The Music Video Game Guitar Rising - Will It Be as Popular as Guitar Hero?

A whole new generation seemed to develop that doesn't care if they play on a real instrument or not--just as long as they can get the feeling they're playing on a real one. But that's another debate about digital vs. acoustic. Being a pianist, I've grown to love the sampled sounds of a grand piano in the digital world on certain high-quality digital pianos such as Yamaha's Clavinova. When it comes to rock guitars, though, most people (just ten years ago) thought they'd never see one that could be used so simply in a music video game. Guitar Hero certainly wasn't the first of its kind to create a video game with a "guitar controller." GuitarFreaks was a popular arcade and home video game already back in the 90's with guitar controllers and letting you play along to famous rock anthems in a karaoke way. And certainly Guitar Hero has its other current competition in the way of Rock Band, though not quite as phenomenally popular.

It was inevitable that Guitar Hero would eventually get some competition that would attempt to right some wrongs that people might have wondered about. For those who want the feeling of playing a real guitar, Guitar Hero's guitar controllers make some feel as if they're merely playing around with a miniaturized toy, which it really is...and one easily breakable if not careful. For those who want the feel of playing on a real guitar, perhaps a new music video game coming out later this year called Guitar Rising will be more satisfying in a musically creative way.

The company that developed this (GameTank) had some smart thinking going on when they put this program together. They probably figured that why would someone want to just pretend to play guitar to those sampled rock tracks when they could easily learn to play some of those licks themselves if a program was designed intelligently to make it easily workable? Real guitarists were probably lamenting, too, that Guitar Hero and others like it were just teaching kids how to basically play air guitar with a little toy and not having the opportunity to learn how to really play some simple licks that could be learned in a few minutes with the proper direction.