![]() Quite frankly, this was always lame and it’s staggering Activision never broke away from it. ![]() In past Guitar Hero games, there was an animated band playing in the background that would attempt to blow the virtual roof off a virtual venue filled with virtual fans. Besides the gameplay itself (more on that later), GH Live is quite different from its predecessors. The core of the experience (but not where most time will be spent) is “GH Live,” featuring a full offline single player experience to strum through. Guitar Hero Live is split into two, almost separate, games. Shrewdly allowing the franchise to rest in purgatory for half a decade, Activision is back with the carefully planned Guitar Hero Live that hopes to recapture the lost fanbase and inspire a whole new generation of virtual rock stars. ![]() Suffice it to say, if Malcolm Gladwell were to write a book on the subject of market saturation, there’s little doubt that an entire chapter would be devoted to these games. There were more than twenty Guitar Hero releases in only five years that’s in addition to eighteen Rock Band games, two DJ Heroes and Band Hero, all of which made matters even worse. While the failure of these franchises could be attributed to them simply being a fad (á la Dance Dance Revolution), Activision and EA played the biggest roll. The world went from having nightly Guitar Hero/Rock Band bar nights to the plastic instruments popping up in landfills and thrift shops worldwide (during a trip down to the small old west town of Willcox, Arizona just last week, I encountered multiple Rock Band and Guitar Hero peripherals spread across three “antique shops,” far and away the most recently produced items there right after VHS tapes). That’s an astoundingly quick boom and bust cycle for anything, let alone a video game franchise, and quite shocking in retrospect. Just as quickly as the genre debuted as a specialized rhythm game published by RedOctane in 2005, it ceased production in 2010. Guitar Hero and Rock Band epitomize the concept of oversaturation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |