Activision Announces “New” Game: Guitar Hero – Market Saturation

Expect to be badgered and berated about Activision’s most effort-free game yet at your local GameStop from now until June 16th (or your suicide by cop, whichever comes first.)

(A quick word of warning: While in theory this is a news piece, it is soaked with rather venomous opinion. People who take games about pretending to play a toy guitar very seriously have been warned.)

Remember the halcyon days of 2005, when your friends and mine at Harmonix made the world feel right again by releasing Guitar Hero for the PS2? Sure, the game is practically unplayable in these dark times, but it’s hard to believe that the franchise was a fresh exciting new way to make an ass of yourself in front of friends and family. Less than four years later, Harmonix no longer has anything to do with their commercial breakthrough, and the Guitar Hero franchise has found itself in the rather unenviable position of slaving away in the note chart mines for an average of three releases a year. The eleventh game, and the third scheduled for release in the franchise’s fourth year of cynical customer exploitation, is the unfortunately titled Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, due to be ignored by an increasingly poor and shrinking American fanbase come June 16th.

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is developed by Beenox, reknown music game developers behind such guitar game smash hits as the bewilderingly named Bee Movie Game and the PC port of The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer. The game boasts “redone” note charts, meaning the charts from the first two games will most likely be replaced with a hailstorm of nonsensical notes that may or may not match up with the song proper. Forty-eight tracks, distributed across Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80′s, and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, will be retouched, with vocal and drum tracks added so your friends can join in the dubious “fun.”  Fans, should they exist, are unable to vote on which tracks they’d like to see released, but can vote on the order of which they are announced, creating an adorably feeble illusion of fan involvement. Eight new venues are apparently planned, and according to GameSpot, “…includ[e] concert halls set in the Amazon, polar ice caps, and the Grand Canyon.” Finally allowing me to relive the time I went to go see Kansas play in the Amazon. If you must, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits will be available June 16th on the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii for the consumer’s tenuous enjoyment of songs they just played less than two years ago.

(Thanks are in order to Jason C. for the photoshop!)