I wonder if a fighter pilot would feel the same way about me playing Star Fox as I feel about you playing Guitar Hero. Yes, I do mean YOU.

You kids with your iBoxes and your X-Phones, lurching about with your  Wii steering wheels, Wii fridges, and Wii windows that display a cartoon image of the Wii street you Wii live on… I’ve seen you standing there with your fake plastic guitar, measuring the accuracy of your pretend rock music. And, though it pains me to say it, I’m beginning to hate you.

I don’t want to hate you, but that’s the way we’re headed, so I think it’s important for you to know that what you’re doing is wrong.

For the same price as a Wii with Guitar Hero (£270), you could get an Epiphone Les Paul 3-pick up Black Beauty. It takes 20 minutes to learn three chords, and another 20 minutes to write a song. By the time you’ve completed Guitar Hero on the hardest setting, you could be signed and on tour with The Shit Dragons, or whatever it is you call your actual band (you guys are AWESOME by the way – looking forward to your difficult second album).

Here’s why I hate Guitar Hero: Guitar Hero simulates something you can do in real life for the exact same amount of effort as just doing the thing in real life. It’s like high energy mime. It’s worse than mime, it’s mime squared. While most decent games do a good job of passing the time, Guitar Hero turns around and spits in the time’s face as it jogs by. And yet, for some reason, you like it.

To demonstrate this theory (and it is only a theory), here are the games I have enjoyed in the past, and proof that all of them would take more effort for less reward if you attempted to do them in real life…

Street Fighter II (SNES)

Ha-Do-Ken!

I do not lie on my CV, so if my CV says that I completed Street Fighter II on the hardest setting with every character except Zangief (and it does), then I did. To this day, I remain unstoppable as Blanka or Ken on the original SNES version, yet there is no cause that I feel passionate enough about in my own real world to warrant getting in a ring with Ryu and risking a blue fireball in the face.

Grand Theft Auto (Playstations 1, 2 and P)

OK, driving fast around town is fun and so perhaps is extorting money from legitimate businesses, but the best parts of the Grand Theft Auto series would not bode well in the real world, i.e. cruising around the city, looking for hilarious places to leap out of burning cars, roll across the road, and clunk an unsuspecting police officer on the head with a bat. In a real city, you’d be facing serious burns (the fiery kind and the frictiony kind), and probably a criminal record. Nobody wants that.

Goldeneye (N64)

Is he armed? Who knows?! Best to shoot him just in case. Or not. Argh!

Sneaking around, killing spies, hoping there’s a bullet proof vest lying around behind the next barrel of petrol… This sounds like a really stressful job, even with the cheats on. Thankfully it goes away when you turn the N64 off and you don’t have a license to kill anyone.

Mario Kart (SNES, N64)

What is his problem?

Racing Go-Karts against a dragon, a monkey, a princess, two plumbers, a weird armadillo man, Mussolini’s gay cousin, and a man with a mushroom for a head (all of whom can launch dead turtles at you to make you crash, whereupon you are rescued you from tumbling into infinity by a little orange potato man who sits on a cloud with a fishing rod) is more a waking nightmare than a fun day out. Best avoided.

Speedball 2 (Atari ST)

The graphics were amazing, though

This was the arguably the best sports game ever not to be based on a real sport. It took the form of a ball game where your team aimed to land a steel ball in the other team’s goal more times than they landed it in yours. A bit like football then, except that your opponent can score 10 points for injuring you in face, only to injure you again when you are substituted back into the game after all of your other team mates are knocked unconscious. You really don’t want that.

The Sims (PC)

Drown me

On the surface, The Sims is designed to simulate exactly the things most of us do in real life: washing our hands, eating meals, reading books, going to work, weeing, adopting babies, going to bed… It all seems fairly banal and real-life-friendly, but it’s not. First of all, it’s time-condensed, so you don’t actually have to stand there scrubbing your bits as your Sim takes a shower; second of all, The Sims live at the mercy of a cruel and whimsical god who is capable of drowning them by selling the steps to the pool.

