Zero Punctuation: Guitar Hero World Tour

This week, will Zero Punctuation’s rock star fantasies be fulfilled with Guitar Hero World Tour?

Guitar Hero turns gamers into musicians

Guitar Center, the world’s largest musical instrument retailer recently announced the findings of their national survey. The survey confirms that gamers who played Rock Band and Guitar Hero have become more interested in playing real instruments and not just the game peripherals. In addition, musicians who play the games use their actual instruments more frequently because of the games.

The survey found that 67 of Guitar Hero and Rock Band players who do not currently play a musical instrument said that they are likely to begin playing a real instrument in the next two years, thanks to the game publishers Activision and Harmonix titles. More surprisingly, 72 of musicians have spend more time playing the real thing since they started playing the titles.

As a result, Guitar Center sales in the last quarter of 2007 experienced a 20.7 boost for beginner-level electric guitars and amplifiers. This number grew even further to 26.9 during the first nine months of 2008.

Guitar Center executive VP and Chief Marketing Officer Norman Hajjar has this to say,

This spike of interest in playing actual instruments stemming from a video game is an unprecedented phenomenon. Most video games sell fantasy, but Guitar Hero and Rock Band are selling a dream that can be realized. These games plant an achievable goal in the heart of the player and that, in turn, drives our business.

To get more gamers to convert into musicians, Guitar Center has created the “Real Guitar” campaign, which gets gamers to pick up a real instrument during the holidays.

I don’t know about the survey, but it seems a bit inconclusive, especially the ones saying that they’re likely to purchase real instruments. Naturally, they’d want to be musicians since they play the games, but it doesn’t mean that they’re gonna follow through and become actual musicians. They would find that the level of skill and dedication required in playing a real guitar is very different from that of pushing buttons on a peripheral.

Guitar Hero Bicycle Battle!

Nothing is more entertaining than two nerds trashing each other over the internet. A gamer by the name of Madflux has racked up over a million hits on YouTube in one week, for this incredibly clever Bike Hero video. Using notes he drew on a sidewalk with colored chalk, he rides his bicycle around this neighborhood pretending the sidewalk is a Guitar Hero screen. Take a look:

Well, Guitar Hero legend Freddie Wong wasn’t pleased and has now tried to school MadFlux… by actually playing Guitar Hero on a bike! Using a wireless controller, Freddie pedals his bike as he follows a car with a backseat TV that’s displaying the game.

Even more impressive, Wong is playing the Dragonforce song, which is probably the hardest song on Guitar Hero III.

I gotta admit, as obnoxious as Freddie Wong is, I think he’s got MadFlux beat:

Bands’ sales feel the ‘Guitar Hero’ effect

DragonForce guitarist Herman Li and his speed metal bandmates used to play the video game Guitar Hero. Now, fans are flocking to the band after finding their song Through the Fire and Flames in the latest installment of the game, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

“Our CD sales have gone up, and we are high up the charts on digital downloads,” Li says. “It’s great. We don’t play commercial music. It took everyone by surprise.”

More fans were converted last month when Ellen DeGeneres invited a young Guitar Hero expert onto her talk show to play DragonForce’s song, considered to be the toughest of all songs to play. (Go to YouTube and search for “Ellen” and “guitar hero”; you can also find her playing the game herself.)

“Somehow it seems our music really connects with the younger generation, gamers and non-gamers,” says Li, 29. “This is a game that is driving music sales when everybody is complaining about the video game industry taking money from movies and music.”

The Guitar Hero effect is real. DragonForce saw digital sales of Through the Fire rise from fewer than 2,000 weekly to a high of 37,825 the week ending Dec. 30, a week when many who got the game as a holiday gift were playing it. (Only one GH III song sold more, Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle at 38,330.)

Also since the game came out in late October, DragonForce’s album Inhuman Rampage has been atop Billboard magazine’s Top Heatseekers chart four times (it dropped to No. 4 this week). Overall sales of the album have reached 230,000, much more than the 75,000 sold in the band’s adopted home, the United Kingdom.

“There has been a steady buzz on the band, and you could just feel their star rising. Then (Guitar Hero III) hit, and it catapulted it to an entirely new level,” says Jonas Nachsin, president of DragonForce’s label, Roadrunner Records.

