Battle Of The Bands Begin
Since their first Guitar Hero game release back in November 2005, Activision and RedOctane have been the top players in the music gaming industry, when just 2 years later a sort of new player stepped onto the stage, Rock Band.
Harmonix were the original developers of Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, but after the release of Guitar Hero 2, Harmonix moved onto a new publisher, MTV Games and EA to see if they could find bigger better thigns, which they did. After the old developers, Harmonix left, new guys Neversoft moved in and started to create a new game, Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, this was then released in the later part of 2007. The game seemed to be a great hit, until, later that year the old developers, Harmonix, came back into business with their new game Rock Band. This game features a whole ne range of instruments, guitar, drums, bass and a mic.
After a good year of Rock Band being released, the competition is back on because in November 2008, both publishers, Activision and EA released a new music game. Guitar Hero World Tour from Activision and Rock Band 2 from EA, let battle commence.
From Guitar Hero’s view, this was a new venture for them, a new range of instruments, but they certainly hadn’t cut any corners. Their new guitar has a touch sensitive bar to allow finger tapping during song sections, their drums feature 5 pads and a foot peddle, one more than Rock Bands. Aswell as a whole range of shiny new instruments, their game featured a music maker where you could create and share your own songs.
On the Rock Band 2 side, Harmonix haven’t changed their instruments much. They have improved the drum set by making it velocity sensitive, basically the harder you hit the pad the louder the sound in game makes, they also changed the foot peddle to metal as people found they broke the plastic one. Apart from those few changes, they haven’t changed their instrument range.
On the actual game side of things, they haven’t got a music maker, however, they do have one great thing that Guitar Hero does not; a huge selection of downloadable songs on top of their 80+ song set list. This also gets better, if you have previously bought any Rock Band 1 songs, they are all compatible with Rock Band 2 and they all appear on your setlist when you load up the game. Another advantage is that for a small fee of less than $5, you can tranfser most of the songs from Rock Band 1 onto Rock Band 2.
Now comes the difficult decision, after each game has had its advantages listed, it comes to deciding which ones you should spend your money on. With Christmas closing in, many people will just be choosing one game rather than both, plus many people will lack the space for 2 sets of instruments.
With both games instruments being compatible with either game, many people will leave it down to the set list or the features within the game, some people may go for Guitar Hero for the music maker and suited up instruments, whereas some people will go for the chance to have a massive set list on Rock Band 2.
Even though Harmonix have more experiance in this type of game, the stage is clearly open and we’ll have to see which game will come out on top.
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