As a barely 23-year-old, my deepest connection to most classic Rock songs is through a PlayStation game. My favorite PlayStation game. You may have heard of it — it’s called Guitar Hero. So when Activision said that it was calling it quits on Guitar Hero, I found myself humming: “lay your weary head to rest, don’t you cry no more.” Ok, maybe I exaggerate. But it was a sad, sad day — not just for me but for fake guitar players everywhere. Since then I can’t bring myself to play, a little tinge of sadness poking at me every time I pass the now-dusty collection.
But it’s been a little less than a year, and Activision has told Forbes that the whole “Guitar Hero is over” thing was a bit of a fib. → Read More
Activision now says that Guitar Hero hasn’t been outright cancelled, but merely placed on hiatus. The publisher had said in February that it was going to disband the Guitar Hero business unit, and that the 2011 edition of the game had been cancelled. What gives? → Read More
Kudos to Activision for doing exactly what so many people had been predicting for years now. The world’s biggest video game publisher said yesterday that it was going to “disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit,” citing a decline in interest in the music game genre. And what could possibly be the reason for that, hmm? Maybe releasing sequel after sequels after sequel in such a quick succession that you don’t give gamers any room to breathe? Gotta maximize short-term profits! The future? That’s someone else’s problem. → Read More
Sad news today. Looks like the music genre doesn’t have room for two (or is it three? four?) overpriced DLC machines. To be sure, Guitar Hero has sold a lot of copies, but you’re not going to get a lot of return business when people have already spent three times the normal amount on your game. Plus, it’s a copyright nightmare, and probably very expensive to produce. → Read More
Rock Band 3 is going to teach you something actually useful: playing-for-real.
Clicky Read More to learn how. → Read More
With sales of music games dropping at alarming rates, the savvy game designers at Harmonix (or more likely, the desperate marketers) have decided that in order to revive their flagging franchise, they needed something truly mind-blowing. “I know! How about a keytar?!” → Read More
Here’s an interesting modification for a Guitar Hero controller. An anonymous modder posted a project to Instructables showing how to convert a full size controller to a small size. The modder converted his to a smaller size for his two year old daughter, but whatever your reason is, it looks like a fairly easy thing to do. → Read More
The original complaint about music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that they convinced kids that playing the guitar was actually easy. A few taps, a few strums and you sounded like Jack White or Ozzy, right? Well Powergig wants to change that perception by offering a real six-string guitar that you can really play and, with the flip of a switch, you can dampen the strings and strum along to your favorite tunes on the XBox 360 or PS3.
The company, Seven45, is also making a guitar game with its own downloadable content that will be something like Brutal Legend, and the guitars are made by their parent company, First Act makers of “entry level” AKA toy guitars and instruments. Nice synergy, eh? → Read More
The NPD Group is reporting that the sale of music games like DJ Hero, Band Hero, Oboe Hero, and Violin Concerto Band are falling with a bullet, leading analysts to expect the category to crash this year.
The report finds that the Rock Band: The Beatles sold 800,000 units, missing its 1 million forecast and that Guitar Hero 5 sold 500,000 units in its first month of sales, down from 1.4 million for GH3. → Read More
Famous rock band No Doubt has sued Activision over the use of its avatars in the game Guitar Hero 5. No Doubt says that the deal it signed with Activision only permitted the avatars to be used when playing No Doubt songs. The problem is that Activision has it set up that you can play any song in the game with the No Doubt avatars. That I’m even writing about this is rather depressing. → Read More
In the interest of bringing Ron and Fez‘s fantastic radio show topics to a more tech-minded audience, I propose the following: games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, while fun and, generally speaking, “good,” will not save rock music. Rock and roll, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Bear with me for a minute, I’ll make this relevant to CrunchGear. → Read More
After finally adding some drummy goodness with Guitar Hero World Tour and then issuing the video game equivalent of a greatest hits album, the newest installment of Activision’s wildly popular Guitar Hero series has hit the market.
Many may look at Guitar Hero 5 the same way people look at popular sports games like EA’s Madden series: the core game hasn’t changed that much at all but there are some new features here and there, plus 85 new songs to play and a slightly redesigned guitar controller.
Diehard fans of the series will likely go out and buy Guitar Hero 5 without much convincing, while people who are slowly (or quickly) growing weary of the near-endless crop of music games aren’t likely to find much here to change their minds. So let’s focus on those of us (myself included) in the middle – people who like music games enough to keep playing them but need some good reasons to keep shelling out $60 to $100 every other month (or so it seems). → Read More
If you really think about it, it makes sense that future installments of Guitar Hero and other games like that could basically come packaged like those Jakks Pacific plug-and-play TV games. It’d eliminate the need for a console altogether. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick realizes this, and says that his company is considering the possibilities. → Read More
Ahhh, just what the doctor ordered: Logitech just released a wireless guitar controller that looks like a kinda-sorta Superstrat played by Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden along with a collapsable drum kit for the Wii and the XBox360. → Read More
Well, they don’t have their own game, but at least the Rolling Stones have their own download pack. Guitar Hero just announced that the Stones have their own DLC pack, available starting today for 720 Microsoft Points (or $9). → Read More
We don’t usually announce blog launches but this one is pretty much beauty: it’s PlasticAxe, a blog about music gaming. Granted he’ll probably run out of stuff to write about on day 10, but Joe Rybicki, formerly of 1UP and a bunch of other gaming sites and magazines, has melded his love of music gaming with his love of Wordpress templates and created a niche blog to end all niche blogs. → Read More
Get right the hell outta town with this one. The kid in the above video plays Ozzy Osbourne’s Mr. Crowly on Expert mode in Guitar Hero, using his right elbow to work the strum bar while his right hand solves not one, but two Rubik’s Cubes. And if that wasn’t difficult enough, he plays with his back facing the game, using a mirror for some reason. Chalk this one up to a skill that adds little, if anything, to our society as a whole, yet is one of the more awesome things you’ll ever see (and will never be able to do) yourself. Un… beee… lievable. [via Kotaku] → Read More
This is the OpenChord V1 guitar. It’s a guitar, obviously, but one that works with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. → Read More
No, I’m not posting this for the fun of it, but I can’t tell you why I’m doing it either. Just watch the video and I’m sure you can figure it out. Sound off in comments if you think you know. → Read More
Logitech has announced a premium Guitar Hero drumset for the PS2 and PS3, priced at $229 and available soon. The kit features a stainless steel bass pedal and the drumheads and cymbals can be repositioned “to fit your reach and suit your style, helping you play faster and better.” → Read More