Two other Roadrunner artists, Slipknot and Kill Switch Engage, have seen increased sales from inclusion in the game. “You might be surprised. It’s not only digital sales but significant full-length sales of CDs,” Nachsin says. “Competition (to be in future games) will probably be more fierce because everyone can see what it does for a band.”

Even though previous Guitar Hero games relied almost exclusively on cover versions of most songs, original artists still saw increased song sales from inclusion in Guitar Hero II, released in October 2006 for the Sony PlayStation 2 and in April 2007 for the Microsoft Xbox 360.

A look at Nielsen SoundScan data for a dozen Guitar Hero II songs found that 11 out of 12 had increased sales in 2007, including:

• Cheap Trick’s Surrender nearly tripled from 58,000 digital sales in 2006 to 161,000 in 2007.
• Kiss’ Strutter went from 11,000 to 63,000 sold.
• The Pretenders’ Tattooed Love Boys rose from 5,000 to 16,000.
• Only Danzig’s Mother showed a drop, from 28,000 to 16,000.

“A lot of it is the classic guitar-type rock stuff form the Skynyrds to the new big monster bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Wolfmother,” says Mike Davis of Universal Music (Bon Jovi, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Who). “Old and new with the classic rock sound seems to be the stuff that is doing super well. … It’s a pretty hot subject these days.”

Rich Williams, guitarist for the classic rock band Kansas, says that after the release of Guitar Hero II, which included the band’s song Carry On Wayward Son, “the front row of almost every show we did was filled with young teenagers. It’s all due to that. It’s brought us a whole new fan base.”

Digital sales of the song rose from 119,000 in 2006 to 297,000 in 2007. “It’s been a positive influence for us,” he says. “It brought a younger crowd to us that otherwise might not have come in.”

The Guitar Hero effect has been sharpened in Guitar Hero III, which features original artist recordings for more than three-fourths of the songs. Every GH III song tracked by Nielsen SoundScan (62 of the 70) saw an increase in digital sales during the post-holiday week, and nearly all saw boosts immediately after the game’s October release.

“It’s such a dark time for the record business. This is one of the bits of truly great news we’ve seen in a long time,” says Marc Reiter of Q Prime management, whose clients Metallica, Muse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have songs in the game.

Sales of Metallica’s One increased from just more than 2,000 weekly before GH III’s release to more than 6,000 in the weeks afterward and spiked at 27,605 in the post-holiday week. Muse and the Chili Peppers saw similar but more modest hikes in sales of Knights of Cydonia and Suck My Kiss.

“Those tracks didn’t have any (other) activity surrounding them at the time,” Reiter says. ” I really do believe we have only begun to scratch the surface of the impact (video games) can have on artists and instrument sales.”
By Mike Snider

Christian Guitar Hero: Guitar Praise Trailer

OMG that was entertaining. I’ve heard the Christian rock industry in the US is worth millions. (Pause for irony to sink in). You’d think, then, they could have spared more than a couple of bucks on the production values for this Guitar Praise trailer. Or spared more than a couple of bucks on the production values for Guitar Praise.

Guitar Hero Mobile: New look, new sound, drums!

When you’ve got a game as compelling and competitive as Guitar Hero World Tour, you get it on as many platforms as you can as fast as you can, including the mobile phone. On Thursday, the mobile version of Guitar Hero World Tour became available on AT&T phones. We got to try it out.

On the PlayStation, Wii, and Xbox, this fourth Guitar Hero installment counters Rock Band’s drum and vocal tracks, which themselves had one-upped Guitar Hero’s original stringed instrument. Vocals aren’t practical for the mobile version–which still rocks, by the way–but a drum track is. Activision and game-maker Hands-On Mobile have introduced a drum choice for every song.

There’s a lot more news here–the updated game, which has a new look and two fresh game-playing features (can you say “battle mode”?). There are also technical details that could make a difference to how the game looks and sounds on your individual phone. Finally, there’s all the practical stuff about when your carrier will stock the game and how much it’ll cost you. Let’s take one at a time.

Gameplay

Anyone who has played Guitar Hero III Mobile (video review) will feel right at home with Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile, which begins with fifteen new songs for guitar and drums, and which uses the phone’s keypad buttons instead of guitar frets. When it comes to customization, you drummers out there are an afterthought–guitarists can choose their instrument, but not you. Also, when you’re playing drums, the bottom row of keys (7, 8, 9) stand in for the kick-drum, which is represented in the game by a horizontal purple line that floats at you along with the notes. I played several songs in the drummer’s mode, where the kick-drum line helped keep the game interesting.

