I was having a little snoop around over on Games Press earlier on, where various publishers put up assets of their new games (think screenshots, videos and press releases). Unfortunately, save for a heap of Ninjatown videos – nope, not heard of it either – the only thing that caught my eye was a game from XS Games, titled PopStar Guitar.
Why, oh, why, did I click on that game? An almost embarrassing plethora of assets await after the jump.
Certainly, this isn’t news, but the musical genre – or to be specific, the ‘pretend you’re playing guitar’ genre – has reached saturation point. Naturally, this means that every publisher lacking in a big “killer app” is going to try and make their mark through what will be, first and foremost, a Guitar Hero clone.
It’s a little like all the games that caught the stealth bug following the release of Metal Gear Solid in the late 90s: everybody started including stealth levels as if it was some sort of modern day requirement of action games, and as a result there were some very, very frustrating experiences to be found because the AI was just utterly broken when compared to that of MGS‘ genetically-enhanced supersoldiers.
In the same way (Guitarfreaks and Rock Band aside) any game that has attempted to mimick the GH formula has ultimately failed. Just look at Rock Revolution: it’s the only other attempt out there and it blows. Not convinced by this though, XS have decided to take the genre on for itself in what it’s calling PopStar Guitar.
Oh dear. This can’t go well, can it? Of course it can’t; find out quite how much it screws up over the page.
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I must say, the fact that the songs in the trailer were playing at a pretty fast tempo and yet the “band” was playing along in good ol’ 2/4 time made me smile.
Yeah, the rhythm games have right about reached their peak and are starting to decline just like the majority of shooters did. You didn’t even mention the other bad band games on the Wii and Rock Revolution, Konami’s atrocity of the rhythm genre it once dominated.