Guitar Hero is a series of music rhythm game video games first released in 2005, in which players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing primarily lead, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar across numerous songs. Players match notes that scroll on-screen to colored fret buttons on the controller, strumming the controller in time to the music in order to score points, and keep the virtual audience excited. The games attempt to mimic many features of playing a real guitar, including the use of fast-fingering hammer-ons and pull-offs and the use of the whammy bar to alter the pitch of notes. Most games support, single player modes, typically a Career mode to play through all the songs in the game, and both competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes. With the introduction of Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008, the game includes support for a four-player band including vocals and drums. The series initially used mostly cover versions of songs created by WaveGroup Sound, but most recent titles feature soundtracks that are fully master recordings, and in some cases, special re-recordings, of the songs. Later titles in the series feature support for downloadable content in the form of new songs.
Hero Download Movies
Despite early success, the series, along with the overall rhythm game genre, suffered from poor sales starting in 2009. Despite asserting consumer research suggested continued solid demand for the series, Activision later stated that the series was on hiatus for 2011, amid the development of a seventh main installment that was later cancelled as the emerging product was considered to be of poor quality. Activision later shut down sales of the series' downloadable content, although users who purchased material from it previously may still play what they bought.
No further downloadable content for either Guitar Hero or DJ Hero was made after February 2011,[26] though Activision committed to releasing content that was already in development by that time due to fan response;[27] later, in a move described by Game Informer as "the final nail in [the series'] coffins",[28] Activision announced it would discontinue all DLC sales for the series without revoking access to tracks already bought as of March 31, 2014.[29] Though Activision had moved away from the Guitar Hero series, the lessons learned helped them and developer Toys for Bob to handle the manufacturing and outsourcing issues that came with the highly successful Skylanders toy and video game franchise.[30]
In April 2015, Activision announced a new entry in the series, titled Guitar Hero Live.[31] The title was developed by Activision's internal studio FreeStyleGames, who previously had worked on the DJ Hero spinoff titles. FreeStyleGames were given free rein to reboot the Guitar Hero series for next-generation consoles. One of their first innovations was to drop the standard five-button guitar controller, ultimately designing a six-button guitar controller, with two rows of three buttons each, allowing them to mimic actual guitar fingering. Guitar Hero Live was released with both a career and an online mode. The career mode used full-motion video taken from the perspective of a lead guitarist underneath the note highway, to create an immersive experience to the player. The online mode, called GHTV, discarded the previous downloadable content approach and used a music video channel approach to stream playable songs to players, adding new songs to the catalog on a weekly basis. The game was released in October 2015.
DJ Hero was announced by Activision in May 2009. Prior to the announcement, the company had purchased FreeStyleGames, a small developer of music games, to help produce localized downloadable content for Guitar Hero games and a then-unannounced music game, later revealed to be DJ Hero.[68] DJ Hero uses a special turntable-based controller for players to perform with on various song mixes in the game. The game also incorporates the use of a Guitar Hero controller on ten specially arranged tracks; Bright suggested that future Guitar Hero games after Guitar Hero 5 could include the use of the turntable control.[69]
Guitar Hero III Mobile was released for mobile phones in 2007 and 2008, and was developed by MachineWorks Northwest LLC. The base version of the game includes 15 songs from both Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero III, and has released a three-song add-on pack every month since January 2008. The title has been downloaded by users one million times, with both Verizon and Hands-On Mobile claiming that over 250,000 songs are played a day on the platform.[77]The two companies produced two other mobile-based Guitar Hero games; Guitar Hero III: Backstage Pass, released in July 2008, adds role-playing elements to manage the band's success in addition to the core rhythm game,[78] while the mobile version of Guitar Hero World Tour, released in December 2008, expands each included track for play on both lead guitar and drums, mimicking the expansion of the console series to the full band.[79]
Activision and Konami, who had previously worked together to make sure that the Guitar Hero series meets with Konami's patents on music games, in conjunction with Raw Thrills, developed an arcade console version of the game, titled Guitar Hero Arcade, distributed to arcades in early 2009. The game is completely based on the Guitar Hero III gameplay, but reducing some of the features such as the use of the Whammy bar, Star Power Button (Star Power may only be activated by lifting the Guitar) and Practice Modes, but keeping the ability to download new songs for the cabinet from the Internet.[83] The arcade game has come under some scrutiny by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), who believe the use of the game in arcades is equivalent to "public performances" and seek additional fees to be paid by operators of the game.[84]
