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Posts tagged MTV
The future of music games
Jan 6th
If you know anything about the gaming industry, you know that music games have been extremely successful lately. Whether Rock Band or Guitar Hero, this new peripheral-based spin on gameplay has garnered a ton of fans over the past year or two. Me personally, I've started to get over the "fad." I don't necessarily think these games are just a fad, but the appeal has worn off on me after playing 3 successive generations of Guitar Hero, and 2 of Rock Band. I'm not sure how many more times I'll be asked to purchase new plastic instruments to keep up with the games as they evolve, but I'm sort of ready to hang up my guitar and retire at this point.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially because a lot of my friends still play Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and I'm wondering what could keep people like myself interested moving forward. First off I think they need to standardize instruments. Perhaps each console maker could cut a deal with the developers to create first party peripherals, and give a cut of whatever money they make back. All I know is that I can't be bothered to buy a new set of instruments every few months...I'm already running out of room to store all of my plastic instruments in. It seems like a bit of a scam, doesn't it? First we had wired guitars, those were fine. Then wireless, that's a desirable upgrade. Then Rock Band came out with the drum kit, microphone and a new guitar with solo buttons. Now Guitar Hero has a full kit as well (thought it should be noted that you can use these cross-platform) including a guitar with a slide on it. It seems like almost every time there's a new game released we get new, slightly improved instruments which have some new janky feature. I'm the kind of person who wants to buy this new revision because I feel like if I don't have solo buttons or a guitar slide I won't be getting the most out of the game. But no more!
The most important part about music games is, of course, the music. The only problem is that the music is getting more and more obscure as the well-known artists become tapped. The first few Guitar Hero games plus the first Rock Band game already have a lot of the songs that I'd want to play in a music game. I was playing Rock Band 2 a while ago and I thought to myself "man, these songs are okay to play but I don't know who half of these artists are." Not only that but there's a lot of overlap between the two franchises - you'll find songs in Guitar Hero that were already in Rock Band, and vice versa. How can Harmonix and Neversoft keep things fresh as more and more games are made, especially with the requirement of downloadable songs not included on the initial disc? One way might be to lock up artist-specific versions of the game. The Guitar Hero franchise is already headed in this direction with Guitar Hero: Metallica slated for early this year.
Rock Band on the other hand has a huge library of songs ready for download. It seems they're more prepared to supplement their current games with downloadable content moving forward. This is more appealing to me. I'd rather buy one disc every 2, 3 or 4 years and then just buy the songs I want as DLC in the time between major releases. I'd also like to see the DLC bundled in with future releases, something they didn't do with Rock Band 2. If, with Rock Band 3, I could pay an addition fee and get all of the DLC released between RB2 and RB3 I'd jump on that in an instant.
Ultimately though I'd just like to be able to choose which songs I want from the get-go. Rather than having Harmonix or Neversoft choose what songs will be included with their game, why not just let me ask for what I want to play? I know, it sounds ridiculous. What, they're going to make a custom version of the game just for me? With all of the legalities involved it's an impossible task. Still, a little personalization wouldn't hurt. That way I wouldn't be stuck playing Mighty Mighty Bosstones tracks (no offense if you're a fan), asking myself all the while why there hasn't been a Deftones song available yet.
What I really want is a version of Rock Band or Guitar Hero with all Irish folk songs though...Folk Hero? Folk Band? Get to work on that. =)
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