After a long hiatus, Activision revealed yesterday that plastic guitar wielding series Guitar Hero is back. Titled Guitar Hero Live, the first 'Hero game in five years sees the reinvention of the formula that made the series so popular.
With a new guitar controller featuring 6 buttons across two rows ($99 Gets you the new guitar controller plus a platform specific game) and a new first person game perspective , FreestyleGames--the studio behind DJ Hero-- have spent the past few years revitalizing what they called a "tired genre".
Instead of the 5 colored buttons that you would normally see on a Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar, they've replaced that with three black and three white buttons across a smaller area of the guitar. This will supposedly emulate the feeling of playing a real guitar more closely than the previous versions.
The new first person perspective has the player positioned on the stage looking out at the audience rather than looking from the audience perspective at the band. Gone also is the cartoon-y feel of previous games, swapped out in favor of actual humans in the audience and on stage with you in pre-recorded situations. Do well during the song, and the audience goes crazy with the band nodding and having a blast. Do poorly and the game switches to the audience freaking out and possibly throwing things at you like bottles or tomatoes.
It looks to be an incredible experience and we cannot wait for it to launch this fall on Xbox One, Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Playstation 3, and WiiU.