Ars Technica has apparently picked up an excerpt of PSP exclusive Rock Band Unplugged’s track list. While the song list is pretty good looking, there’s some familiar looking stuff showing up here that we’ve seen in music games both recent and from a few years ago.
Seperate games aside, I’m thinking: are we running out of truly awesome songs?
Before we go any further, here’s the leaked list in full:
- 3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite”
- AFI – “Miss Murder”
- Alice in Chains – “Would”
- Billy Idol – “White Wedding, Part 1″
- Blink-182 – “What’s My Age Again?”
- Bon Jovi – “Livin’ On A Prayer”
- Boston – “More Than A Feeling”
- Foo Fighters – “Everlong”
- Jackson 5 – “ABC”
- Modest Mouse – “Float On”
- Nirvana – “Drain You”
- Pearl Jam – “Alive”
- The Police – “Message in a Bottle”
- Weezer – “Buddy Holly”
- The Who – “Pinball Wizard”
Some new songs, which I can imagine working very well; Buddy Holly, White Wedding, even ABC at a stretch. I have no doubt that Unplugged will be pretty fun to play as long as the control system is nailed: which it probably will be, since Harmonix have created several joypad-based rhythm games in the past.
But study the rest of the tracklist. Miss Murder, Livin’ On A Prayer, More Than A Feeling, Drain You, Message In A Bottle. All songs have appeared in either the Rock Band or Guitar Hero series in the past, and we’ve seen plenty of other examples in the past.
Hier kommt Alex by Die Toten Hosen has appeared no less than three times, in Guitar Hero III, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band. Doubtless there are plenty of other examples too.
Between this and the utterly, utterly lame setlist in Guitar Hero World Tour, I’m beginning to worry about what we’re going to do when developers run out of truly great songs to stick in music games. On Guitar Hero II - and, stretching it a bit, in game number three as well – my friends and I could pick out song after song we’d want to play since we knew it was already an awesome song.
On World Tour, we could barely pick out 5 or 6 songs from the back of the box; arguably the place where you’d find the “best” songs in the game. Whether this is a question of musical taste or not, I’m not sure. But to put it simply, we’re running out of well-known “great” songs to put in music games and so we’re resorting to sticking them on repeat.
Am I just overreacting? Could you simply accept playing the same songs over and over again with each tweak of the game formula? I can’t imagine everybody playing Livin’ On A Prayer for the 10th game in a row, even if the drum kit had 20,000 extra cymbals to smash. The big question I’m asking here though is this: if we are running out of songs, what do we do?
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No, they aren’t running out of great songs, they are running out of instantly-recognizable pop tunes. That’s the problem with RB/GH and the main reason I can’t play it anymore. It seems that they have backed themselves into a corner with big label music and can’t do anything but recycle the usual stuff, because of the licensing involved. As a musician and a self-proclaimed music freak, there are about 60+ artists in my library that will never see the light of day on those games, regardless of the high end stellar reviews of their music. An easy one would be The Flaming Lips or Soundtrack to Our Lives. Or even something simple as Alien Ant Farm or some indie band like Band of Horses. They need to broaden their collections in an independent direction to actually maintain any real up-to-date integrity with their games, methinks.
The thing is – and a reason why I’m not too keen on GHWT – without mainstream “hey I know this” songs people aren’t going to be interested. While I have no doubt that there are plenty of “indie” (for want of a better word) artists out there who produce excellent music that would translate excellently into Guitar Hero or Rock Band most people aren’t going to want to play it because they don’t know how it goes and hence the game becomes a chore rather than a plaything.
With a party game comes party restrictions; you wouldn’t put on some obscure shit nobody else had heard of at a house party or whatever, would you?
No but if they stretched to include more obscure things in the mix with the pop stuff, they would suffice to introduce newer bands to the crowds playing the game. A good example of this is the band The Mother Hips, who saw very little mainstream success before RB used three of their songs in the games. Now, they are not Britney Spears/Weezer big, but they have a new following through the career mode of the games, who opened them up to the new audience. Of course, I do take all of what I’m saying with a grain of salt for the reasons you mention, mainly because the attach rate of the average player for those games is ridiculous AND the majority of people playing those games may or may not even know of the DLC options that await them. SO all variable factors involved, I still stand by the idea that a broader song library would help them more than hinder, especially considering it’s cheaper to license most indie music, but I do see your point.
And yes, I would, I do, all the time, and usually only 2-3 out of 30some people complain about my musical tastes, but that’s usually because they are bent on Lil’ Wayne or whatever crap they are into.
I think the era of mainstream music games is near over. This is evidenced by the offshoot titles like Beatles: Rock Band, the Metallica thing, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, etc.
The music game genre will probably continue shooting off to the smaller target markets and you’ll get a lot of specialized, rather than AAA, releases. So it’s not likely there will be a lot of huge band licenses all piled in to one game any more.
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I still can’t believe no one has put “Layla” (by Derek and the dominoes) on their tracklist…
What I don’t understand is, even if Harmonix and Neversoft are going to continue reusing the same well-known artists, they should still be able to use new songs, right? I mean, if they are going to have a Bon Jovi song, why “Living on a Prayer”, which has already been in both Guitar Hero: WT and Rock Band 2? Why not “It’s My Life” or something? And I know that Blink-182, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam have more than one well known song, so why use the same ones over and over?
I would just like to add, for the record, Bon Jovi is terribad.