Leveling Down

Band Hero still has the elements that made Guitar Hero 5 enjoyable, but with a more female friendly soundtrack.

I think I’m pretty much done with Band Hero on the 360, so I’m ready to share my review. For those that don’t know, Band Hero was released by Activision last November and is basically Guitar Hero but with a more family friendly and female friendly tracklist. The game is headlined by Taylor Swift as a playable character, and is pretty much a carbon copy of Guitar Hero 5′s engine and features except for its Achievement design and tracklist. I never got around to reviewing Guitar Hero 5, so please consider this review as one that is most likely applicable to both games – they really just come down to whether you like the tracklist of either game.
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One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.

I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!

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Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.

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With Band Hero and LEGO Rock Band recently released, I picked up Band Hero to play with my family this holiday season and am even looking at LEGO Rock Band since both have several “family friendly” recognizable songs. But then I was trying to understand how the importing works for all these music games and it was somewhat of a headache since there’s over a dozen of them out now. Well, as I went through figuring them out, I decided to write up a guide at the same time, so those of you that are curious about how exporting works for all the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games can now learn from what I just learned. However, please keep in mind that I’m talking about these games specifically from a 360/PS3 perspective – Wii owners may find even more limitations in place since I don’t know much about the Wii versions. I believe the Wii Rock Band universe does not support any sort of exporting but the Wii Guitar Hero universe follows the same limitations as the 360 & PS3 versions.

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For Guitar Hero fans, it seems like practically everyone agrees that Guitar Hero 5 has saved the series from its downward course. Reviewers and gamers seem to love how accessible it is - making it the best music game to play at parties since it allows anyone to join or drop out at any time, all songs are unlocked from the start, very little hurdles to actually starting a game (you can join in and play the random song playing right from the title screen), and no more fighting over instruments since all four players can play the same instrument if they want.

Unfortunately, I don’t exactly have guests over as frequently as I once did so Guitar Hero 5 is basically a solo affair for me. Thus, many of these new features that have been touted for why the game is so good just don’t apply in my case so what I have to look forward to most is a new setlist and Avatar support. I like the Avatar support, as it’s amusing to see my Avatar playing, but it makes me wish I could dress him up differently based on clothing I can acquire in-game. And that brings me to a minor negative I have with the game: no more in-game currency – a staple that has been in the Guitar Hero games for as long as I can remember. (Actually, another negative is that I don’t like that Kurt Cobain is an unlockable character, but people will feel differently about that so I’ll just leave it.)

I’m honestly more of a regular Guitar Hero player – not casual where I only play it at parties, but not a hardcore player where I’m full comboing or even playing on Expert. I buy these music games because I’m interested in hearing songs I would have never been exposed to otherwise, and merely content playing through them on Hard difficulty. In a way, these games for me are more about the music than the actual gameplay, which is no longer doing it for me as it used to. I’m a little tired of the plastic guitar now, but my hope is that I come upon some new awesome song like DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and Flames” in Guitar Hero 3.

I guess at the end of the day, Guitar Hero 5 is really more of the same, and I’m no longer enthusiastically playing the games as I was maybe the first or second one. But at this point in the franchise’s history, you’re either burnt out on music games or not. If you’re still going strong, Guitar Hero 5 delivers. It’s hard to really fault it with anything serious except for the fact that the genre is definitely getting old and the limitations on the game’s song importing. When the inevitable Guitar Hero 6 comes out next year, will I buy it? I say no now, but who knows what kind of incentive Activision will throw out to get me to buy it? Music is so ingrained in our world, and maybe Guitar Hero really does have staying power.

I’ll leave it to cmfl3x to weigh in with his hardcore analysis on music games, as he’s a lot more musically talented and can appreciate these types of games more. I’m sure he’ll share with us his thoughts on The Beatles Rock Band game in the near future. Me, I’m just content playing music games with more pop bands that I can recognize (maybe I should pre-order Band Hero since it has Taylor Swift haha).

Being recently married and a person who is obsessed with music games, I made a conscious decision this year to only buy one of the two major music games (Guitar Hero 5 and Beatles: Rock Band) at full retail price. I even backed off on that when Best Buy announced their BOGO half off promotion last week. I decided to preorder Beatles: Rock Band since I love the Beatles and trust Harmonix over Neversoft, but now that reviews are coming out for GH5 I’m beginning to regret my choice.

All the reviews that are coming out for Guitar Hero 5 make me wish I had the game RIGHT NOW. It seems like the game is now much more user friendly, you can start playing songs from the main menu, drop in/drop out, change difficulty on the fly, and play with any combination of instruments that you want. Anyway, it sounds like a lot of innovation, and I’m a bit sad to be missing out on it. What’s really great is all the songs are unlocked out of the box: no codes or anything.

I guess I’ll have to wait another week for Beatles and hope it is just as good. What I prefer about Guitar Hero is the level of difficulty, which I doubt will be present in the Beatles, so I’ll just have to hope the song list and quality makes up for the difference. I guess this only a temporary lament, since I’ll probably pick up GH5 when there’s a price drop, but I’m big on instant gratification so I’ll have to learn to wait. BAH!

Just when I thought I was done buying music games altogether (especially anything in the Guitar Hero franchise), Amazon and Activision have to both offer concurrent deals that are making me reconsider my stance.

Guitar Hero 5 for $60 is far too expensive considering how many music games I already own. But now Amazon is giving away a $10 gift card with pre-orders of the game, and ECA membership (10% off on all video game purchases at Amazon) make this net out to $44. This is also not to mention Amazon giving a free $5 credit for MP3 downloads off their site as well with this pre-order.

In addition to the Amazon deals, Activision is giving away Guitar Hero Van Halen free with the purchase of Guitar Hero 5. While I don’t really care much for Van Halen, the soundtrack has plenty of contemporary guest bands that I’m digging such as Foo Fighters, Weezer, Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World, The Offspring, Third Eye Blind, and Fountains of Wayne.

So in the end, if you buy this Guitar Hero 5 off Amazon, you’re basically paying under $50 (or $40, in some cases) for Guitar Hero 5 and Guitar Hero Van Halen. Part of me suspects that Activision is running this promotion because they suspect Guitar Hero Van Halen won’t sell well, and I guess that makes sense considering the music game genre is oversaturated by this point. Ugh maybe I have to pre-order this after all. With all these $10 gift cards, Amazon is quickly becoming the main vendor that I’m pre-ordering all my games from this Fall season!

The other day my wife and I had about 20 minutes to kill before we had to go out and she asked if I wanted to play a few songs in Rock Band to kill the time. For some reason, I hesitated to take her up on her offer, which is crazy because a) how often is she going to SUGGEST we play video games together, and b) I’m supposed to be a huge music game fan. That got me thinking, have music games possibly reached their saturation point?

Adding fuel to my speculative fire is the news that came out while I was away, namely, that Guitar Hero and Rock Band sales are both down (34 and 67 percent, respectively). Even though Rock Band didn’t have a new game this year, perhaps in this down economy people aren’t as willing to shell out the money for all these plastic instruments.

Personally, I’m not as excited anymore about Rock Band Beatles and Guitar Hero 5, which seems strange to me considering the amount of time I’ve put into Guitar Hero 2, World Tour, and Rock Band 1 & 2. I wonder if I’m going to put as much time into those games as I have in previous iterations. Or maybe DJ Hero is going to be the next big thing, it certainly looks interesting. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to music games in the next year or so.

Am I alone in this, or do others feel the same way?