Silent Hill (Playstation 2)

Not in my abandoned hospital, thank you very much

The opening sequence involves running through fog for ten minutes, followed by a swift change of reality that turns the world into a hellish landscape of twisted steel and rotting meat. A world where wild dogs and giant chicken people emerge from the shadows out to bite you in the night when all you have to fend them off is a bit of old pipe. I shouldn’t need to explain.

Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (N64)

Zelda, in real life

OK, I admit it. There is a part of me that wants to be a young hero with a sword and a horse who can save the world over and over again. But it’s magic and pretend, so I can’t.

Snake (old Nokia phone)

That snake wriggles around in solitary confinement, eating blocks that look like his own rear end and face as he tries to avoid bumping into himself. That’s just time consuming and embarrassing.

Tetris (Gameboy)

I don’t want to be the man responsible for manipulating geometrical bricks into tidy positions, only to have them disappear from existence every time I complete a row. Neither would my job would not be helped as the effects of gravity increase exponentially towards the end of the day. Rubbish.

Pro-Evolution Soccer (Playstations 1 through 2)

Wind, rain, mud, running about and getting kicked in the toes – these are all things I could do without. Aside from that, I think I might quite enjoy playing football. If the game forced me to do all of those things, I’d probably either play real football or not bother. This is why I don’t get Guitar Hero – it makes you do all the things you’d need to do to play a guitar, but you don’t learn to play… everyone’s laughing at you.

The only other game I can think of that compares to Guitar Hero is Solitaire on the PC, a card game for people who should be doing something else. Solitaire forces you to play Solitaire in the same way you would in real life – in fact, it’s better than Guitar Hero because it doesn’t prevent you from getting better at playing Solitaire, which isn’t possible anyway; it just robs you of your time and leaves you feeling slightly embarrassed if anyone ever catches you.

It’s time for Guitar Hero to carry the same weight of shame that Solitaire does, so please… either get yourself a real guitar, or minimise that shit when you see me coming. I’m watching you.

This was a guest post by Jimi Odell from Blogtired. He’s not joking, you know.

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Times have changed. Granted, you may be obese through to an addiction of Ginsters pasties, but that doesn’t matter. Back in the old days you may have had no musical ability, but all that has changed due to the creation of Guitar Hero. You can almost be as good as Slash as you press a few coloured buttons in time to the ones on the screen. Now sodden Coldplay have only donated a couple of songs. Preaching about the environment is optional.

Guitar Hero is a stroke of genius. It’s the only time you’d get to be a rockstar. Minus the drugs, drink, groupies, sex orgies, wild hotel antics and er… the live experience of performing to 30,000 screaming fans who want your babies.

Has the game inspired a new generation of musicians? We bloody hope not, because we are suffering enough with wet bands like The Kooks, The Feeling, Scouting For Girls and The Hoosiers. At least The Red Hot Chilli Peppers had the decency to bugger off for a year.

The most rock n roll thing you can actually do with the game is smash the controller up. Granted it cost around £40/50 but would you do the same to a £1000 guitar? If you had any sense, you probably wouldn’t. But then again we don’t know you. With clone versions of the game spawning other instruments, you can have your own virtual band! We recommend having real arguments to make it a bit more true to life. Isolating the drummer or firing the singer just before a virtual gig will get the fireworks going.

So with high profile bands featuring The Ramones and Deep Purple you’d think any expansion pack would carry on this vibe. Sadly not, the publishers have gone for a weedier down tempo vibe with Coldplay. They must have a new album to promote or something. If song was bad enough to make you cry, how will you cope knowing there are three tracks used altogether?

“Included in the pack will be new single ‘Violent Hill’, classic track ‘Yellow’ and the high-octane ‘God Put a Smile Upon Your Face.”

Hecklerspray won’t stand for this. So much so that we are zipping up our trousers and refusing to rock out with our cocks out.

Read More:

Coldplay To Release ‘Guitar Hero’ Tracks – Digital Spy

But something worries us – the next Guitar Hero expansion pack is going to be about Aerosmith alone. And, obviously, the trouble with that is that Aerosmith are a giant sack of donkey bums. By copping out this badly, Neversoft had better pull its finger out and make sure that Guitar Hero 4 is full of songs that don't make us want to lose the will to live. Songs like these.

