Activision Drives the Guitar Hero Franchise Even Further Into the Ground

Although I was never a huge fan of the series, I once thought that the Guitar Hero games were decent rhythm titles that provided a good amount of fun. However, with Activision releasing countless spin-offs with negligible improvements and song lists that decline in quality with each new edition I quickly lost interest in the Guitar Hero games.

It looks like Activision is going to milk the series even further in 2009. Although we're all aware that they're going to be releasing Guitar Hero Metallica for consoles this upcoming spring, it looks as if they have their third DS title already planned for release next year as well. The ESRB has confirmed the existence of Guitar Hero: Modern Hits for the Nintendo DS for a 2009 release. This will mark the third time Nintendo's ultra popular portable has seen a Guitar Hero title in less than a year.

After playing the mediocre Guitar Hero: World Tour on the 360 and deciding that the series has lost its appeal I can't say that I'm excited for another title in this series, especially a dumbed-down portable off-shoot. In the end, though, I really can't blame Activision for rehashing the same one-trick pony ad naseum. The sales are certainly there, and the public seems to be eating these sequels up. However, this is a series I see heading down the same route as Tony Hawk (another Activision property that was milked beyond belief) where the franchise is eventually run so far into the ground that the public will eventually lose interest.

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Rock Revolution: Konami's Big Holiday Bust

Prior to Guitar Hero even being a concept, Konami’s Guitar Freaks was a major hit in Japanese arcades. Highly innovative for it’s time period, it influenced the popular rock music games we enjoy in the West today.


Konami will finally be infiltrating the Western music world with a new effort titled Rock Revolution. Alright, so the preceding is not news to anyone who’s been following the game market for the past year – it’s been announced months ago. However, it’s only been recently that Konami has actually unveiled new footage of what is supposed to be their huge hit this year and… well… it looks pathetic, to be blunt.


Not only does Rock Revolution fail to offer anything new in a crowded genre (Guitar Hero and Rock Band do the job well enough, thank you), it looks far worse than those two established titles. The soundtrack will be strictly covers (no master tracks – for shame!), the visuals look hardly next-gen, and there’s absolutely nothing intriguing about the peripheral included. Instead of trying to appeal to a niche, hardcore market and releasing a rock title with Japanese flair, they’ve decided to go down the generic route and create a game that will appeal to… well, absolutely no one, considering the fact that the bigger and badder competetion has either already arrived (in the form of Rock Band 2) or will be here soon (Guitar Hero: World Tour, anyone?).


If you want to pity Konami even more for making such a shameful move in the musical game market, try watching this video. It’s absolutely embarrassing; one of the PR reps for Konami fails a song during the showcase of the game for crying out loud! Oh, Konami: your third-rate Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater clone didn’t sell (Evolution Skateboarding, a forgotten release from 2002), and your third-rate Guitar Hero rip-off won’t, either.