It's a good time to be a music game fan. While recent months may have been been dominated by Rock Band news, now it seems it's the turn of rival music game Guitar Hero to step back into the spotlight. Both band-centric multiplayer games that let you and your friends jam together on a series of plastic instruments, both have been on somewhat of a hiatus in recent years - with Activision even going as far as to shut down the studio that made Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock back in 2011.
It seemed like the time for strumming along to everyone from Queen and Rush to My Chemical Romance and Rammstein was over - blamed on an over-saturated market and a dwindling interest in music games (and not on the never-released Guitar Hero Motley Crue), with the genre all but disappearing overnight. So we hung up our plastic guitars and microphones and moved on.Until this year, that is, when Harmonix announced out of the blue that they were working on Rock Band 4. Seemingly not wanting to be outdone by their rivals, Activision appear to have scrambled to get their own version to go up against it - in the form of the newly-announced Guitar Hero Live. Details are a little on the scant side but, unlike Rock Band 4 which seems to promise more of the same (not that that's a bad thing), it seems this new Guitar Hero has a few things up it's plaid sleeves.
This is an actual screenshot of Guitar Hero Live. Not sure what we make of having gurning Steve on the right, there.
For starters, it seems Guitar Hero Live will come with an all-new guitar, which likely surprises no-one - but this seems to be a guitar with a difference, and one that also scuppers any chances of backwards compatibility with those plastic axes you have tucked away in cupboards, wardrobes and under beds. You see, Guitar Hero Live's newest peripheral will have a different array of buttons compared to it's predecessors - six buttons split into two rows of black and white, to more accurately map out chords and stuff so as to seem more like you're playing a real guitar.
The guitar in all its glory - note the 3x2 button arrangement
How well this will work in practice when it comes to playing the songs, we're not sure, as - if Rock Band 3's keyboard peripheral was anything to go by, rows of black and white buttons are a lot harder to decipher at high speed than the bright colours of previous games.
The second big difference seems to be more of an aesthetic one, as now - instead of picking/creating yourself a rocker to play as, then watching them gadding about on stage seemingly indifferent to the struggles you were having getting more than three seconds through Through The Fire And Flames, you'll now see things from a first person view. Intended to let you experience things first hand, through the eyes of your guitarist, with a real life crowd drafted in to react to your performances, we're not entirely sure how we feel about this (not to mention what the focus group were smoking when they thought it up), but we guess we'll see how it works.
And last, but by no means least for the new additions is something known as GHTV - a brand new, and somewhat original mode which lets you play along with music videos. Overlaying a note track on a popular music video, we're not entirely sure how this will work in practice - whether it'll make the guitar drop out should you mess up the notes, like the main game does - and the press release doesn't exactly make things that much clearer. Described as "a 24-hour music video network that lets players jump right into various genres of music and play along to official music videos", it seems GHTV makes up both a never ending library of songs for single players to tackle, and the competitive multiplayer mode (both local and online), with "new songs being added all the time". What we're less keen on is the thought that we won't be able to choose what we actually get to play, with the description of GHTV saying it's "similar to turning on your regular TV. Pick any channel and dive right in. Don't like what's on? Just switch over to another channel and pop into a new song." There's not really any concrete details on the mode as of yet, although we have a hunch it'll be some sort of subscription service rather than a traditional store where you buy the odd track - so we'll reserve judgement till we know more.
How will GH TV work? There's a lot yet to be revealed.
Guitar Hero Live is due out on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, but, unlike it's competitor Rock Band 4, will also make an appearance on the older consoles of the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii U - as well as 'select mobile devices', however that may work. It's scheduled for release sometime this autumn, but until then we have a bit of a strange reveal trailer to whet your appetites:
