Sponsored Feature: Guitar Hero III Mobile

You don't have to be a riff-shredding rawk star with your own roadie to play Guitar Hero, but it helps! Well, you'd think so, although Slash is rumoured to be, whisper it, not that good at playing the game he appears in. At least not as good as the gamers who are addicted to it, anyway.

But the fact that Slash is officially promoting a console game shows the importance of the Guitar Hero franchise. It's won millions of fans, and has been crucial in convincing the music industry to view games with a new respect. And that's as true of the new Guitar Hero III Mobile game as of its console forebears.

Let's start at the beginning though, to give you a sense of why the mobile game is so hotly anticipated. Guitar Hero wasn't the first music-based console game to come with a guitar peripheral – that honour goes to Konami's Guitar Freaks – but it did popularise the idea in the West.

The first Guitar Hero came out in November 2005 for PS2, developed by Harmonix, whose previous music games had included the critically acclaimed Frequency and Amplitude. Guitar Hero came with its own controller, modelled on one of Gibson's guitars, with five coloured buttons representing notes, to be pressed in time to the on-screen action.

It was a big hit, and was followed by Guitar Hero II in 2006, which first appeared on PS2 and then came out on Xbox 360. But the monster of the series has been Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, which came out late last year for a host of consoles, complete with wireless guitars to save you the embarrassment of tripping up during your rock theatrics.

It's sold millions, naturally. And it's convinced the music industry that licensing tracks for music games could be big business. Bands saw their sales boosted by being included in previous versions, but Guitar Hero III actually lets people buy new tracks – in three-song 'track packs' – to ensure they never get stuck with just the songs that came with the game originally.

There are even plans for dedicated versions of Guitar Hero themed around individual bands, with the Aerosmith version due out imminently, and Metallica following later this year. Recent reports have even suggested that a Beatles-themed Guitar Hero could be in the works.

With all this history and excitement, you'd think that Guitar Hero III Mobile would be a challenging project to take on, such are the high expectations of its fanbase. However, Hands-On Mobile has met these expectations with aplomb, releasing the game initially in the US and quickly selling more than a million downloads, thanks to its simple gameplay and slamming collection of licensed tunes.

The game uses the same basic concept as its console parent, but reduces the number of frets to three to suit the mobile keypad. As you play along by pressing the buttons, you'll rack up your score, and you'll rack it up even faster if you trigger the special Star mode.

Okay, so you don't have to leap about windmilling like Pete Townshend to play Guitar Hero III Mobile (especially not if you're playing on the train or bus), but it shares a vital element of the console game: its social nature. You'll want to show the mobile version off to friends, particularly when you nail a 100-note combo or better.

The Guitar Hero franchise has managed several things: it's made music games big business, it's excited people who wouldn't previously have thought of themselves as gamers, and it's revitalised the careers of several metal bands who thought their best days were behind them. This is a plus, we promise.

Guitar Hero III Mobile might be played on a mobile handset rather than a console, but it does all of those things too. So if you've got a phone and a few minutes to kill, as Def Leppard would say, a rock is most certainly not out of the question.