April 3rd, 2007
Guitar Hero II on XBOX 360 released
Activision has ported its popular PS2 game franchise, Guitar Hero, to the XBOX 360. Now XBOX 360 users can pretend they are musician gods of old, stopping meteorites with the force of their strumming and releasing endless streams of near-perfect albums because, heck, us moderns just can't do music anymore (okay, inside joke).
I've played Guitar Hero before, and its harder than it looks, and oddly addictive to boot. The game is massively popular on the PS2, and this might just be random chance, but the last few times I went to Best Buy, I've seen someone in line holding a PS2 game console and the telltale guitar-shaped custom controller. That popularity bodes well for its success on XBOX 360.
The version 2 released for the XBOX 360 also appears to make use of XBOX Live, allowing users to download new songs to the hard drive. Unfortunately, there's no multiplayer mode yet, though what shape such a multiplayer mode might take is anybody's guess.
Guitar Hero's success, however, is curious. It's an oddly simple game. Then again, so are games such as Nintendo Sports for the Wii, or "Dance, Dance Revolution." This leads me to make a broad generalization.
Consumers like games that use non-standard game controllers. Second, they want games that involve a bit more motion than is possible with a simple controller. Granted, that's not universal, as "Gears of War" was extremely popular (and Halo 3 is likely to be more popular still), but it's an interesting trend. I expect more custom game controllers in future. It seems an interesting avenue to profits for innovative game companies.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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