wrong about Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. It's not that the game has the wrong songs, but that it has so few of them. For $50, you can't help but feel a little cheated when all you get is Guitar Hero III with a light coat of paint and barely half the songs. If the rumored Metallica and Van Halen versions of Guitar Hero ever come to pass, we can only hope they get better treatment than this.
