I have already glanced over the Guitar Hero franchise in the very first article that I made before I committed to saying why a lot of things in general are crap, and it was a direct response to a Freky’s Fantastical Facts episode but don’t be fooled by me going back and treading old ground. I still can talk about Guitar Hero well enough to sprout a conversation and I feel that I can make a good point so sit right there.
People often say that Guitar Hero is one of the main things killing the real life music industry; that people will no longer learn to play real instruments, get famous and earn their record labels lots of blood money, and instead learn how to press coloured buttons. Well, that’s not fair. You can hit pads with those same colours on too… However, I don’t feel that Guitar Hero is necessarily a bad thing. I myself own a copy of Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock for my Playstation 3 and I still play this game to this day. Maybe I should elaborate on why people think Guitar Hero is bad. I do feel that some people will do exactly what I said above, obsess over coloured buttons and dedicate a vast amount of their lives to that. That is fine. If they like a game that much then I don’t have a problem with that. Some feel the same way about Halo or Counter-Strike. BAD EXAMPLES!
Anyway, you get what I am trying to say. The problem with Guitar Hero is not that it is killing the music industry (read: isn’t). The problem with Guitar Hero is that it is building up a bad reputation to be associated with ‘foaming at the mouth’ people with three hands (similar to the obsession seen with games such as Microsoft’s Halo or Valve’s Counter-Strike). In the news, all we hear from Guitar Hero is about a 9 year old 5 starring Cliffs of Dover on Expert on Hyperspeed 35, or something, and the public believing that that is the whole idea of the franchise (i.e.: To show how quick you can move your fingers up and down a molten piece of plastic). Like I said, this is similar to people believing that all Counter-Strike is about is speaking in ‘l33tsp3ak’ and being 8 years old. Allow me to explain how the Guitar Hero franchise actually works.
The whole idea of Guitar Hero is to introduce people to new types of music that they may not have otherwise known about. Before I picked up Guitar Hero in HMV, I had not heard of the likes of Eric Johnson or Social Distortion, and now I enjoy playing the songs and they have made the exodus over to my iPod. People seem to fall under the false pretence that Guitar Hero is all about who can wave their cock in front of other people’s faces the best but I feel that this is unfair. This is another classic case of games being ‘put down’ by ‘The Man’ which is kind of ironic because, according to Jack Black in School of Rock, rock and roll was all about sticking it to ‘the Man’. But also like he said, it was ruined by a little thing called MTV and I guess he is sort of right. Music television has made an easier transition into the public eye than games and I feel that we still have a little way to go before it becomes accepted by society. Maybe the release of Beatles: Rock Band may help as there are a lot of Beatles fans out there. And now we link very nicely to the next point in two ways. A: I mentioned Rock Band which is Guitar Hero’s biggest rival and B: MTV was one of the companies that brought Rock Band to us in the first place.
Rock Band broke the mould for rhythm games on the console. Harmonix started off with a budget of $100 thousand dollars and decided that they were going to make a video game. That later became Guitar Hero. They then went off and made Rock Band by taking the Guitar Hero formula and really turning it up to 11. They took the vocals of Singstar, the guitar from Guitar Hero and the drums from Drummania, threw them into a blender, added great graphics and an amazing DLC system and made Rock Band. Now, after Guitar Hero came Rock Band for me and I got it for my 17th birthday, and I am still playing it and having fun. I’m even still getting DLC for it right as I write this article (The Jam Pack 2 in case you were wondering). I do feel that Rock Band is stronger than Guitar Hero.
No. I will not tell you where I live. Just hear me out people. All will become clear.
Guitar Hero created the scene for casual rhythm games on the home console (note: they didn’t make the scene in general. That was done by Drummania). They have done an incredible service to gaming; trying to make games acceptable in modern culture. They chipped away at it and have done a good effort, but no cigar. Rock Band blew the bloody doors off with it however. More wide song choices (from big names such as Kings of Leon, to independent artists such as Jonathan Coulton being in the same marketplace as each other) and more realistic charts to name just two things. But the biggest thing is interactivity. With Guitar Hero, it is only you and a friend at the most, and you are either doing completely different charts to each other or trying to beat the shit out of each other. Rock Band adds emphasis to co-operative play. Having 4 people play through the epic 7 minute and 47 second Foreplay/Long Time never gets boring when you have your friends around you, getting unison bonuses together, complaining about why the singer doesn’t get to do anything for the first 2 minutes and 25 seconds of the song, all turning to the guitarist during the epic acoustic guitar sections in the bridges…
Guitar Hero is flawed for one big reason: It is made to be played on your own. Rock Band emphasises that friends make it the best experience that it possibly can. Even at the end of the Solo Career in the first Rock Band you told to get some friends together and make a band. The reason Guitar Hero failed in the first article is because they don’t listen to their fan base. The reason why it fails here is because they try to separate their fan base. And this is a problem. Rock Band isn’t like this. They have lively forums online, there are many many many different genres of music in their store so no one is left out (and each song costs the same in the UK as the same song in the iTunes store) and even Rock Band alows you to use your Guitar Hero controllers and almost any USB microphone to play. They seem to be more concerned about the community than their profits and that is a rare thing.
Ever since Rock Band was released, Guitar Hero has been playing catchup. Trying to ‘tack on’ a real multiplayer did not work well, their DLC is slow coming out and not that good, and you get the feeling that the game was taken from an accounts book than a dream factory. Rock Band’s 8 player multiplayer still cannot be topped by the veterans. The only good music in Guitar Hero is on the disc but that is also flawed as it is released on Rock Band at around the same time and you don’t have to fork out £40 for a song you like. GH’s last chance to claw back was with GHTunes but that became just a medium for people to create Mario and Zelda song remixes, and bad ones at that. I would even go as far as saying that the Guitar Hero DLC is just lazy. Rather than releasing a track pack, like in Rock Band, Guitar Hero makes you fork out for ANOTHER disc with only around half a dozen songs you like on it that are named like: Guitar Hero – Metallica or Guitar Hero – Aerosmith or Guitar Hero – George Formby or something… You get the idea. But here is what it comes down to. GH haven’t embraced the advent of DLC, leaving it to an afterthought and I am afraid that is what it takes to survive these days in this type of gaming market. Maybe if they started listening to the fans and bringing them together in a convincing, non evil corporation way, then they may stand a chance. At least show us you are trying. Put some stupid stuff on, like the Red Dwarf theme for example, and people will be blinded by fake smiles and the magpies will flock to your shiny discs. It isn’t honest, but it will at least get you enough money to make you last until you release Guitar Hero – Village People.
