But what about Guitar Hero II? This was a huge sequel, with so many improvements over the legendary original:

• Far better competitive two player modes. It’s easy to forget, but multiplayer in Guitar Hero was a tacked-on affair, offering only the oddball “you play a section, then I play a section” tug-of-war multiplayer mode.
• Cooperative two player mode with bass/guitar and lead/rhythm tracks depending on the song.
• A significantly larger on-disc tracklist, going from 30 core songs to 40 (48 on Xbox).
• A few of the songs were original masters, predicting the wholesale switch to all masters later.
• After a few months, finally available for the first time on a next-gen console as well as the original Playstation 2.

As far as I’m concerned, the “II” in the title stood for the best two player guitar game ever!

The Guitar Hero II soundtrack was killer, too. But it also predates reusable DLC song libraries by two years. So short of booting up the original game on a Playstation 2 or Xbox 360 — how can we experience these 48 classic tracks in a modern rhythm game? Let’s see:

(* indicates the song is exportable to be used as DLC in current Guitar Hero games. All Rock Band songs are exportable with very rare exceptions.)

By my count, out of the original 48 songs in Guitar Hero II, that’s …

For reference, the complete library of songs are officially listed for each game here:

• Guitar Hero music catalog
• Rock Band song finder

Unfortunately, the tale of the tape in this case is rather woeful — 43% of the Guitar Hero II tracklist is only playable in the original game. Here’s hoping we get a few more of these classic tracks as DLC in the future!

The original Guitar Hero soundtrack is a true classic. But short of booting up the original 2005 game on a Playstation 2 — can we experience these 30 classic tracks in a modern rhythm game? Let’s see:

(* indicates the song is exportable to be used as DLC in current Guitar Hero games. All Rock Band songs are exportable with very rare exceptions.)

By my count, out of the original 30 songs in Guitar Hero, that’s …

Here’s hoping we eventually get to play all these classic songs in one form or another without being anchored to a PS2!

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2011/06/the-original-guitar-hero-songs-where-are-they-now/feed/ 4 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/the-original-virtual-guitar/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/the-original-virtual-guitar/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:46:52 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1271 The big news from E3 was the prevalance of games that attempt to actually teach guitar, rather than mimicing it in classic five button Guitar Hero style.

My pals at RockBandAide and PlasticAxe had outstanding roundups of their recent hands-on time with a bunch of these new real(ish) guitar controllers at E3:

• The Real (and Real-ish) Guitars of E3
• Hands-On Impressions of New REAL Guitar Peripherals at E3

But before you click through, let’s take a trip back in time … way back, to 1994. When Windows 95 was the latest OS sensation, the Sony Playstation was a hot new console, and the Nintendo 64 was still just a rumor.

The 1994 PC game Quest for Fame was the first (that I know of, anyway) game that attempted to use a full-size guitar peripheral.

The Unsung Story of Quest for Fame documents the game’s brief and somewhat sad history.

Players plug a “virtual guitar” into the computer to make music in the game. Fritz still owns a couple; they’re almost the same size as a real electric guitar and fairly heavy. Unlike the make-believe instrument in Guitar Hero, the Quest For Fame virtual guitar has strings, and there are no colorful push buttons on its neck.

A player watches a window in the computer monitor as a red line scrolls past a series of green blips, like pulses on a heart monitor. When the red line crosses a blip, the player strums the virtual guitar’s strings, and the computer’s speakers respond with Aerosmith hits like “Eat The Rich” or “Walk This Way.” Hit the strings too early or too late, and out come discordant notes and insults from on-screen characters.

Quest For Fame was a hit with critics. “I have seen the future of interactive multimedia, and it rocks,” wrote Stephen Manes in The New York Times. The game acquired a number of avid fans, like Ian Hughes, a virtual worlds evangelist for IBM Corp. in Hursley, a town south of London. “It was wonderful,” said Hughes. “I liked the immersion in the music. You’re in the music and feeling the music.”

If you’re wondering how the game works, I found a video of the game in action via the old British TV show Bad Influence — the Quest for Fame demo starts at 8:20 or so.

Quest for Fame certainly predicted the eventual appearance of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith 10 years later.

Here’s hoping the current crop of virtual guitars …

• Peavey HeroMaker
• Power Gig: Rise of the Six String controller
• Rock Band 3′s Squier Stratocaster and Fender Mustang Pro
• the You Rock Guitar

… fare a bit better than Quest for Fame’s virtual axe did.

