Guitar Hero Greatest Hits & On Tour: Modern Hits out now

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Break open your piggy and get an advance on your pocket money because the next two editions of the Guitar Hero family have been born. Guitar Hero Greatest Hits and Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits are available to buy from today from all good retailers both on and off line.

Yes, Activision is delicately rinsing music geeks the world over of their hard earned cash. Greatest Hits is the compilation for the consoles of the best tracks of the first three titles whereas Modern Hits is a 28-track music bundle for the Nintendo DS including Coldplay, Fall Out Boy, Tenacious D, The Strokes and Weezer.

You can pick the former up for around £37 and the latter for £25. Oh, and the finalised track list for the Greatest Hits is as follows:

Guitar Hero Greatest Hits Track List

“Back in the Saddle” – Aerosmith
“Bark at the Moon” Ozzy Osbourne
“Barracuda” – Heart
“Beast and the Harlot” – Avenged Sevenfold
“Carry On Wayward Son” – Kansas
“Caught in a Mosh” – Anthrax
“Cherry Pie” – Warrant
“Cowboys from Hell” (Live in Moscow 1991) – Pantera
“Cult of Personality” – Living Colour
“Electric Eye” – Judas Priest
“Free Bird” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Freya” – The Sword
“Godzilla” – Blue Öyster Cult
“Heart-Shaped Box” – Nirvana
“Hey You” – The Exies
“Hit Me with Your Best Shot” – Pat Benatar
“Love Rock ‘n Roll” – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
“I Wanna Rock” – Twisted Sister
“Killer Queen” – Queen
“Killing in the Name” – Rage Against the Machine
“Laid to Rest” – Lamb of God
“Lay Down” – Priestess
“Message in a Bottle” – The Police
“Miss Murder” – AFI
“Monkey Wrench” – Foo Fighters
“More Than a Feeling” – Boston
“Mother” – Danzig
“No One Knows” – Queens of the Stone Age
“Nothin’ but a Good Time” – Poison
“Play With Me” – Extreme
“Psychobilly Freakout” – Reverend Horton Heat
“Raining Blood” – Slayer
“Rock and Roll All Nite” – Kiss
“Round and Round” – Ratt
“Shout at the Devil” – Mötley Crüe
“Smoke on the Water” – Deep Purple
“Stella” – Incubus
“Stop!” – Jane’s Addiction
“Take It Off” – The Donnas
“Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand
“Them Bones” – Alice in Chains
“Through the Fire and Flames” – DragonForce
“Thunder Kiss ’65” – White Zombie
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper” – Heart Stone Temple Pilots
“The Trooper” – Iron Maiden
“Unsung” (Live in Chicago) – Helme
“Woman” – Wolfmother
“YYZ” – Rush

Activision announces DJ Hero, Guitar Hero 5 & Band Hero

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It’s long been mooted and now it’s official. Activision is releasing a dance music version of their music games called DJ Hero. It’s coming out this autumn and just in time for the Christmas rush.

The turntable controlled title will be accompanied by the fifth version of Guitar Hero and a family friendly incarnation of the rock classic simply called Band Hero. GH5 sounds pretty much identical to World Tour except with a new track list. You’ll be able to change difficulty levels, band members and swap in and out of songs on the fly but that doesn’t seem like ground breaking stuff. Still, looking forward to it nonetheless.

Band Hero will feature poppier top 40 hits and is generally designed not to scare off mums, dads and a few girlfriends too, whereas is DJ Hero is for hip-hop, R&B, Motown, electronica and dance. Looking forward to the track lists. Got my fingers crossed for some gangster rap.

(via Slashgear)

Activision accused of sabotaging development of DJ Hero competitor

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The world of big-budget game development is got particularly murky today as Activision, who will be releasing the forthcoming DJ Hero title, was accused of interfering with a contract and misappropriating trade secrets relating to the development of a competing title.

“Scratch: The Ultimate DJ” is the game in question, which is being developed by a company called 7Studios and published by lawsuit-filer Genius Products. The latter alleges that Activision approached it to buy Scratch, but when the company turned down the offer, Activision bought the developers (7Studios) instead. Now, Genius claims, Activision and 7Studios have been withholding code, controllers and other products so that the launch of Scratch will be delayed.

Whether the lawsuit succeeds will depend very much on what the contract between 7Studios and Genius says. If 7Studios has indeed been sharing proprietary technology with Activision and withholding code then there might be trouble. For the moment, 7Studios are continuing work on the game, but given the legal situation the whole thing has got into, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole project ends up eventually cancelled.

