Guitar Hero 5 Aims to Rock Your Freaking Socks Off

Today saw the release of Activision’s Guitar Hero 5, the latest entry in the insanely popular “band” genre of games. GH5 continues the Guitar Hero tradition of adding more celebrity guitarists/musicians, in this case including Kurt Cobain (!), Johnny Cash, Carlos Santana, Shirley Manson of Garbage, and Matt Bellamy of Muse. I never knew that guy’s name before, but still, great band.

The release of GH5 has obviously been timed to compete with The Beatles: Rock Band, which comes out in a little over a week. It’ll be interesting to see which of the games becomes more popular with the game-buying crowd: the huge variety of bands available in Guitar Hero 5, or the classic appeal of The Beatles to older gamers. This may be one case where there’s plenty of room for both.

Activision is doing some really interesting with this release, including offering a free copy of the unreleased Guitar Hero: Van Halen with the purchase of GH5. Hopefully that game isn’t just a throw-away, but either way, free game! Playing Van Halen songs will probably appeal to the older gamer set as well, so it might help lure some fans away from The Beatles for a while.

A Party Mode that lets people pop in and out of songs whenever they like is a pretty good idea too, since people are notoriously unreliable when drinking, as is allowing multiples of the same instruments when you’re with a bunch of people and everyone sucks at the drums.

I haven’t had a chance to use GH: Studio, which allows you to create your own music and download other people’s to try, but I can imagine that would be a pretty cool feature with all the people out there with a ton of time on their hands to make really challenging songs. Finally, Activision built in some really unique functionality that allows Wii and Nintendo DS players to interact in a variety of ways while playing. It’s one of the most interesting cross-platform ideas I’ve ever heard of.

Whether you’re a bigger fan of Guitar Hero or the Rock Band series, one thing is clear: the arms race to stay ahead of each other and offer more innovative features and more songs and bands with each release means cooler and cooler games for us.

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