So if you want your band to develop into a tight group, you’ll want to spend at least some time playing together in a real-world setting — even if it’s just to supplement your online rehearsals. Real-time online collaboration isn’t a substitute for practicing together in person. That said, there are times when it makes sense.
My time to play games, even with this job, can be limited. Anyone out there with kids understands this. When I get a chance to play a game, even for review, I take it seriously. Now I know what true hell is, and it's very simple: it's when you have DJ Hero 2, not to mention Rock Band 3, in your game collection and for some godawful reason you have to play Power Gig: Rise of the Six String instead.
But I played it. For hours. This is a game where the competition is insane, so it better bring something impressive to the table immediately. Instead, the interface is terrible, the peripheral seems like it was thrown in there just to add a bullet point to the box and marketing materials, and there isn't a single thing the game does better than the alternatives.
Power Gig: Rise of the Six String
xbox*, ps3
- Release Date: now
- MSRP: $60 to $230
* = platform reviewed
Why is there a real guitar in this box?
The main gimmick of Power Gig has always been the inclusion of a real guitar. Yes, this guitar has strings, and working pickups, and it's basically a budget guitar with a plastic body and some electronics allowing it to work on your gaming system. Wirelessly, thankfully. Plug it into an actual amp, and it will work just fine. You can also use this controller on other rhythm games, although I have no clue why you would choose that particular punishment.
The thing is, using an actual guitar on a rhythm game pretty much sucks. Even the Pro Guitar for Rock Band 3, the $150 Mustang, offers buttons instead of strings. It's smart. Moving your fingers quickly between frets to play in the way a standard rhythm game asks you to just don't make sense when you have to push down an actual string, even if any of the six strings will register the hit. Strumming actual strings is also annoying, because you've lost the tactile response from the strum bar the game controllers provide. Plus, the strings are locked down by a rubber stopper that you can raise and lower to keep the game from recognizing multiple strums when then strings vibrate. So why bother with a real guitar at all?
It gets worse: the game never takes advantage of the fact you have a real instrument. It won't teach you any guitar skills, and since many of the songs require you to hold down two frets at once on any string, it teaches you bad habits. Fretting a string on the second and fourth fret made no sense to my hands, and felt actively wrong since I know how to play guitar. Playing the game this way just felt imprecise and lame; I soon wanted to get out an older Guitar Hero controller to play.
While Rock Band 3 offers the Pro Mode that teaches you how to play the song in a more realistic fashion, along with helpful lessons so you can teach yourself the fundamentals of playing a real guitar, the only thing Power Gig gives you is the option to turn on Power Chords, two-fingered chords that play during certain sections of certain songs. Since the note charts both before and after these sections are gibberish in terms of real guitar playing, what's the point? It feels like a game that rewarded actual guitar skills tried to emerge from the mess, but was smacked down. It makes no sense to sell a game with a working guitar and then do nothing of note with that peripheral. Before you ask, don't think about picking this up from the bargain racks—where it's likely already headed—the guitar controller does not work in Rock Band 3 on anything but the standard guitar mode. I tried.
There is a story here
The game also has to reinvent many wheels, and things we're already familiar with, such as Star Power or Overdrive, have been given new, ridiculous names. Allow me to quote from the manual:
As you play a gig and become attuned to the mojo field, your Attunement Level rises. The Attunement Level measures how well you're playing overall. The triangular seals that measure your Attunement level are the Seals of the Great Composers. The seals represent the Composers' favor and approval.
Real Guitar Dj Songs
You can also change your background by rocking out, and this is called 'MojoMorphosis.' You'll explore all this if you suffer through the story, but the playing field itself is terrible. Instead of the pseudo-3D effect where the notes seem to be traveling towards you, you get a flat area for the notes to come down, and the rest of the UI elements are confusing and poorly thought out. Everything looks like it was taken from a better game, adjusted so no one could sue, and then slapped on.
I can't think of anything nice to say, except that Eric Clapton deserves to be included in a better game. There is no reason for this to exist, and no reason for you to think about buying it. The inclusion of a guitar is neat, but it hurts the game that it was packaged with, especially since no one thought it was a good idea to actually build a game around that guitar. When your main competitor owns the field this cleanly, you need to bring everything you have to compete. This game barely showed up at all.
Can I play something fun, now? (Editor's note: No!)
Verdict: Skip
Freestyle Games' Jamie Jackson hands me an odd, beige coloured slab of plastic, a shrunken facsimile of semi-hollow Gibson 335 guitar. It's non-functional, but it's easy to see where the six buttons spread over two rows at the bottom of the fret board are meant to be. On the body there are several knobs, along with the familiar strum bar of the Guitar Hero series. Made during rapid prototyping on a 3D printer, the brittle guitar (I'm warned not to drop it several times) never made its way into full production. With plans for pearl inlays, multiple non-functional knobs, and gold-coloured detailing resulting in the guitar costing over £60 ($100) just to manufacture, it was deemed too expensive by the powers that be at Activision.
