It's Just a Harmless Little Bunny, Isn't It?
As of about ten minutes ago, there are 110,000 people on the Guitar Hero leaderboards. I'm plummeting, as expected, down into the 3,200 range. If I can be in the top 15% after the dust settles, I'll be really pleased.So I've been watching these announcements of the competing music games--in particular, Rock Band this week--and it's making me queasy. Guitar Hero is a phenomenon because it's a great game--it's incredibly well-designed and extremely well polished. When companies like EA and MTV get involved, it's trouble--the last time EA saw the words "well polished" they were on a Powerpoint slide.
All these companies seem to have such a dismissive attitude toward the quality and uniqueness of Guitar Hero, like it will be stone cold simple to create a knockoff, or a giant expansion, and we'll all be rushing to buy it. It's like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Tim is warning Arthur and his men about the killer rabbit, but no one can believe him because they think it's just an ordinary rabbit.
Until it starts killing them, obviously.
Rock Band is coming out this fall and there are two roles to integrate (voice and drums) as well as online play for four people? How is there going to be adequate time for refinement and balancing? It will be a combination of lack of polish (just EA's regular lack of polish will do nicely) and an incredible, bloated attempt to cash in by EA and MTV. I expect the game to be incredibly expensive when you add in the cost of the peripherals, plus the downloadable content (which you pay extra for) is going to be far more enticing than what you get with the game.
Of course--that way, you can pay twice.
The word "calculated" comes to mind. And I doubt that Activision is going to be any different when it comes to Guitar Hero 3. This is probably the beginning of the long slide.
I hope I'm wrong. The idea of playing in a "band" with three other people online sounds incredibly fun. It just seems like these games are about to become all about cashing in instead of rocking out.
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