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/the-original-virtual-guitar/feed/ 6 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/02/rock-of-the-dead/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/02/rock-of-the-dead/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:18:15 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1201 Sure, you can kill zombies with your keyboard, but did you know you can kill zombies with your Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar, too? Behold Rock of the Dead!!

There are mindless beasts that take basic three- or four-strum combos to take out, but then there are ones that’ll lob projectiles at you – these knives/bombs only take a couple of fret flicks to get rid of, but unless you take down the guy that’s throwing them out at you, you’ll just be endlessly downing those objects. When the screen fills with a half-dozen beasts at once, you have the ability to discriminate and target specific ones by “typing” out the combo of the one you want – the game’s smart enough to know which beast you’re “aiming” at because it locks in on the enemy as you’re pushing out its fret button code.

Periodically you’ll have to take down larger enemies in rhythm fashion: this is basic Guitar Hero/Rock Band gameplay as the notes must be played to the beat of the background music to take down the threat.

The game has extra geek cred because it features voicework by Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day, too. If you don’t know who those people are, I forgive you.

Unfortunately this game is Wii-only, which means I won’t be able to play it — but it sounds awesome, and I totally support destroying zombies with the power of fake plastic rock!

updated: yay! Rock of the Dead will be available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 this October!

Here’s some recent footage of the game in action courtesy of our friends at RockBandAide:

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/02/rock-of-the-dead/feed/ 0 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-knockoffs/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-knockoffs/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:04:28 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1162 Imagine the joy of finding a copy of The Beatles: Rock Band or Guitar Hero 5 under your Christmas tree this year. Now imagine what you’d feel like if, instead, you unwrapped a copy of an ultra-chintzy, bottom dollar Guitar Hero knockoff. Behold.

Guitar Superstar

(picture courtesy of the always-excellent Rock Band Aide)

Featuring, according to the box, 12 “hit” songs:

• Santana – “Stormy”
• Motorhead – “Fight”
• Fall Out Boy – “Dance, Dance”
• Alice Cooper – “Billion Dollar Babies”
• System Of A Down – “Forest”
• The Vines – “Get Free”
• Aerosmith – “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”

There must be multiple versions of this thing, because this one features the song Granite Man. Not Iron Man, mind you, but … Granite Man.

Oh, but wait, there’s more!

Shredmaster Jr.

This one has a similar tracklist, but a totally different gameplay UI.

• Smoke on the Water
• I Love Rock and Roll
• Iron Man
• You Give Love a Bad Name
• Billion Dollar Babies
• Hotel California
• Paradise City
• Smells Like Teen Spirit
• Paranoid
• Master of Puppets

I’m not sure which one is worse. I don’t think there can be a winner when both are so bad. This is gameplay that would have been barely acceptable in the 8-bit NES era, and “songs” that are painful, barely recognizable MIDI deconstructions of the originals.

There’s even a drum superstar, though it’s so profoundly bad I couldn’t find any details on it, or videos of it in action.

Any kids who got these crappy knockoffs for Christmas instead of the real thing, you have my condolences. I’m sorry your parents don’t love you!

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-knockoffs/feed/ 6 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-van-halen-released/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-van-halen-released/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:05:31 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1148 With less of a bang than a whimper, tomorrow is the release date for Guitar Hero: Van Halen.

I’ve had this game since the first days it was available as a Guitar Hero 5 pre-order bonus. Although I am kinda-sorta a Van Halen fan, have to admit that it was a bit of a letdown. In all honesty, I had more fun playing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. There’s something about the Van Halen catalog that just isn’t … deep. It’s just sort of basic rock music. Outside of the Eddie guitar virtuoso wankery (aka Eruption) and the top 5 Van Halen hits you’re probably thinking of, there is no “there” there.

It’s also a shame that this disc doesn’t import at all into Guitar Hero 5, like World Tour, Smash Hits and Band Hero do. Well, partially, anyway.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen is probably worth getting if you’re a massive fan of the band, though it is nowhere near the intimate fan-centric portrait of a band like Guitar Hero: Metallica, much less The Beatles: Rock Band. If you are a genre enthusiast like myself, I can recommend picking it up once it drops to discounted levels. It’s mostly Van Halen, but there are a handful of other interesting songs on there as well — check out the song list and see if anything appeals to you. I expect it to tumble in price quite rapidly.

Even if you have no interest in the game proper, there is a little bonus for all fake plastic rockers — an official Eddie Van Halen “frankenstrat” faceplate!

The frankenstrat is Eddie’s famous guitar, a combination Gibson / Fender with a very distinctive paintjob.