Also new to the mobile game is the multiplayer battle mode, where Hands-On Mobile has created a good way to pair you up with similar players all over the world. You’ll be matched by skill level and by phone type (more on this below.) You’ll divvy up picking a song and the instrument, and will have to use your star power strategically (called battle power in this mode) to keep your opponent from scoring. After playing, it’ll be easy to track your score from the accompanying Web site (launching Friday). This is neat, but what if you want to play your friend? You should be able to duke it out with personal pals as well as with perfect strangers.

Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile is a fun game to play; at two minutes per song, it’s also well-suited for playing in-between other activities. This World Tour version sports a darker look and more updated graphics, but for some reason, Hands-On Mobile has opted for tiny, ornate–even arcane–font that might be favored by the Black Sabbath crowd, but which frankly is uncomfortable to read on a tiny screen. Judy and Axel are also mini. The avatars’ small statures may help the characters render better (or make you notice wonky animation less,) but if they’re part of the draw, then I want to be able to look my singing, head-banging avatar right in the rock ‘n’ roll eyes.

Technical details

Sound quality on Java (J2ME) phones was the number-one complaint of the first mobile Guitar Hero. In World Tour, Hands-On Mobile has improved the audio for Java phones, bringing it up to the MP3 quality of other platforms.

The graphics have also improved. BREW and Windows Mobile users get 3D graphics, while animation for the J2ME phones has gotten smoother since the last version. It’s still not as good as most console games, but considering how much action is crammed onto a roughly 2-to-3-inch screen, it’s pretty impressive. The graphical quality will also depend on each individual handset. Higher-end Sony Ericsson phones will give you a richer experience than Motorola V3 RAZRS, for instance.

Handsets make a difference in the visual experience, but also when it comes to playing the game and matching up players for battle mode. Those high-end phones will support multiple key presses, which add an element of difficulty if you need to press two keys at once to play a chord. Phones that don’t have that capability get a different pattern of notes that excludes mutli-pressing. To keep things fair, you won’t battle anyone with a different key press philosophy than yours.

Easy to pick up and (mostly) easy on the eye, Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile is as equally suited to casual gamers as it is to fans of the console games looking for a quick guitar-licking or drum-pounding fix before they can make it back to their plastic instruments.

Guitar Hero Arcade Game Revealed

Konami and Activision have joined forces to bring a Guitar Hero Arcade game. The unit, which should be announced officially at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions exhibit in Orlando, Florida tomorrow, is going to include 500 LED lights, ten speakers and a 32″ HD monitor.

For along time, rumors of such an arcade unit have spread like the LA wildfires, but nothing ever was confirmed. However, tomorrow looks to be the time that will change because sources started to leak info about the arcade — and now pictures of the cabinet have surfaced.

This won’t be a first music arcade music game from Konami, they also published other arcade machines which included ‘Guitar Freaks‘ and ‘DrumMania.’ However, checking out the picture — the cabinets resembles Konami’s other famous game Dance Dance Revolution.

Guitar Hero Arcade also looks to feature the ability to go online and gamers will have the opportunity to participate in tournaments around the country.

There really isn’t a way anyone could debate that guitar games are not the most popular genre in the gaming world today. But will people really spend $1.00 (we think) to play something that they already own at home. Isn’t that the main reason why the era of the arcade is considered dead because people already have something similar? That’s a big answer Konami and Activision will need to face in the upcoming months.

Our guess is that both companies realizes this and hopefully one way they can attract attention to the game is to have exclusive songs only for the unit. By doing that and having people show off their skill — the arcade just might work, especially in places like a movie theater.

Jimi Hendrix Guitar Hero DLC Not Coming to Wii

If you’re a Guitar Hero World Tour owner, odds are you’re anxiously awaiting this week’s Jimi Hendrix pack. Unfortunately, if that plastic guitar of yours is tethered to a Wii, then it looks like your concert just got rained out; MTV Multiplayer is reporting that the Jimi Hendrix DLC pack for World Tour will not be making it to the Wii.

