Music Game Competition Heats Up 82
With Guitar Hero: World Tour set to launch on October 26th, Activision has released a list of downloadable content that will be immediately available. Activision has also apparently included a trailer for Guitar Hero: Metallica (which will arrive sometime next year), and they recently trademarked the name 'Guitar Hero Modern Hits,' which may be part of their plan to increase the amount of Guitar Hero content they produce. Meanwhile, new Rock Band 2 DLC tracks are coming as well, and the release dates for the PS2, PS3, and Wii versions have been set. Early reports say the Wii version made the platform jump better than the original Rock Band, and that all currently existing DLC will be available for Rock Band 2. MTV's Multiplayer blog took a look at Wii Music, which creator Shigeru Miyamoto calls, "Not quite a game and not quite an instrument."
Re:Music authoring (Score:4, Informative)
Plenty of people will be putting in covers of copyrighted music, but I'm think small local bands will use Guitar Hero to promote their music in grassroots type of way.
The director of Guitar Hero World Tour said they will remove songs that have a copyright. Here is the link quoting the guy. http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/29/guitar-hero-world-tour-wont-condone-your-awful-cover-songs/ [joystiq.com]
Guitar Praise (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget about Guitar Praise, the Christian Guitar Hero clone available for the PC and OSX!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Praise [wikipedia.org]
Guitar Hero vs Rock Band (Score:3, Informative)
I've never seen Neversoft claim they were the first full band game. If they made the statement, then it was inane because everyone knows it isn't remotely true. They were however the first to do guitars and start the genre to begin with.
I will say having played Rock Band and Guitar Hero, I prefer Guitar Hero for a couple reasons. The guitar portion of Rock Band is far too easy. I sit there all day waiting for notes to play, where as drums provides a reasonable challenge. There is a great disparity there. Next, Rock Band added drums, but it didn't do much in creating gameplay around the instruments.
Guitar Hero: World Tour has developed a better guitar, better drums, and has better gameplay to boot.
Not to mention everyone I know with Rock Band has complained about cheap instruments breaking, especially the drums.
The one advantage Rock Band had (and might have with the next generation) was more DLC. Guitar Hero says they are going to step up here and offer more DLC. We'll see.
Re:Guitar Hero is a racket (Score:3, Informative)
Now I know the games come with a bunch of songs, but only a handful are actual versions; the majority are covers.
Not anymore. All 86 tracks in Guitar Hero: World Tour are master recordings. All 84 tracks in Rock Band 2 are master recordings as well.
In the age of consoles w/ harddrives and the existence of myriad music downloading services it seems odd to buy an entire game just to get some new songs.
Two things wrong with that. Firstly the PS2, which is still largely popular, doesn't have a hard drive, and the other popular inexpensive console, the Wii, is a joke in terms of storage size. Secondly, with a new game coming out with a consistent set list (of varied tunes), that means that every player of the game who has played it enough will be on the same playing level in terms of experience with songs as any other player. If everyone just downloaded what they wanted, almost no-one would ever be on the same footing in a competition (friendly or otherwise), because they likely wouldn't have downloaded the song.
I realize newer versions allow songs to be downloaded, but I don't believe this is very prevalent.
Baldfaced lies. Every PS3/360 owner I know that has this game for that console also downloads tracks, and I'm a Wii owner who's waiting for this game, and I can't wait to download some new tracks as they arrive. Obviously I won't be able to store much, and it'll take over a third of my Wii's memory to actually be able to play the songs, but I can handle that for a few dozen songs.
If I were Activision I would make a free downloadable version of the game built around downloadable content. An iTunesesque version, if you will. They could also release a SDK* (Song Dev Kit) so artists could sell their tracks via the service (or give them away if the artist is NiN-like). I believe this scheme would create a large song library, making users happy, whilst enable Activision to sit on their asses and light their stogies with $100 dollar bills.
In addition to the player experience issue I stated above, there are still a lot of people in the West who are resistant to "being nickel and dimed" for their entire gaming experience. Also, when the player decides all of the tracks he's going to have, you're a lot less likely to choose songs you don't already like or have heard a lot of good about. This is bad, because it reduces exposure of the player to new songs. One of the greatest things about Guitar Hero (and Rock Band) is that you get exposed to new artists, giving the player a richer experience and the opportunity to discover new favourites.
Re:Music authoring (Score:3, Informative)
Custom songs will have a limit of 1,200 notes or 3 minutes, whichever comes first.
That's the most important limiting factor for creating songs in World Tour; your time length is less than the track length for the majority of songs in the game, and the note limit can make the song even shorter for more complex arrangements (especially since that note count is likely eaten up by background instruments as well).
At the end of the day, if you thought you were getting a robust music making tool in this game, you're were going to be disappointed anyways. Activision likes money, and as such they won't release something that could effectively be used to circumvent or directly compete with their DLC or releasing of new games.
And all of that dances around the fact that you won't be able to record voice in it, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. The amount of space required to keep the recording from being compressed into shit would probably be too much after a couple recordings.