I’m pretty sure the frankenstrat is probably the single most copied faceplate design in the history of fake plastic rock. So having it as an official faceplate design is a good thing. The faceplate is available as a promo bonus from some sites, or also sold directly for $10.

And here’s my own bonus to you — a video from the Legion of Rock Stars covering Van Halen’s Jump.

They’ve done a ton of these covers, which are available here. Bring your earplugs, and a sense of humor …

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/12/guitar-hero-van-halen-released/feed/ 3 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/10/band-hero-track-list/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/10/band-hero-track-list/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:18:49 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1133 In all the excitement over Lego Rock Band, I almost forgot about Band Hero, which is also launching soon.

The full 65 song list was recently unveiled along with the fantastic news that all but four of the songs will be exportable to Guitar Hero 5! (Oddly, you can also go in the reverse direction, importing 69 Guitar Hero 5 songs into Band Hero.) It’s hardly the access to the nearly 1,000 song Rock Band 2 DLC library that Lego Rock Band offers, but it’s a start.

Now that’s the kind of importing we wanted! Oh, and on the incredibly rare chance any Activision excutives happen to be reading this blog, I’m still waiting for fuller Smash Hits and World Tour importing in Guitar Hero 5.

Click through to see YouTube videos of any song, if you’re not familiar with it.

While I’m much more partial to the Lego Rock band setlist, I can’t deny that Band Hero has a whopping 20 more tracks, and there are some definite gems in there. It also uses the Guitar Hero 5 engine, which is a massive improvement over the Guitar Hero 4 (World Tour) engine, even the tweaked versions of it that appeared in Smash Hits and Metallica. Playing Guitar Hero 5 does not make me want to cut myself with my plastic instruments in quite the way that Guitar Hero World Tour did, so that’s … a plus.

Band Hero is scheduled for release November 3rd, which just so happens to be the date Amazon is telling me I’ll get Lego Rock Band as well. Coincidence? :)

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/10/band-hero-track-list/feed/ 3 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/mad-catz-wireless-fender-stratocaster-review/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/mad-catz-wireless-fender-stratocaster-review/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:17:38 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1067 Remember that Mad Catz full-size Stratocaster guitar controller? I couldn’t resist its siren call. I am now the embarrassedproud owner of my very own sunburst fake Stratocaster.

The first thing you need to know about the Mad Catz Rock Band Wireless Fender Stratocaster Replica is that IT IS ENORMOUS. It is made from an authentic Stratocaster body, so it is truly a 100% full size guitar. Those other guitars you thought were “authentically sized”? Not even close! See for yourself:

That’s the Mad Catz Wireless Fender Stratocaster Replica next to the previously reviewed Logitech Wireless Guitar and the classic GH3 Les Paul guitar controller. (I didn’t show the GH5 / GH4 guitar, but it’d be a bit larger than the Les Paul.)

The Mad Catz Strat isn’t just full size, but full weight, too. It tips the scales at over 7 pounds with strap.

OK, yes, it’s huge and expensive, but it is also a thing of great beauty.

It even comes with a Fender strap (the same one that’s included with the much cheaper Wireless Bass, but who’s counting.)

Everything here is authentic — all metal bits and real knobs throughout. There’s even a connection port for the overdrive pedal (the guitar includes the necessary 1/4″ step-down adapter.)

All the standard Rock Band 2 guitar features are present and accounted for, including the effect switch. The strum is of the clicky variety, with the premium Mad Catz “2.5 million cycle” switches.

Flipping it over to the back, we can see the battery compartment (takes 3 AAs, included) and a back cutout. I was initially a little perturbed by the frankenstein-like patchwork on the back of the guitar, but even a real Strat has a similar (albeit smaller) back cutout, as you can see in this picture.

The headstock, like the body, is from a real Strat guitar, so of course it includes real metal tuning pegs.

The only part of the guitar that’s plastic is the fretboard; the back of the neck is wood, but the front face is plastic. This is a Rock Band guitar, so the buttons (both solo and normal) are of the standard flat Rock Band variety.

If you’re concerned about the strategic use of plastic in the fretboard, don’t be. It looks fantastic, and the faux wood effect with metal detailing is first rate. In fact, one of the things I didn’t like about the Logitech Wireless guitar was the odd (and visually jarring) melding of real wood and plastic in its fretboard. The Mad Catz Strat neatly sidesteps this problem by making the fretboard one seamless length of cleverly detailed plastic. The fret buttons themselves feel identical to those of any official Rock Band 2 guitar, with the same action, stop edges and tiny embossed finger position dots.

OK, so we’ve established that this is a guitar so handsome that it utterly blurs the line between fake plastic guitar and real guitar. But how does it play?

