Holy Crap. Way Too Many Music Games.
Remember that article I posted a whole 24 hours ago about the music game industry becoming a fad, and a dying one at that? Remember how music gaming was transformed from a cool, fun platform to said fad as a result of the saturation of the market packed with too many needless titles and songs? Well, if the already-announced Lego: Rock Band, Rock Band: Beatles, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits and Guitar Hero: Van Halen weren’t enough, more titles have been confirmed to hit the shelves this fall. Great timing. Clearly this is just what we have been missing.
Enter the contenders: Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero, and DJ Hero. Three brand-new titles that make a whopping seven music games to release within the next 5 months or so; God forbid any Lips, SingStar, Karaoke Revolution or American Idol titles should come out and inflate that number higher.
Guitar Hero 5 will let you change difficulty and swap band members on-the-fly, while in the middle of a song. Sounds useless. That’s the only thing we know about it, so one can expect it’ll just be another basic title. I have no idea what the reasoning behind developing this could be, aside from “you can’t spell unnecessary without necessary!”
Band Hero is another Activision project, being released with a family-friendly E10+ rating in order to compete with the release of Lego: Rock Band. Lovely.
DJ Hero, at least to me, is just a butthole of an idea, and the death tag on the toe of this genre. It will put you at the helm of the turntable controller, remixing hip hop and electronica tracks to create “original mixes of popular songs from the world’s most exciting artists.” So basically, terrible Top 40 music and one painfully weird controller. Guitar Hero: 50 Cent, here we come.
People have had concerns about the number of titles set to release this summer, as if the genre wasn’t already smothered enough. Now, we’re getting a glimpse of the fall, and seeing the trend continue.
How much longer can this persist? How many of these games can people afford to buy, and how many will they continue to want to buy? Even this guy is ready to put down the plastic instruments and shoot off his own wiener:
Christ, I couldn’t agree more. But I suppose out of the two major companies involved I would say Harmonix had the right balance of game release dates – when their three game deal ended the flood gates literally opened.
Music games run the risk of becoming too diluted, that was a personal worry of mine for a while now, but the game announcements for the rest of the year may be the straw that breaks the camels back as far as I am concerned, I’m drowning in a sea of music games, and as passionate of a fan of Rock Band as I am, the rate everyone’s going it’s going to all get really dull, really soon.
I agree. I am also a huge Rock Band fan, and have always preferred it over GH – in almost every respect. That is true for their release schedule, their DLC, even their instruments. But I have to say, I play about 10% as often as I used to, and don’t really care. My interest certainly isn’t going to grow stronger when a million new music titles come out…