The Death of Guitar Hero

First let’s get the obvious “our thoughts are with the people who were laid off” out of the way.

Now, how does it effect Rock Banders (and gamers in general)?

Well we could see the signs at least a year ago. Rock Band 3 was announced with the “real guitar” and piano hardware, what was Guitar Hero’s response? Warriors of Rock? Although the game has a bunch of good songs (most notably Rush 2112), it seemed like a desperate last gasp in comparison to RB3.

It’s only a wonder this didn’t happen sooner. Think about it, how did Rock Band advertise? It didn’t. Game sites and word of mouth made Rock Band popular. Now look at Guitar Hero and all those Bob Seger commercials. How much did those cost?

And then of course there’s the market over saturation. Seriously: Warriors of Rock, Guitar Hero Smash Hits, Guitar Hero 4, Band Hero, DJ Hero, Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero Van Halen, DJ Hero 2, Guitar Hero Metallica. And those are just off the top of my head! What was the logic in this? I could go on for hours, so let’s get to the benefits.

The immediate benefit is that Rock Band is suddenly a monopoly over the genre. And since Harmonix is a pretty well liked by everyone, this is sort of like having Santa as president or something. If a band wants to be in a music game they pretty much have to go to Rock Band.

The next big thing is that it forces anyone who is a new entrant to the music genre or a Guitar Hero fan to go to Rock Band. This will greatly help the franchise which is frankly no prize right now either.

What are the problems? First is the people who are saying this is the death knell of music games. It’s not. It’s sort of like saying HD-DVD dropping out of the HD wars was signifying the end of HD movie discs. Yet Blu-Ray is still around.

Even then, it’s not some sort of revelation that music games are in a slump. The problem is the image this presents might turn off artists from using Rock Band.

Finally the worst part is how shaky it makes Rock Band look. If a well established game like Guitar Hero can just collapse, can the same happen to Rock Band? A couple of songs and I could have been a Guitar Hero player. That’s a lost investment in hardware, software and downloadable content. They can at least use the hardware for RB3 but even then, what happens if Harmonix closes? Then where would we turn?

Game Review: The Beatles: Rock Band

What I liked about Beatles: Rock Band is that it gets us to the core of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero game which is simple: Playing kick ass music. It's not about who gets the best score, it's about enjoying the music.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

First off lets get this out of the way: not being able to export Beatles songs does suck. BUT it needed to establish itself as it's own game, and it does that perfectly. We never really wanted to pop in Rock Band 2 and play that instead, we just kept going from song to song and having fun.

The inclusion of having three microphones was just a brilliant move, and I hope it's applied to other Rock Band games. The game is being well supported with DLC and I hope that continues to happen.

One of my favourite parts is the bonus material, such as pictures, factoids and videos. If anything I want more! The game plays well and is a little more picky with notes than Rock Band, in my opinion anyway. The story is loyal to the different periods of the Beatles music and was a blast to play.

Programming: 10/10 : 0 bugs, game loads quite fast
Graphics: 9.5/10 : The gang is captured perfectly and everything else is standard for Rock Band
Story: 9/10 : Could have been a little more, but addresses the history of the Beatles well.
Atmosphere: 10/10 : Captures the essence of Beatlemania perfectly
Multiplayer: 10/10 : The more the merrier, adding three microphones is something I hope to see in Rock Band 3
Overall: 9.5/10 : I don't think I could ask for a better Beatles game. Highly recommended.

P.S. When is Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da coming?