by Flack » Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:30 pm
HONORABLE MENTION
Guitar Hero/Rock Band
As everybody knows, tennis rackets are the "gateway instrument" between air guitars and real guitars. Tennis rackets are roughly shaped like guitars, and the tactile sensation of flicking your fingers across a racket's strings is more enjoyable than plain old mid-air strumming. As a kid, before I owned a tennis racket my pretend guitar-du-jour was a baseball bat. I played the pretend electric bat for a few months before finally acquiring a tennis racket at a garage sale (for the sole purpose of using it as a pretend guitar -- I had zero interest in tennis). By third grade I had graduated to a real (cheap) acoustic guitar, and before long my worthless uncle gifted me an old broke electric guitar. It didn't work (it didn't even have any strings), but was a hell of a lot more fun to play "rock star" with than any goofy acoustic guitar, tennis racket, or baseball bat (especially after a few coats of black spray paint.)
E chords are one of the easiest guitar chords to learn. You can master it in 30 seconds; learning it is just a matter of pressing a couple of fingers in the right frets. There's nothing particularly difficult or sexy about the technical execution of it, but when played on an electric guitar with proper amounts of of distortion and volume it's like having sex, winning the Super Bowl, and punching everyone who has ever been mean to you in the face all at once.
So do Guitar Hero and Rock Band give you that same feeling? In a way, I suppose, in the same way karaoke gives people their three minutes of cheers (or jeers). I mean, you're performing in front of other people, and that's kind of a rush, even if "other people" simply equates to all your other nerdy friends who also grew up playing the electric tennis racket.
There were several rhythm-based games around before the dawn of Guitar Hero. Most people instantly think of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), but you also had Konami's Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania, which were definitely Rock Band predecessors. Because they were arcade games you got the thrill of performing in front of other people, but that also meant learning how to play those games in front of other people, and that can be intimidating. A few of those games made it to the home market, but none of them were terribly successful there. There were multiple DDR games (both licensed and knock-offs) with plastic dance pads that were greatly inferior to their arcade counterparts. Konami's Guitar Freaks actually made it to the home market, but in Japan. US gamers who went through the trouble of importing the game (and modifying their PlayStations in order to play it) found it full of Japanese pop music (makes sense).
But Guitar Hero got it right. Standing on the shoulders of Guitar Freaks, Harmonix and Activision took the thrill of being an American rock star and somehow bottled it into a video game. And people love it, or at least loved it. Put it this way; the first Guitar Hero game was released in November of 2005. That means Guitar Hero and Rock Band are both less than five years old, and yet if you know somebody who is into modern gaming of any kind, they probably have at least one plastic guitar stored away in their hall closet. We have several.
The first thing Guitar Hero did right was included a cool guitar. The original was a scaled down Gibson SC, but later you could get Gibson X-Plorers, Les Pauls, and Fender Telecaster clones as well. We've officially graduated from tennis rackets, my friends.
The second thing Guitar Hero did right was include some classic guitar tracks. The first game alone contains track s from Audioslave, Bad Religion, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Cream, Deep Purple, Helmet, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Jett, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Motorhead, Ozzy, Pantera, Queen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Donnas, The Ramones, White Zombie, and ZZ Top. Sure they were cover versions, but they sounded pretty darn close to the originals. Later games licensed official tracks.
Rock Star raised by the bar by adding drums and vocals to the mix; Guitar Hero countered with Guitar World Hero. At this point, both series essentially interchangeable (in fact, most of the instruments on the market at this point work with both games). There are tons of spin off games as well, especially in the vocal/karaoke category. If you're a singer, you're in luck -- no longer are you limited to bellowing out tunes in the shower. Now you can bellow them into a plastic microphone.
Both programmers and bands saw the importance of getting real studio recordings into these games, a move that culminated in entire releases dedicated to single bands: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, and Guitar Hero: Metallica gave players the ability to virtually jam along with their favorite bands. Rock Band countered with Rock Band: The Beatles and Rock Band: Green Day. The Who and Queen are rumored to be working on Rock Band releases as well.
But back to my original question. Does standing in your living room and prancing around with a guitar-shaped piece of plastic really make you feel like a rock star? And surprisingly the answer is yeah, it kinda does. When your hand starts cramping while you're mashing your way through those rapid fire machine gun triplets in Slayer'S Raining Blood, despite the fact that you're doing it in your living room on toy guitar, yeah, there's a small part of you that kind of feels like a bad ass.
In five years, Guitar Hero went from being a single game to not only a multi-million (probably billion) dollar franchise, but a genre as well. I mentioned Rock Band and SingStar, but there are dozens of others (I've got DJ Hero sitting on top of my entertainment center) and new contenders coming out all the time. Will there be an end? Probably. But for the thrill it gives you, even if it doesn't last forever, Guitar Hero and Rock Band make the honorable mention list.
