Duelling Guitar (games)

I just blogged some more Rock Band footage, this time out of the E3 MS press conference.

Among the various bits of news leading up to and coming from E3, are a bunch of factoids released about the 2 duelling guitar games: The Activision-acquired Guitar Hero sequel Guitar Hero 3 and the MTV/EA published Rock Band from the creators of GH, Harmonix.

I'm starting to worry a little about the escalating arms race of spend going into both these titles to pick up various music licenses, band/musician signups, etc.

Rock band has an advisory board.
Rock Band gets Metallica, plus has entire albums as DLC.
Slash to be the Boss in GHIII, plus do an original track for the game

etc, etc.

It's great for consumers, but I hope that (a) they remember that it's about the GAME, and (b) they both make money so we see more of the same.

To be clear, I'm sure they'll both see an assload of units, I'm just wondering whether the budget growth is outpacing the likely sales.

Bizzy

As you may have guessed, I've been fairly busy past few weeks, thus the lack of activity on the blog. Well, ok, slight stretching of the truth there, as I've been fairly busy but have also logged a lot of guitar hero action :-). Priorities and all that.

Last weekend I got down to Portland to see some friends and former co-workers from Intel. A couple of them are involved in the "larabee" project that just got announced (vaguely) at IDF. Got to have some interesting conversations about how life in The Empire differs from life with The Borg. (One of those former co-workers was having his side-project shown in a local fashion show the evening we were leaving. Not exactly what you expect for an Intel engineer, no?)

This past week I got down to San Francisco for one night. Mostly work and little social, but did manage to hook up with Robin for crepes and some interesting discussion comparing life at two different big games industry companies.

Hoping life gets back to normal a bit so I can post a little more frequently. Well, that and I'm almost done the all-songs-on-medium-at-five-stars achievment.

Good take on the Guitar Hero Song Pricing Kerfuffle

In case you missed it last week, the internets were abuzz with the griping of many a gamer.

This is of course true of every week, but the target of last week's ire seemed to largely be directed at the pricing/packaging of downloadable song content. (3 songs priced at ~$6.50). The griping being directed (a) at the price of >$2 a song, more expensive that iTunes and they are covers at that, and (b) at the packaging, necesitating the purchase of 3 songs at once.

While I have *no idea* on what the real story is (not involved in that part of Microsoft at all), and while I'm not saying whether the pricing strategy is a good or bad one, I did think that this post by DonkeyXote was a good take on the subject. He's a lawyer who works with our games group (but did not work on GH2 in any way), and his post goes over some of the complexities involved in digital distribution of music, performers rights societies, etc.

I'd label this 'what you have when the round peg of new technology, new mediums, and new business models is smashed into the square hole of antiquated organizations and business models; and what happens when people try to get it to work.

What hath the Game Gods wrought? GH2, that's wot!!

Guitar Hero 2 *finally* shipped for Xbox360. Ah, but how I'd waited for this day. This is a good thing.

I went by Circuit City yesterday morning to pick one up, and they were bundling a $20 points card with it. This is also a good thing.

Extra content and downloadable songs on Xbox Live. This is an even better thing.

And now this news from Kotaku: The Xplorer controller works fine out of the box in your PC to play the awesome Frets on Fire. Well, that's it then. See you all next year. (jk)

Cranky...

... not one, but TWO crowns done at the dentist today. Had some faulty dental work from years back that got some decay under it and... well, I'll spare the details but suffice it to say that two hours in the chair ain't any fun.

Channelled the negative energy into some Guitar Hero 2 shredding though. Ah. Gaming goodness.