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.

Be Prepared to Pre-Order Your Metal Gear Solid 4 Bundle!

...that is, if you've got a disposable income.

Tomorrow you'll be able to pre-order the Gun Metal-colored Metal Gear Solid 4 Playstation 3 bundle. It is going to be sold exclusively through Konami's online store. Not only does it feature a special paint job, but it will contain a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 (which is, hands down, the most eagerly anticipated game coming to the Playstation 3), the game's soundtrack and a non-interactive Blu-Ray disc jam-packed with extras.

Although Konami has not revealed how many of these will be produced, early reports from Japan (where they received a Metal Gear bundle of their own and it sold out almost immediately) indicate that these will be very severely limited.

The bad part, now, comes from the actual price of these units: $600. Yup, 600 big ones for a Playstation 3 that contains a mere 40 GB hard drive. Now, I'm no mathematician, but this bundle is more than wee-bit overpriced for what you're getting. Still, fans and collectors are undoubtedly going to eat this pack up when pre-orders start on Konami.com tomorrow. The actual unit will ship out on June 12th.

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