When we first caught word that Jimi Hendrix DLC would be headed to Guitar Hero World Tour, most people just assumed that Wii owners would be included in the downloadable festivities. After all, the Wii version of the band simulator is among the few games on the console to support add-on content downloads, so offering that audience an exclusive artist like Hendrix seems like a no-brainer. The reality, however, is tainted by conflicting policies between the music industry and Nintendo’s online store.

“Due to technical or licensing restrictions, the DLC offerings will not be the same for every console platform,” an Activision representative explained to MTV Mutliplayer, continuing, “For example, certain artists prefer to keep the integrity of the track pack rather than releasing singles and the Wii’s infrastructure only allows us the ability to release single songs as DLC.” It’s the combination of these two factors that’s leaving the three-pack-only Hendrix songs on the cutting room floor for Wii users.

Barring a shift in policy from either company, it looks like everyone who bought Guitar Hero World Tour on Wii will have to look elsewhere if they want to rock out to “Fire”, “Little Wing”, and “If 6 Was 9″. Look on the bright side: You just saved $5.50 worth of space bucks.

Guitar Hero World Tour Beats Rock Band 2 in October sales

When Rock Band was released, it seemed to take a little energy out of Guitar Hero. With drums and voice being added to guitar giving the game the ability to let players form a full band, it could easily be described as a fully-realized Guitar Hero.

But now that Guitar Hero World Tour gives players the change to play multiple instruments, it might just be getting the last laugh. October sales shows Guitar Hero World Tour having sold 534,000 units compared to Rock Band 2′s 238,000 units. Rock Band 2, which was released in September, has sold 600,000 units, giving it a slight lead in overall sales, but Guitar Hero is quickly catching up.

Of course, Guitar Hero World Tour is also available for the Nintendo Wii while Rock Band 2′s Wii edition won’t be out until December. The Wii accounted for 182,000 units sold for Guitar Hero World Tour.

So long as the two battle it out and continue to take the music game to the next level, the real winners will be us gamers.

How is Dirk Nowitzki the Guitar Hero Spokesman?

Dirk Nowitzki sure is a cool guy, but I’m not sure GameStop and the marketing experts behind the Guitar Hero franchise did enough research before picking the Dallas Mavericks star as their spokesman.

Two weeks ago, Dirk made an official appearance at a GameStop store in Plano to promote the new Guitar Hero: World Tour.

As what looked like about 2,000 screaming fans waving camera phones pressed in, I snagged a small corner from which to interview the big German.

They tried to sneak Dirk in the back entrance, but the crowd noticed him almost immediately and went wild, and Dirk turned bright red and grinned.

After he made his way to the tiny, roped-off corner at the front of the store, he signed a few guitars and talked to a few reporters.

As I tilted my head nearly straight up into the air to talk to him (and at 6-foot-2, I don’t have to do that for many interviews), I asked him whether he played a lot of video games.

“Nope.”

Somewhere, a GameStop marketing executive began to experience chest pains.

Well, have you played much Guitar Hero?

“I think I’ve played it like one time.”

(GameStop exec fumbles for the phone to dial 911.)

Have GameStop or Activision hooked you up with an early copy of World Tour?

“No, but they better!”

(Exec tumbles to the floor, vision going dark, wheezing for breath.)

What about the other guys on the team? What games do they like?

“A lot of Madden, sports games.”

(Exec flatlines.)

Dirk was a heck of a good sport, though, and after posing for countless pictures, he took to a stage in the parking lot.

First he threw autographed jerseys into the crowd and then drew names for bigger prizes, and that’s when he displayed a quick wit that I think most people missed.

Several weeks ago, the Mavs traded little-used guard Eddie Jones to Indiana.

During the raffle at GameStop, one of the goodies was a pair of Mavs tickets to an upcoming game against the Indiana Pacers in Dallas.

As Dirk was rummaging in the box of names, he asked out loud into his microphone, “Who’s going to the game?!”

And then, almost under his breath, before announcing the actual winner, he said, “Eddie Jones is going.”

I LOL’d.

After that, while the PR people said Dirk wasn’t going to play a song from World Tour, he went ahead and sat down with a guitar, snatched a pair of sunglasses from one of the chubby Mavs Maniacs dancers on the side of the stage, and strummed through Nirvana’s “About a Girl.”

Then Dirk mingled with the crowd a bit longer, climbed into his dusty SUV (seriously, can the man get a car wash?) and slowly backed out of his parking space while trying to avoid flattening any of the dozens of fans who’d converged.

Good times.

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