Full text of lawsuit (via Variety)

Guitar Hero World Tour and why you must own it

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I bought Guitar Hero on Friday night. I left Shiny Towers the minute I tapped my last key and made a beeline for Oxford Street, home of crowds, that horrible eternally vomiting zombie and one of the few stretches of road still left with more than one movies, games and music shops still standing.

I’d walked past the remains of a credit crunched Zavvi and then up and down between GAME and HMV trying to work out the best deal on guitar packs for either GHIV or Rock Band 2. Which was more expensive was less the issue than which game had the best tracks, after all, it was pay day. Who cares about being broke at the end of the month when you can stay in, turn on and rock out? That’s budgeting baby.

So, there I was, on a sunny Friday evening, the first nights of summer in the air; beautiful people in beautiful clothes spilling out of pubs reclaiming the streets, golden light shining through pint glasses – and me, walking past with an oversized box embarrassing one of HMV’s larger bags, heading underground and home to lock myself away from the world and screen hard. A little part of me felt guilty but I soon smothered that small voice with a series of rationalisations, and six pack of Carlsberg Export just to make sure.

I can’t really give you many more details of the evening itself save the enjoyment of putting together my shiny, new, sunburst strat-like axe, cracking the first tin open and taking it from there. Suffice to say that, by the time I had my first gig under my belt, I was onto can three and on my feet posing at the imaginary crowd in my front room with further affirmation that I do indeed rock.

I played the game for most of the weekend between the odd trip out to prove to my girlfriend that I haven’t slipped back into the days of my Everquest addiction and I’ve completed about 60% of it, so far, somewhere between easy and medium levels on lead guitar with one hard in the bag in the shape of About a Girl (Unplugged) – Nirvana.

Now, this isn’t supposed to be so much a review as a look at guitar games for those who haven’t yet got involved, but, all the same, I’m going to suggest you buy Guitar Hero World Tour. I’m not going to say that either Rock Band or Guitar Hero is a good way to get into playing an instrument for real. It isn’t, with perhaps only the drums as any kind of realistic indication of a transferable skill.

I can’t play the guitar and I never will. I spent years as a teenager trying to figure out how to make a good sound out of the damn thing and I just couldn’t get to grips with the chord changes or even how to strum properly which I always found incredibly frustrating because I’m neither a-rhythmical nor without a decent level of musical ability.

I’ve even got long fingers for getting round the bar chords but I’ve never made it beyond an attempted intro to Spaceboy by Smashing Pumpkins and the first few notes of Purple Haze. I’m not Hendrix. I never will be, but these games offer me that piece of pure rock emotion that I always deserved.

These games are hard enough to make you feel like you’ve got talent but not so impossible and painstaking as doing it for real, and the idea is that you adjust the difficulty levels as you get to know the songs and as they get easier. It’s the only game I can ever remember playing that isn’t done as soon as you complete it the first time round regardless of whether you happened to select Beginner all that time ago when you clicked on New Game.

You don’t even have to bother with the tracks you don’t like. I have absolutely no desire to do anything with the entire Tool gig other than get through it but I’ll sit there one Sunday practising Wind Cries Mary in the recording studio over and over at the slowest speed until I can finally play the thing on Expert. Why? Because some part of me that bought hundreds of albums, downloaded thousands of mp3s and spent summer after summer in the muddy fields of England deserves to be Hendrix even if only for 1% of the satisfaction of playing a gig in front of the cheering crowds. That’s what these games give you. You can be a legend, if only in your own front room.

RB and GH do cost a lot of cash. Granted, but I’d put GHIV in my top five games of all time. I’m not saying they’re for everyone. In fact, there’s only one type of person who’ll like them: those who like games – all of you – and also like music – 98% of you. So, if you’re in that 98% of people reading this, I suggest you get your wallet out now and either head here or here. You have been told.

Guitar Hero / Rock Band

DJ Hero coming this year

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Not really into guitars? More a fan of the humble DJ? Well, don’t worry – Activision’s got a videogame for you too. The games publisher’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, has confirmed that DJ Hero is in production. He told CNBC:

“We have this product called DJ Hero coming out later this year which is a turntable that you can actually play competitively, spin discs and mix on”

He also talked up the benefits of online play and tacky plastic peripherals. I’m with him on the former, but I’m not sure about the latter. I’m hoping that DJ hero will cater for Indie DJs, too.

(via Gamesindustry.biz)

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