It’s a really smart evolution of the music game genre, and a great way to discover new artists. Your score is ranked against other online players in real time as you shred along. These MTV-like channels have seemingly hundreds of songs to play at no extra cost. There’s also GHTV, an online streaming mode in which you can access two always-on channels filled with music videos to play along to. Guitar Hero TV allows you to play along to songs presented in TV-like format.Īnd that’s only half of the experience-or less, really. Activision shot footage of bandmates and fans alike for each song on the disc, making you the lead guitarist of several fictional bands as you play multi-song sets at large festivals. That’s clear once you start up the tutorial and find yourself onstage and surrounded by video of real people playing instruments, not to mention a vast crowd of admirers. Much more has changed besides the guitar interactions. Additionally, a USB microphone can be plugged in to add vocal accompaniment to the guitar action. Drums and bass guitar are out, although you can use a second guitar for one-on-one battles. Luckily the game starts things off easily with a tutorial, and multiple difficulty levels are available.Īlso, Guitar Hero isn’t a full-band experience anymore. It can be challenging to adapt to the new approach. But ultimately, the goal of playing the scrolling notes remains the same. The notes you’ll strum-by holding a fret button and flicking the bar-are shown with black and white guitar picks pointed up or down. The change is reflected in the gameplay too. It’s the kind of thing that’s very quickly coming to define alternative music on the radio - foot-stomping choruses, pitch-perfect harmonies, and no scorching guitar solos to be found.Instead of the colored buttons, the new Guitar Hero controller has six buttons lined up in two rows of three. Grizfolk followed with a set of anthemic indie rock that shows how wide Guitar Hero’s appeal can be. Each band played an abbreviated set that will soon be featured as a playable option on Guitar Hero TV, and the crowd of developers, journalists, and celebrities responded with full-bodied cheers.īased out of LA, the bluesy Rival Sons seem a perfect match for the Guitar Hero video game they’re all about the riffs, first of all, and they carry themselves like the glam gods that ruled much of the ‘80s. For the big kickoff, Activision converted a section of the massive warehouse into an intimate concert hall and invited Rival Sons, Grizfolk, and the almighty Weezer to headline the festivities. Time will tell if this idea will work, but it had plenty of supporters on hand at the YouTube Space on Monday night. Guitar Hero TV seeks to be this platform, and it wants to make music discovery more palatable by turning it into an actual game. The analogy makes sense in a roundabout way now that we watch most of our music videos on YouTube, there’s no platform that essentially forces us to discover new artists by playing what it wants. The idea of a video game that can introduce you to a new favorite band is a strange one, but Activision’s Eric Hirschberg likened it to an MTV for the modern era. Potentially very exciting, if it manages to live up to the lofty expectations of the developers at Activision and FreeStyleGames. An even more exciting development is the Guitar Hero TV feature, which adds new songs to the game every week and curates playlists to help gamers constantly discover new music.Ĭonsequence of Sound was in attendance Sunday night at the Guitar Hero Live release party at YouTube Space LA, and what we saw was exciting. The innovation of including an actual live audience may seem like window dressing on the same old gameplay experience, but it really does heighten the stakes of a game that seemed to have run its course five years ago. Flub a couple of notes on the revamped six-button guitar controller, and you’re liable to catch more than a few boos raining down from the cheap seats. That’s because, unlike previous iterations in the series, the game utilizes full motion video to simulate a real-world concert experience - complete with cheering fans, yes, but also with hecklers ready to turn on you at a moment’s notice. An immersive concert experience? A first-person music video? Boot camp for aspiring rock stars? Whatever you want to label it, one thing’s for sure: Guitar Hero Live is not recommended for people who suffer from stage fright. In fact, the reboot of Activision’s popular music rhythm franchise is so thoroughly different from its predecessors that it’s hard to say what to call it. Guitar Hero Live is not a traditional video game. Traditionally, video games have served as a kind of escape from reality - an electronic valve that shuts off all the pressures and anxieties of life in the actual world.
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