Remember iamchris4life, who got the perfect score on the hardest Guitar Hero Song? He’s now featured in the New York Times in an article titled Rec-Room Wizard:

Every Guitar Hero needs a nemesis, and Chris found his in a song called “Through the Fire and Flames,” a track that appears in the game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Performed by the British power-metal band Dragonforce, “Through the Fire and Flames” (or simply “TTFaF” to die-hard gamers) is a brutal tour de force of finger-tapping, consisting of 3,722 notes over seven and a half minutes. The song is available only to players who have completed all the other tracks in the game, and they are not expected to master it so much as simply to survive it.

“It’s what we would consider the pinnacle of difficulty,” Mr. Huang said. “The guitar shredding in there is just insane.”

Over a period of weeks and months Chris practiced the song in the family den, surrounded by walls decorated with his mother’s homemade Western shirts, family photographs and a picture of his maternal grandparents with President Bush. He completed the song to 96 percent accuracy, then 98 percent, but kept falling just short of perfection.

Then, late on the night of June 3, with his $80 video camera recording him for posterity, Chris played the song flawlessly. His hands still trembling, he shouted a few expletives and raced to upload his footage on YouTube, where the online world had already been tipped off to his accomplishment when his astonishing score was automatically uploaded to an Xbox Live leader board. Within a few hours, Chris estimates, the video of his perfect “TTFaF” performance had been viewed more than 10,000 times; it has since been watched more than 2.1 million times — a particularly astounding tally for what is essentially a video of someone pressing buttons.

Maybe Chris, who just signed an endorsement deal with The Ant Commandos, is our first fake plastic rock god?

Unfortunately, most TAC fake plastic rock peripherals have gotten really poor reviews to this point, so here’s hoping they step up the quality to match Chris’s playing!

I thought this Basic Instructions strip “How to Get the Most Entertainment for Your Video Gaming Dollar” — which references Guitar Hero — was quite funny.

Warrant’s Cherry Pie, of course, is a song in Guitar Hero II.

For an extra-double-plus dose of absurdity, here’s the actual Cherry Pie video. The symbology and mythology in this video is very difficult to understand, so pay close attention when you watch!

I noticed when the first info on Guitar Hero World Tour was released that the new guitars were larger:

These guitars are significantly larger, perhaps to mirror the the more realistic size of the Rock Band stratocasters.

Thanks to a scan of a UK Stuff Magazine article on Guitar Hero World Tour, this is now confirmed. Here’s a shot of the Les Paul guitar controller, originally introduced in Guitar Hero III, next to the new Guitar Hero World Tour.. er “unbranded” guitar controller

Definitely larger. And check out the size of that whammy bar!

One of the very few things I liked about the Rock Band Stratocaster was its much larger size. Here’s hoping the new improved stratocaster is a better controller.

Of course, we’ve got a long way to go before the fake plastic guitars are anywhere near as large — or as heavy — as real guitars.

There’s great new interview at the Onion AV club which covers Harmonix’ design philosophy in rhythm games. A few highlights:

On teaching people to hear music differently:

You can go to a really great sandwich shop and you can order an amazing sandwich and it just has one big name, and you eat it, and it’s great. But maybe you didn’t taste that they’d layered the prosciutto on top of the mozzarella with this special mayonnaise or whatever. You aren’t tasting every individual element of the sandwich. You’re eating the sandwich and it’s a great sandwich. There are a lot of people who turn on a song, and it’s a song. And they couldn’t tell you what the bass player’s playing, versus what the guitar player’s playing, versus the synthesizer in the background, or any of those elements. They just hear a song, in the way that you might eat a sandwich. And playing this game does a really easy trick, which is deciding that the success of one event determines the muting of one track. It equates two things which are actually not equal, and does this great trick to your brain which is hugely pleasurable, and educates you in a way by pulling [the track] away. It’s this simple, “One of these things is not like the other.” And then you all of a sudden have this knowledge that with a lot of other people would take them two or three years playing in a band to figure out. And bang, it’s there right in front of you.

How rhythm games are becoming a way for new bands to get heard:

We’ve always been thinking about [giving indie bands exposure]. And that is something that we really want to do, and [we've] started actually a few things that we can’t talk about, to make an avenue for indie bands to get their music heard through Rock Band. Because it’s so tough for them to get heard through the major record labels. So we’re thinking about that and seriously pursuing that.

This is particularly true with DLC, and I wish there was more of it. Although they really should release more at the 99 cent price range for new bands; pricing tracks from new bands at the same $1.99 as established classic acts is not helping anyone.

On adding new instruments, in particular keyboards:

We talked about keyboards a lot. I don’t think it’s actually what we need to add right now. I don’t think there are that many songs that are going to have interesting keyboards all the way through, that are going to warrant a new piece of hardware, or learning a new thing. That would be kind of tricky, teaching people to play with two hands. So I don’t know, that’s not something I would actually push for. Every year we talk about it, and one of these years it could pop up.

I think keyboards would be really tough to integrate; not only is it fairly limiting in terms of song choice, imagine how complex the controller would have to be. Certainly 5 or 6 inputs wouldn’t even begin to cover it!

Many other great insights in the interview; I highly recommend reading it.

There’s been a lot of Rock Band 2 news, probably because the game is a bit closer to launch. A quick check of current release dates shows the following on Amazon:

The game alone is $60 whereas the “special edition” includes drums, guitar, microphone, and the game for $190. Ten bucks less if you buy the Wii or PS2 versions. Although the “special edition” will not be available on September 14th, oddly enough, the Standalone Rock Band 2 Drums and Standalone Rock Band 2 Guitar will.

The Guitar Hero World Tour release schedule is considerably simpler:

I checked on EBGames / GameStop website and it confirms these dates to the exact day.

So if you have an Xbox 360 (and platform allegiances aside, for rhythm games there is no contest — the Xbox is the best choice due to controller compatibility and DLC experience), you’ll be playing Rock Band 2 before anyone else, and over a month before you can play Guitar Hero World Tour regardless of platform.

To me, Rock Band 2 is by far the superior overall game — so I’m anxious to get it as soon as possible. One caveat: it is unknown (and currently unlikely) that the Wii version of Rock Band 2 will support DLC, whereas GHWT has confirmed DLC support for the Wii. So if your only console is a Wii, you should prefer GHWT at this point.

That’s not to say that GHWT doesn’t have charms of its own. Check out this video Joystiq captured of the development team kicking out Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher at E3.

As a genre addict, I’ll definitely be buying both games.