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Why I despise Guitar Hero: World Tour

I love me some video games. If I had things my way, I'd play them all month long and likely never be bored of them. I considered myself an aficionado of sorts when it comes to these games and its one of the few topic I like expressing opinions about.  Just three weeks ago, I had mentioned to a friend that I would be picking up Rock Band 2 and the new Guitar Hero: World Tour. The new GH game will be featuring all the same instruments as Rock band and since all the controllers are now cross compatible I thought it would be cool to play both games. However, Guitar Hero's publisher, Activision Blizzard, keeps putting their foot in their mouth. Their love for dollars and their ability to express how much they love money is uncanny. I discounted the new instrument gaffe as a small exageration. I found the DLC (downloadable content) subscription to be an intriguing twist to their existing business model. I regarded their boasting of increased music sells to the purchase of a successful franchise. But after all that, they just keep shoving it in my face. Why do you need a new game for every band? How many damn Aerosmith songs can you play in a row before it gets old? Do we really need Guitar Hero: Metallica or Guitar Hero: Hendrix? Give me a break.

However, the article I recently read reaks of the MilkMan. It's fraught with promises that they won't be able to deliver and in some instance, they just down right lie to the customer. They do this in order to increase their sales of a game that has a bright future only to the Execs in the tower and not the people playing the game. Check out this interview with Brian Bright, the director of Neversoft (the devs that tooks over the GH franchise after Harmonix sold the name).  Several times when asked about included features he responds with "Anything is possible." W T F? You jackass. How can you say that? I'm beside myself with that answer.  Obviously, these features aren't in the game, but he just can't admit that his game doesn't have what the interviewer is asking for. The interviewer happens to be asking him very specific questions because Rock Band is already out there kicking ass and he simply wants to know what has GH got that RB doesn't. However, instead of admiting that the games are different, he simply lies to the customer base and makes false promises giving the customer false hopes that maybe one day these features will see the light of the day. On top of that, most of the interview happens to focus on features that will be included in a patch that doesn't have a specific release date. Why are all the cool features NOT on the disc itself? You're selling a patch that we have no idea the release date of. I've seen way too many release dates come and go because the devs couldn't get their shit together. This is no different and selling a game where all the cool stuff is in a patch is rediculous.

Add to all this that Brian's claims, "For us, we're not really getting denied, it's more like they can't find the master recordings." BULLSHIT! Zeppelin doesn't want to be in your shitty music game.  I wouldn't trust you with my master tracks with comments like that either. When Zeppelin says "you can't have my master tracks" that does not mean that they can't find them. YOU WERE DENIED. Perhaps if the interviewer asked about The Who's Who's Next, that would of been a correct statement, but since he was asking specifically about Zeppelin, Brian lied to us.

The game ships with a patch, so your game is already broken. Having a patch on release is one thing. Having a patch that includes a majority of your touted features is a whole different story. I can't imagine anyone wanting to play with that stupid ass music creator anyway. No one is going to sit in front of their TV and use as PS3 controller to "make music" so that they can play them in the game. Plus you're just going to delete any songs that  resemble any popular music. Let's say that I'm wrong about the music creator  and people DO want to make up songs to play them. The 1200 note limit and the 3 minute caps are probably go to stop any hope of doing something actually cool. And the 6 set limit? "We kept it to six. We could have probably gone higher, but we thought six was a good amount before you just wanted to take a break, maybe change difficulties and swap up the instruments or something." Bahaha! What a lame ass answer for being unable to develop software correctly.

Enjoy destroying the franchise that you bought.