Thursday, March 20, 2008

Guitar Hero on Tour for the DS. Really?

Speaking of Guitar Hero, have you guys seen the media on Guitar Hero on Tour for DS? The peripheral alone makes it feel more like an "Accordion Hero" than a guitar, and its 4-button control scheme rules out the hardcore Expert mode from the game. Either that, or Expert mode now will just be a more intense Medium mode.

Call me a skeptic, but hasn't this franchise suffered enough? I mean, Rock Band's pretty much trumped them in every way, and things have gone downhill since their poor release of Guitar Hero Encore: Rock the 80s. Of course, they could have taken a better path...something along the lines of a Guitar Hero all on Pop, Alternative, or even Ballads. Nope. They figured if a decade doesn't rake in the dough, a game based on one single band should.

By the way, Rock Band just launched a new Music Store in-menu that will potentially allow users to download full albums of songs to play. But go ahead, Activision - I'm sure everyone would want to play songs from one band. They already just listen to one band at a time nowadays, right?

Radio? What's a radio?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree that Activision is just playing GH out for all it's worth without infusing any new ideas or creativity... Sad, really.

The thing that worries me in all this is that Guitar Hero games are outselling Rock Band despite the superior quality and vibe. A couple of the guys around the office even said they saw a local fluff news story recently about how popular the genre's getting, and apparently they kept referring to "Guitar Hero" while showing the controllers and footage from Rock Band. So while gamers know what's up, the masses may be uninformed. Hopefully Actiblizzon doesn't flood the market with so many crappy overpriced theme versions that the general populous skips over Rock Band and considers the genre stale.

Unknown said...

With the strong name branding that Guitar Hero has brought upon itself, it's hard to shake it off, which I guess is the one thing Activision is banking on. It's just that their involvement is chipping away its integrity every crappy iteration after another.

Perhaps, Guitar Hero = poor man's music game, while Rock Band = higher-quality music game?