The first thing you need to decide is whether you prefer your fret buttons flat (Rock Band style) or embossed/raised (Guitar Hero style). If you love or hate a particular button style, this guitar, despite its awesomeness, will not change your mind. Yes, the “premium” strum mechanism is a bit stiffer and perhaps a bit clickier than a stock RB2 guitar, but it’s a Rock Band guitar through and through. It plays pretty much identically to any other Rock Band style guitar, except it’s substantially larger and heavier. So how much you like it will depend on how you feel about flat fret buttons.

Beyond that, this guitar is large. Did I mention that it’s large? Yes it is VERY LARGE! And HEAVY! I thought I was a fake plastic guitar tough guy, having played with my own custom weighted guitars, and the 6 pound Logitech Wireless guitar with no problems at all. But after playing my first 10 song set with the Mad Catz Strat, my shoulder was killing me. And that’s with a nice aftermarket guitar strap!

If you want a truly full size guitar, be prepared to pay the price in training in your body and shoulders to handle it. Given the size of the neck, you may also need to stretch to reach the fret buttons a bit more than you’re used to. It’s not a deal-breaker (for me at least), but it does take some time to get used to it. And that goes double if you’re a smaller guitarist!

The only real difficulty I had when playing with the Mad Catz strat is with the whammy bar. I guess this is an artifact of the real guitar component locations, but it’s ridiculously easy to hit the back and start knob with the whammy, and it takes some conscious planning to use the whammy without hitting any knobs. The whammy also hangs down much more freely than I’m used to with my other guitars, so it has to be wrangled a bit in use. Don’t get me wrong, overall the whammy works great, but you will have to adapt your whammy style to this particular guitar.

Is this guitar worth $299? If you absolutely love Rock Band style (flat face button) guitars, and you want an awesome looking and great playing full size axe, then absolutely. Well, assuming you’ve got $299 burning a hole in your pocket!

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/mad-catz-wireless-fender-stratocaster-review/feed/ 15 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/new-features-of-the-guitar-hero-5-guitar/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/new-features-of-the-guitar-hero-5-guitar/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:04:00 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1045 The Schecter-alike fake plastic axe introduced with Guitar Hero: World Tour was (and is!) one of my favorite fake plastic guitars, ever.

The Guitar Hero 5 guitar looks nearly identical to its older sibling — and it is identical in shape and size — but there are some key differences if you look closely.

(warning: I have received direct reports that the Guitar Hero 5 guitar package in Europe does not include the new, updated guitar model, but instead substitutes the same old World Tour guitar. If you’re in Europe, double check before buying!)

Obviously, the faceplates are different. The GH5 faceplate offers a faux metallic red with white pickguard. It looks OK in static photos, but it does not look very good in person, in my opinion — it’s trying a bit too hard to be something it clearly isn’t. Plus, I have made my own real metallic faceplates and they look a zillion times cooler than this cheesy photoshop printing effect.

But that’s purely cosmetic, an issue of taste and preference, and anyway the faceplates are designed to be easily swapped out. Let’s move on to the real differences.

For one thing, the pegs on the headstock are now chrome!

I used a silver sharpie to achieve a similar chroming effect on my other guitars, but it doesn’t look nearly as good as the factory chrome effect. A nice detail touch.

The strumbar, star power button, and navigation control are all rubberized now. This is hard to show in photos, but immediately obvious when you handle the guitar. Notice how the area around the strumbar is very shiny while the strum itself is flat and matte — it’s rubberized!

Allow me to explain using the Xbox 360 controller as a point of reference: the old strumbar was hard smooth plastic like the controller triggers; the new strumber is rubberized plastic like the analog sticks.

The touchpad has gone from analog to digital, and now features embossed marks at each end and in the middle, so you can more easily “feel” where you are on the touchpad. The colored dots on top of the neck (cleverly printed on both side for lefties or righties) are also new, and way more logical than printing the colors on the surface of the touchpad where you can’t even seen them while playing!

While the jury’s still out on the overall usefulness of the touchpad in the big scheme of things, these changes definitely make it easier and more effective to use than the older model.

Beyond that, the guitar fret buttons look and feel unchanged. They are identical.

There is, however, one major change that isn’t visible from the outside — the internals of the strum have changed in a big way for the Guitar Hero 5 guitar.

The World Tour guitar had sophisticated leaf-switch activation, with two springs physically attached to the strum to provide centering force and resistance.

The Guitar Hero 5 guitar, on the other hand, has reverted to the classic, and much simpler, Les Paul switch mechanism. No springs, no fancy leaf switches, back to simple plastic digital switches exactly as in the GH3 Les Paul.

