Guitar Hero 5 Bites the Dust! Video of System Freezing on Career Song List
Guitar Hero 5 froze my Nintendo Wii solid; I had to cold reset it to recover.
I only had the game for 2 hours and was simply browsing between the very 1st and 2nd song in the Career setlist, when the game suddenly froze cold in the video you see below. Unbelievable! Activision quality control department: This is your wake up call.
What Caused the Crash?
It's impossible to know for sure, but in my experience over the past 2 years using a Nintendo Wii, Internet communication seems to often be the cause of system freezes when they occur. Since the Guitar Hero 5 online game servers were not ready for the launch of GH5, I was experiencing frequent connection/disconnection notifications every 5-10 minutes. One possible theory is that a background reconnection attempt triggered the crash while I was browsing the career setlist.
Guitar Hero Has a History of Catastrophic Bugs on Nintendo Wii
This isn't the first Guitar Hero game to crash and lockup the Nintendo Wii. Guitar Hero World Tour suffered from a worse problem that would occasionally freeze the game when it was loading the song for an online match, also requiring a cold reboot to recover the Wii. The GHWT issue was far more serious, as it would eventually lead to a corrupted save file, forcing the user to delete all their hard-earned game progress in order to continue using the game at all.
The situation leaves one to wonder if the game quality would have improved had Activision's developers spent more time chasing bugs, rather than cranking out 5 Guitar Titles per year?
At the very least, let's hope this freezing issue on Guitar Hero 5 is an isolated incident, and not something that will marr what was otherwise a significant improvement in the Guitar Hero series.
UPDATE: I've now played the game for several hours over the past few days, and haven't experience any more freezes.
There's a solution, it's called buy a real game system. lol
Seriously, stuff like this is far too frequent on all the systems. On the 360, some games freeze if you shoot too much, others lock up at certain points unless the game is installed on the hard drive, etc etc etc.
One thing about the Guitar Hero games is the constant and annoying checks for downloadable content, the stock messages about not turning off your console during everything it does from loading to saving to nothing, and so on.
But of course nothing double checks if you're using the controller to shut off the console or opening the CD tray in the middle of anything you're doing.
Gotta love it, hunh?