You might not agree with some of these choices – and you definitely won't agree with all of them – so feel free to leave any other suggestions you have in the comment box. Meanwhile, here's our massively subjective list of songs that deserve to be included in Guitar Hero 4…

10 – The Bronx, White Guilt

Part of the appeal of Guitar Hero undoubtedly comes from flouncing around your living room with a gruesome pout plastered across your face, and White Guilt is a song that'd let you do that in spades. Like a distilled, updated Guns 'N Roses, it's got enough strut to please the hair metal fans, enough rawness to please the punks and exactly the right tone to fit Guitar Hero's classic rock mandate. And if completing it could unlock a homeless rabbit costume then that'd be even better.

9 – Steely Dan, Reelin' In The Years

Steely Dan. You heard. Now, before you start threatening to string us up by our nutsacks for blaspheming in such an awful way, just hear us out. There's a certain type of Guitar Hero 3 player – let's call them 'wankers' – who enjoy nothing more than going online and filling up their side of the setlist with Through The Fire And Flames again and again even though a) the song's shit and b) they're horrible BO-stinking metal fans who know that they'll beat you because they never do anything else. The best weapon to retaliate with? That's right, the sodding Dan. Plus, you can't deny that you secretly want to have a go at the solo two minutes in.

8 – Beck, E-Pro

Not Beck's best song by a long stretch, but it's easy and beginner-friendly – and it beats the shit out of Slow Ride, wouldn't you say?

7 – Duelling Banjos

The song that multiplayer Guitar Hero was made for, frankly. Plus, if you play Guitar Hero as much as some of the people we know do, there's a strong chance that you're probably starting to look quite inbred. Hacked here for Guitar Hero 2, but surely it’s time for an official release.

6 – Lou Reed, White Light White Heat (Live) Hear sample

No, not the Velvet Underground original – the live version from 1974's Rock N Roll Animal. The version where Lou Reed takes everything that was good about the original, throws it in the bin and covers whatever's left with widdly guitars. And yodelling. We feel the widdly guitars/yodelling combination has been sorely overlooked on Guitar Hero thus far.

5 – Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash

We've always though it'd be nice if Guitar Hero had a long multipart song in it that wasn't One by Metallica because, you know, it's One by Metallica for God's sake. Nobody wants to listen to that more than a couple of times a decade. So instead, why not use the title track from Stephen Malkmus' new album? Starts off fiddly and quiet, quickly turns into a tendon-snapping wig-out and then collapses into an exhausted heap at the end. Probably like you would if you managed to get a perfect score on expert with it.

4 – Love, Orange Skies

Guitar Hero shouldn't be exclusively about neck-snapping rock, and Orange Skies would offer the lushest of pace-changes. It's laid-back, not insultingly easy to play and, well, just listen to it. It's bloody lovely.

3 – Iron Maiden, Run To The Hills

Not exactly giant Iron Maiden fans around here, but even we can't shake the suspicion that Guitar Hero fans travelled back in time and gave Run To The Hills to Iron Maiden just because it'd be so much fun to play on Guitar Hero. And, yes, we know it's on Rock Band. But we haven't bloody got Rock Band, have we?

2 – Dinosaur Jr, Almost Ready

Quite honestly, any Dinosaur Jr song ever recorded would make us play Guitar Hero until our arms fell off, but after a long period of contemplation we've decided to offer Almost Ready – the opener to last year's comeback Beyond album. You'd have to be an idiot not to see why – the intro alone would test the fiercest Guitar Hero player, not to mention all the freefalling solos. Look at David Letterman's face at the end – if he likes Almost Ready then Guitar Hero definitely would.

1 – Magazine, Shot By Both Sides

How this hasn't made it onto a Guitar Hero instalment yet beggars belief. Listen to that solo. Listen to it. Now imagine hitting a bunch of coloured buttons in time along with it. Feels good, doesn't it? And then there's the chorus – tricky, but not tricky enough to stop you windmilling your arms around with one foot on the coffee table at the same time. Guitar Hero people – we urge you, stick this on Guitar Hero 4. We'll love you forever for it. And isn't our love the reason why you got into this crazy business in the first place?