(The above photo is from a Les Paul, because I forgot to take photos when I disassembled my GH5 guitar. Anyway, the GH5 switches are identical in shape, size and function except they are two physical parts instead of one.)

This is probably the most dramatic change to the GH5 guitar, and definitely changes the “feel” of the strum. How you react to this will depend how you feel about the Les Paul strum action versus the GH:WT guitar strum action. After spending some time with both models, I slightly prefer the smoother, frictionless action of the fancy spring-tensioned GH:WT strum — but I can see why people might want a basic digital switch strum, too.

Anyway, that’s probably way more detail than you ever needed. I can’t believe you even read this far!

At any rate, now you’re equipped to go forth and decide on the fake plastic guitar that best fits your play style.

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/new-features-of-the-guitar-hero-5-guitar/feed/ 12 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/guitar-hero-world-tour-pc-mac-version/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2009/09/guitar-hero-world-tour-pc-mac-version/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:31:29 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1029 Now that Guitar Hero 5 has been released to very positive reviews, and it (mostly) imports the World Tour songs, I’d love to declare Guitar Hero: World Tour utterly obsolete.

But I can’t.

Guitar Hero: World Tour may indeed be old and busted on consoles, but it is by far the best version of the series on the PC! There have been three Guitar Hero computer releases to date:

1. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock PC / Mac
2. Guitar Hero Aerosmith PC / Mac
3. Guitar Hero World Tour PC / Mac

Unfortunately, GH3 and GH:A were all but unplayable on the PC due to terrible, embarrassing performance. Even on a high end gaming rig, these games had extreme video and audio lag, which made getting a decent score or enjoying the game pretty much impossible. I owned both, and believe me, I tried everything — turning all the detail to minimum, resolution to the lowest possible setting, and exiting all background tasks before starting the game. Nothing worked! Barely playable. From everything I could tell, it was a fundamental problem with the way the games were ported from console PC. That’s … kind of a crippling flaw.

So when I booted up the PC version of Guitar Hero: World Tour I steeled myself for even more disappointment. Imagine my surprise when this game plays every bit as well as the Xbox 360 version! It’s almost indistinguishable, well, except for the near-instantaneous load times that only a PC can offer. :)

I tested the game extensively on guitar, playing through the entire campaign as a solo guitarist. I even trotted out my drums and handy-dandy Mad Catz M.I.C. for vocals.

The feel was so accurate and solid on vox, drums, and guitar that most of the time I forgot which version I was playing! That’s definitely a first for any PC version of Guitar Hero.

By the way, I highly recommend the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver — it lets me use all my wireless Xbox peripherals on my PC, no problem! (It should also work with the Mac since it’s basic USB.) I used this nifty little device to test the game with a variety of guitars and the World Tour wireless drums.

No drivers required, just plug and play. Press the sync button on both devices and as they say, “it just works”.

One small problem I ran into with vocals: the game didn’t want to recognize any of my microphones. After some research, I found that the PC version of Guitar Hero: World Tour is hard-coded to look for a “Logitech USB Microphone” — literally. You’d expect it to accept whatever sound recording devices you have on your PC, but no. To get around that, I simply renamed my Mad Catz M.I.C. to “Logitech USB Microphone” in the sound device, recording tab, properties dialog, as pictured:

Goofy, but it works. Once I did that, I re-launched the game and I was able to start a vocalist career without the dreaded “please connect a microphone” alert.

I realize that any PC / Mac version of Guitar Hero is something of an oddity at best. It’s still fun and convenient for a quick jam session, though:

• I’m always in front of my PC
• the PC version of the game loads in no time at all
• with a no-cd patch, it loads even faster
• I have so many fake plastic guitars now, I just keep an extra one by my desk

… the PC version of the game ends up being the fastest possible way to jump in and practice a song when I have a few extra minutes. Or if you’re travelling with your laptop, in a pinch, you could even play a few songs with the keyboard. Heck, just because you can. Why not? Fake plastic rock knows no boundaries!

Being a PC release, there’s also the possibility of user-created mods: hacked songs, now with a full band, and actually playable this time around. The GHWT PC mod scene is still fairly new, but I expect in time you’ll be able to, uh, “import” every song from every Guitar Hero game ever made into this version.

Anyway, World Tour is the first respectable version of any Guitar Hero on the PC to date. Kudos to Aspyr for finally getting this right, and here’s hoping that the much better Guitar Hero 5 will eventually be ported to PC as well.

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