With the game industry already saturated with rhythm action titles, how can the genre move forward?
The current rivalry between Guitar Hero and Rock Band is one of the most significant in recent history. Both games are huge $1.6 billion revenue-generating monsters, which is hefty even when stacked against the biggest names in the business. Guitar Hero and Rock Band have made a significant impact on the industry's commercial worth, accounting for 32 per cent of its growth from 2007 to 2008. But what's really astounding is how it all started – with Guitar Hero, a quite little game from a budding music developer called Harmonix.
These groundbreaking video games changed gaming forever and drew in scores of fans in the process.
The Guitar Hero franchise died in the wake of Activision's lust for Call of Duty, but we should be dusting off those plastic guitars for a new Guitar Hero game.
Guitar Hero was good. The problem was Activision started creating many versions. Guitar Hero had the every one year cycle like COD and people felt they were being robbed.
Why in the hell would one want to spend time to learn a button mashing order when you can lean to play a real guitar in the same time frame.
TheGamer Writes "Harmonix has proven plenty of times it can make Rock Band work without instruments."
I mean, yeah, but was anyone saying otherwise? The fact is people liked the plastic instruments rather than pressing buttons on a controller. They enjoyed the simulated experience.
"Work"? No, but to be good? It's absolutely necessary. Not having the accessories is like playing a lightgun shooter with an analog stick sure it works, but one experience is completely unique and fun as hell, and other is torture trying to make do playing in a way it was never meant to be played
I think CHEAP plastic instruments is THE reason why the instrument-genre ‘died’.
People invested in buying the game AND the peripherals, so the guitar, the dj-set, the drum, whatever, and the experience was absolutely fantastic. Great fun, great music, etc.
But then the instruments would break. A button would stop working, or your hits wouldn’t register, and that kind of hardware failure would end in you not being able to play the game as intended, and thus you not getting the scores you deserve.
So, now you had a great game, but a broken instrument, and nobody is gonna buy a new plastic instrument every 3-6 months in order to keep playing the game.
A solution would have been to release better quality instruments (obviously), at a slightly higher price, so you could have kept the new games coming and the genre alive, but sadly, that didn’t happen.
Bust a Groove, Gitaroo Man and Parrapa the Rappa were such good games. Neither needed any extra peripherals
I really don't care about one versus the other when it comes to the consoles, I just play the songs I like and that's it, I use cheats to unlock all songs if I have to.
But I gotta say, I LOVE Rock Band Unplugged. It's the only RB/GH game I've played where I'll actually sit through and enjoy playing songs I don't like to advance the career mode. It may be a repackaged Frequency/Amplitude, but it's fantastic, and there's a lot of good songs on it too.