Posted: Oct Mon 2008 11:29 AM CDT
The World Doesn’t Need Another Crappy Guitar Hero Game
It’s like a bad Star Wars fan film really. More like the sum of all ten thousand of the shoddy rip-off homemade video clips so called “inspired” by the original genius of the 1977 Sci-Fi action flick. Ever since the inception of the innovative ‘Guitar Hero’ Playstation 2 title by experimental game developer Harmonix, the video game industry can hardly stop vomiting up more and more fodder for wannabe rock stars; and on EVERY game platform imaginable.
A Short History Lesson Here
The insipid market flood actually started with a little known title called “Guitar Freaks” originally released on the Playstation console in 1999. An adaptation of an arcade-only title, the console game provided the player with a custom controller where button presses matched colored dots on the screen synced to groovy guitar tracks. Groovy. While meeting little commercial success, game publisher Konami relentlessly pushed out roughly one sequel per year, often combining another game “Drumania” with each dreaded discharge; Drumania, of course, being the rock drummer’s equivalent of the guitar-centered game.
With a small marketing budget and non-licensed track lists, the games were doomed to fail in the western markets. After all, Americans don’t just play games to be fast at them (cough cough, Japanese, cough), we play games to be badass and nothing says badass like the original cut of Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’ blasting through at a thousand watts while waving our phony guitar about like a madman.
Harmonix Finally Gets It Right
Leave it to a western developer to finally realize a novel idea that had been plagued with poor execution for years. “Guitar Hero” launched in 2005 to critical and commercial success thanks to brilliant gameplay and a solid set of licensed music tracks. Finally, those with no musical talent could be rock stars in the leagues of Ozzie, Hendrix, or Pantera. Pantera? Well maybe not.
“Attack of the Guitar Hero Clones”
It is said that “the love of money is the root of all bad sequels”. Nothing could be more appropriate concerning the onslaught that awaited gamers in the coming years:
Frets on Fire
Guitar Hero II
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith
Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades
Guitar Hero: World Tour (latest craptastic revision)
Praise (Christian Guitar Hero we kid you not)
Rock Band
Rock Band II
You can also look out for exciting new titles yet to be released:
Guitar Hero: Metallica
Guitar Hero Carabiner (not a joke)
Guitar Hero’s Bastardization Is Complete
Not even the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario’s creator, is above ripping off such a profitable franchise. He aims to soil Nintendo’s smash hit Wii console with a brand new unoriginal rendition of a vaguely titled ‘Wii Music’. More apt would be “Wave Control While Crappy Music Plays”. I suppose ‘Wii Music’ has a better marketing ring to it.
Miyamoto claims however, “I really wish I made this before those other games were popular. I really want people to be able to look at it from the perspective that I looked at it from.” After playing this recently released trash, one can hardly imagine what he was talking about or what awaits lucky gamers around the world as developers like Nintendo, Neversoft and Harmonix continue to milk the music-rhythm genre for everything it’s worth and a lot more of what it’s not. Spare us the innovation, please.
Ha ha: yea, i’ve always wondered about this myself … why would anyone spend all their time learning a vid game when they could be spending the same time learning an actual instrument … oh well, more gigs for us ….
Jesse,
Great article. Brings back memories of you, josh, and I: two of us double-teaming expert mode and doing Pete Townshend-esque leaps from your couch while the third waited on-deck. Of course, that was when the games weren’t quite stale yet.
This trend reminds me of Hollywood, where one script-making-the-rounds turns into multiple clones, one for each major film company. Against so many similar competitors, the original can’t just rely on originality of idea. It can only leap ahead of the pack through innovative presentation and/or quality-of-production. Even then, it has to go to market against an artificially imposed deadline and its success is likely to be diminished by a consumer-base with limited funds and too many options.
Maybe one day, you and I will develop that video game we talked about, show ‘em all what innovation and originality really is.
Cheers,
Kev
P.S.
Gimme a call sometime, ya recluse.
I totally agree. these games will be the death of me
Ah,yes, Guitar Hero…the game which the alpha male who owns it decides when the beta and omega males get to play and when they don’t. I wonder…if more beta and omega males owned GH, they could pretend to be alphas over the game and become guitar heroes.
Who knows, as guitar heroes, they might even try to become alphas in real life and challenge the established alphas. Then again, they may regress back to beta-dom or worse…back to omega-dom and let the alphas continue to rule.
Go betas…become Heroes!