HONORABLE MENTION
Guitar Hero/Rock Band
As everybody knows, tennis rackets are the "gateway instrument" between air guitars and real guitars. Tennis rackets are roughly shaped like guitars, and the tactile sensation of flicking your fingers across a racket's strings is more enjoyable than plain old mid-air strumming. As a kid, before I owned a tennis racket my pretend guitar-du-jour was a baseball bat. I played the pretend electric bat for a few months before finally acquiring a tennis racket at a garage sale (for the sole purpose of using it as a pretend guitar -- I had zero interest in tennis). By third grade I had graduated to a real (cheap) acoustic guitar, and before long my worthless uncle gifted me an old broke electric guitar. It didn't work (it didn't even have any strings), but was a hell of a lot more fun to play "rock star" with than any goofy acoustic guitar, tennis racket, or baseball bat (especially after a few coats of black spray paint.)
E chords are one of the easiest guitar chords to learn. You can master it in 30 seconds; learning it is just a matter of pressing a couple of fingers in the right frets. There's nothing particularly difficult or sexy about the technical execution of it, but when played on an electric guitar with proper amounts of of distortion and volume it's like having sex, winning the Super Bowl, and punching everyone who has ever been mean to you in the face all at once.
So do Guitar Hero and Rock Band give you that same feeling? In a way, I suppose, in the same way karaoke gives people their three minutes of cheers (or jeers). I mean, you're performing in front of other people, and that's kind of a rush, even if "other people" simply equates to all your other nerdy friends who also grew up playing the electric tennis racket.
There were several rhythm-based games around before the dawn of Guitar Hero. Most people instantly think of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), but you also had Konami's Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania, which were definitely Rock Band predecessors. Because they were arcade games you got the thrill of performing in front of other people, but that also meant learning how to play those games in front of other people, and that can be intimidating. A few of those games made it to the home market, but none of them were terribly successful there. There were multiple DDR games (both licensed and knock-offs) with plastic dance pads that were greatly inferior to their arcade counterparts. Konami's Guitar Freaks actually made it to the home market, but in Japan. US gamers who went through the trouble of importing the game (and modifying their PlayStations in order to play it) found it full of Japanese pop music (makes sense).
But Guitar Hero got it right. Standing on the shoulders of Guitar Freaks, Harmonix and Activision took the thrill of being an American rock star and somehow bottled it into a video game. And people love it, or at least loved it. Put it this way; the first Guitar Hero game was released in November of 2005. That means Guitar Hero and Rock Band are both less than five years old, and yet if you know somebody who is into modern gaming of any kind, they probably have at least one plastic guitar stored away in their hall closet. We have several.
The first thing Guitar Hero did right was included a cool guitar. The original was a scaled down Gibson SC, but later you could get Gibson X-Plorers, Les Pauls, and Fender Telecaster clones as well. We've officially graduated from tennis rackets, my friends.
The second thing Guitar Hero did right was include some classic guitar tracks. The first game alone contains track s from Audioslave, Bad Religion, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Cream, Deep Purple, Helmet, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Jett, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Motorhead, Ozzy, Pantera, Queen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Donnas, The Ramones, White Zombie, and ZZ Top. Sure they were cover versions, but they sounded pretty darn close to the originals. Later games licensed official tracks.
Rock Star raised by the bar by adding drums and vocals to the mix; Guitar Hero countered with Guitar World Hero. At this point, both series essentially interchangeable (in fact, most of the instruments on the market at this point work with both games). There are tons of spin off games as well, especially in the vocal/karaoke category. If you're a singer, you're in luck -- no longer are you limited to bellowing out tunes in the shower. Now you can bellow them into a plastic microphone.
Both programmers and bands saw the importance of getting real studio recordings into these games, a move that culminated in entire releases dedicated to single bands: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, and Guitar Hero: Metallica gave players the ability to virtually jam along with their favorite bands. Rock Band countered with Rock Band: The Beatles and Rock Band: Green Day. The Who and Queen are rumored to be working on Rock Band releases as well.
But back to my original question. Does standing in your living room and prancing around with a guitar-shaped piece of plastic really make you feel like a rock star? And surprisingly the answer is yeah, it kinda does. When your hand starts cramping while you're mashing your way through those rapid fire machine gun triplets in Slayer'S Raining Blood, despite the fact that you're doing it in your living room on toy guitar, yeah, there's a small part of you that kind of feels like a bad ass.
In five years, Guitar Hero went from being a single game to not only a multi-million (probably billion) dollar franchise, but a genre as well. I mentioned Rock Band and SingStar, but there are dozens of others (I've got DJ Hero sitting on top of my entertainment center) and new contenders coming out all the time. Will there be an end? Probably. But for the thrill it gives you, even if it doesn't last forever, Guitar Hero and Rock Band make the honorable mention list.