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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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
You seriously think that playing Guitar Hero is anything like the real thing? The guitar hero controller has five buttons on it – the equivalent of five notes. A standard six string / twenty-two fret guitar can play 47 distinct notes (and this is not even including chords – just individual notes). Does that sound like the same thing to you? And to suggest that the average person can pick up a guitar, learn to play it and write a song in the space of 40 minutes is just plain idiotic. I appreciate that you were just trying to come up with an witty intro for your (otherwise unrelated) article but come on, you can’t possible believe the crap you’ve written, can you?
Ahh speedball – i used to frikkin LOVE that game!!!! I played it on the Amiga and am now dedicating the rest of my evening to getting and playing it!
I just carry the shit from the car, then drink myself unconscious. Where’s my Roadie Hero game?
So you’re OK with Rock Band, then?
d.
Oh sure, it takes *exactly* the same amount of skill and dedication to play guitar well as to beat Guitar Hero. And it’s *easy* to pull together a band. Finding musicians that can play, that will commit to rehearsal, that’s a breeze: it’s just as hard to get a bunch of guys to come over and play Guitar Hero in your living room. And when you’re all playing in a New York club in front of an audience of 5 people, it is totally the same experience as emulating being a star in a band game.
But even though all that’s true, this is still a stupid article, because it’s apples and oranges. Playing guitar in guitar hero is not remotely like playing guitar (I’ve been told that playing drums on expert is pretty much like playing drums though, but I have to take other people’s words for that). It’s like playing a rhythm video game. Is DDR like going out dancing? No, and I go out dancing almost every night and prefer it to DDR. But I’ll still play DDR, because it’s not dancing, it’s playing a video game, and I like playing video games. Playing a music video game bears no more resemblance to doing the real thing than playing Half-Life prepares you for an alien invasion.
Sheesh.
I disagree. Half-Life teaches you small-unit tactics, how to lead the target with a machine-gun when taking down flying vehicles and to stay the fuck away from zombies. Especially ones with grenades. That’s all useful shit, right there.