My wife was kind enough to show me this article about Guitar Rising at Gizmodo, which looks like a great attempt at creating essentially a game based on guitar hero that can actually teach you to play the guitar. The game uses any real guitar hooked up to your sound card, featuring “actual songs” and tracking your accuracy much like your score is kept in Guitar Hero / Rock Band. I suppose the writer at Gizmodo considers the songs used in those games to be ‘fake songs’, but when they say things like:
I never got the whole Guitar Hero, Rock Band and their fake guitars playing thingie, which require so much practice to master that you may as well use a real guitar to become as good as Satriani. That’s why I love the idea of Guitar Rising…
You really have to wonder how much time they spent with the games in the first place. I highly doubt that after a month or two of playing the guitar I could fling out anything CLOSE to a rendition of ‘Knights of Cydonia’ or ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ like I can with Guitar Hero. Admittedly Rock Band is a step closer when it requires you have very dexterous and skilled people at the drums and microphone in order to beat most songs on hard or expert, there’s still very little comparison to the amount of time it takes to attain such skill with the actual instruments. I know a lot of us are sick of people who don’t like these games saying that we should spend our time “learning to play the instruments”, what they don’t understand is the feeling and excitement you get from the game when you are rocking out to your favorite song (or just Epic, over and over and over again) and it doesn’t sound like utter crap for the first hundred times you play it. Playing real instruments takes dedication, and to become that skilled with them it really requires a high level of passion for what you’re doing to get through the years of practice. Plus, why don’t they tell us to just go out and shoot people while we’re playing Halo?
Guitar Rising should be coming out for both PC and Mac, and will feature a wide range of song difficulties to ease beginners into the feel of playing a guitar as well as varying speeds to help learn particular songs. There is a quick video of the game being played over at Gizmodo that you should definitely check out.
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