At one stage, Guitar Hero Live—the first new Guitar Hero game since 2010's Warriors of Rock—didn't even have a guitar controller. Early prototypes used console camera systems in an attempt to turn drunken air guitar (admit it, we've all done it) into a game. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. But this was all part of the process, a 'washing off of what Guitar Hero was,' as Jackson tells it. Other prototypes would follow, including the first iteration of what would become the Guitar Hero Live guitar, which was made out of the plastic trunking that lines the walls of Freestyle Games' Leamington Spa studio, and some buttons ripped out of an old controller.
This wasn't an entirely foreign process to Freestyle Games. As the studio behind the cult classic DJ Hero, it had been down a path of rapid prototyping before. Many of the original prototypes for DJ Hero were built inside Jackson's garage, the product of smashed up Guitar Hero controllers and some shoddy soldering. By building a guitar out of trunking—something that would later become known as the 'Frankentar'—the team could easily toy with different configurations, moving the buttons around to mess with the fundamental mechanics of the series. By switching to two rows of three buttons, the awkward pinkie presses of old—something even real guitar players have a hard time with—were removed, making gameplay more accessible, but also allowing for the introduction of new, complex chord shapes.
This was the breakthrough moment. Paired with some basic graphics—a '1980s Atari type thing' I'm told—the basic gameplay of Guitar Hero Live was born. Oddly enough, Jackson didn't see the magic at first. 'I'll be totally honest with you: when the team presented it to me and Dave Osborne the design director, we looked at it and were like 'what the fuck are you doing? You can't change the buttons!' explained Jackson. 'But then we sat down and played it, and thought 'that was really cool, we take it back.' The end result is a game and a guitar that's comfortingly familiar, yet very different to the Guitar Hero games of old.
While notes still stream in from the top of the screen to the bottom along a note highway, now there are two different colours for notes: black for the top row of buttons and white for the bottom. Even for those that were Guitar Hero pros, this presents quite the challenge, particularly as chord shapes are introduced. Pushing down across a single row represents most power chords, with extensions on the bottom row adding in higher notes. Songs with open chords ape classic fingerings like the three-finger spread of an open C, or the claw-like grip of a G.
Despite this added complexity, the game remains true to its Guitar Hero roots. You still activate star power by tilting the guitar (or hitting a button by your palm), while jiggling on the whammy bar to add vibrato to those extended notes for extra points. The retail design of the guitar—the final product from all of Freestyle's prototyping—also maintains the same distance between the buttons as in Guitar Hero guitars of old, while also sporting a similar profile and body shape. It was very nearly bigger, though, like that earlier beige prototype. But Freestyle got its way with at least one love-it-or-hate-it aesthetic decision: the flashy gold highlights remain.
A game of two halves
Real Guitar Dj Music
It's the sole addition of bling to a game, and a studio, that prides itself on being—for want of a better word—real. It's hard to imagine a game on the scale of Guitar Hero Live, which is attached to one of the biggest games publishers on the planet, being made in such humble surroundings by a team of such personable human beings. But there's evidence of Live's impending release scattered around the studio: meeting rooms filled with computers and TVs for last-minute play testing, and computer screens in the kitchen that stream debugging information for Guitar Hero TV, the game's ambitious always-on music TV service.
In another room a team of musicians—most without any games industry experience—create note highways in MIDI software. They show me how, for each of the six buttons on the guitar and the open strum bar, there's a line of MIDI information for the note highway. Programming the timeline is as simple as clicking to input a block of MIDI information. The musicians start with the expert level—a note-for-note transcription to Live's six buttons—before stripping out notes to accommodate less skilled players. A peer review process ensures that, despite the missing notes, the song's basic rhythmical structure remains. When the song needs to be play-tested, potential note highways can be exported to a PC version of the game in seconds.
Elsewhere there are sound designers bashing out some Judas Priest on expert, testing the game's 70/30 (front/rear) 5.1 surround mix, while upstairs there's a newly formed analytics team amassing gigabytes of data on what songs people are playing, and how often they're being played. With a team of 180 people behind the scenes, it's a complex operation for a complex game. Divided into two parts—the online music video channel Guitar Hero TV (more on that later), and the offline campaign Guitar Hero Live—development at the studio is split down the middle: the former got a crash course in running a TV station, while the latter became film directors.
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Live's high-concept aesthetic, that of 'stage fright,' has resulted in a look that's quite unlike the Guitar Hero games of old. Instead of staring at an oddly animated 3D band, you get a full, live-action sequence of walking through Spinal Tap-like winding corridors of the backstage area, past the stage hands, and the groupies, and your fellow bandmates, before leaping up onto the stage in front thousands of adoring fans. Eventually, when the song gets underway, you're provided with an an eerily accurate first-person representation of playing the guitar in front of a live audience.
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The live-action footage looks modern in a way that even the most well-animated of 3D models never could, but for a studio used to pixels and polygons, it presented a huge technical challenge.