Many of the Guitar Hero games developed for the recent generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii) support downloadable content, allowing players to purchase new songs to play in the respective titles. Songs each cost approximately $2 through the various online stores for the console's platform. Prior to Guitar Hero 5, downloadable content for earlier games will not work in other games in the series, save for songs from Metallica's Death Magnetic, which were available for Guitar Hero III, World Tour, and Metallica.[101] Existing World Tour downloadable content for World Tour will be forward-compatible with Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero[99] and Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock, and for a small fee, some songs from both Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero Smash Hits can be exported to both Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero, limited by music licensing.[102] Activision has also stated that they are considering a monthly subscription service to deliver downloadable content to user for future games.[103] Guitar Hero World Tour introduced a music creation mode that will allow players to create and share songs (excluding vocals) via the "GHTunes" service, which was also used in all other Guitar Hero games and Band Hero since its inclusion. The creation tools were improved with Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero to allow longer songs and other means of generating songs in real-time.
Prior to the release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Activision worked with the iTunes Store to provide more than 1300 tracks of Guitar Hero-related music across more than 20 compilations, including most of the tracks from the games in the series, called "Guitar Hero Essentials". These compilations, such as "Killer Guitar Solos" and "Guitar Anthems of the '80s", include songs related to but not contained within the Guitar Hero series. Dusty Welch of RedOctane stated, "Where there's music, there's Guitar Hero, and with iTunes, we are able to provide fans with a central location for downloading their favorite rock anthems."[107] Following the merger of Activision and Blizzard, the new company announced plans to create an alternative to iTunes based on the Guitar Hero brand that would allow for downloading songs and their associated note tracks for the Guitar Hero games.[108]
Upon release, the first game was seen as an unexpected hit, earning over US$45 million with about 1.5 million copies sold.[162][163][164] Guitar Hero II was significantly more financially successful, with over 1.3 million copies sold and sales over US$200 million.[162][165] Guitar Hero III, according to Activision, was the first single video game to sell more than US$1 billion at retail, with nearly 3.5 million copies sold during the first seven months of 2008.[166][167] World Tour continued the series' high sales records with 3.4 million units sold in the United States during 2008.[168] More than 60 million downloadable tracks have been purchased across the series as of February 2010.[13] Both Guitar Hero III and World Tour were listed on a March 2011 list from the NPD Group of top-grossing games in unadjusted sales in the United States since 1995; Guitar Hero III tops the list with total sales of $830.9 million.[169]
The series has also been criticized for its release model in contrast to the Rock Band series, causing some players to hold contempt towards Activision.[212][213] Harmonix considered the Rock Band series as a "music platform", and supported it with downloadable content and the ability to import songs from its games and expansions into most other games of the series.[214] Critics argued that Guitar Hero should have been doing the same, either through releasing expansions that could be incorporated into the main games of the series, or by issuing the songs as downloadable content.[215][216][217][218] The release of Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, reworking older songs from the series to full four-instrument band support but otherwise adding no additional material, was called "the definition of 'milking'" by reviewers, with no observable technical limitation as to why the songs could not be added as downloadable content.[212][216][219][220][221] Ars Technica recognized that licensing issues might have limited when songs from one single game could be played in others of the series (such as the case for The Beatles: Rock Band), but that such cross-compatibility should have been a high priority for rhythm games.[222] Furthermore, some expansions were praised for the additional content beyond the note-matching gameplay; Guitar Hero: Metallica is considered to be one of the series' best works to be developed by Neversoft in part due to the care that the developers took with imaging the band and the available extras for the game.[215] Activision later revealed that both Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero would support playing songs from both Guitar Hero World Tour (both on-disc and downloadable content) and Guitar Hero Smash Hits, with music licensing being the only limiting factor on which songs could be made forward-compatible.[102] 2ff7e9595c
コメント