Part III - What makes music games so great?

This one's easy: music games let you party like a rock star. You invite a bunch of friends over for Guitar Hero or Rock Band and you can all be guitar legends or rock out on drums that go clack clack instead of boom boom or sing terribly off-key renditions of Alanis Morissette. Even if you are terrible at real music, set the game to easy or no-fail mode and you can feel like you are actually playing Free Bird in front of millions of screaming fans.

The games are the same basic formula as DDR - you match the notes flowing down (or up) the screen, and you rack up bigger and bigger combos as you play better. It's strange that by merely including a plastic guitar instead of a dance mat, the entire genre took off. Best Buy and Wal-Mart even have whole aisles now dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of hardware you need for these games. I don't think it was the peripherals that helped launch companies like harmonix into the stratosphere; I think it was the music.

DDR is techno music, house music, and trance music, with a few current pop hits sprinkled throughout. Guitar Hero is rock. Not only that, it's good rock. When the original Guitar Hero came out on PS2, nobody knew it would take off like it has. People would say, "Oh, another game that costs $90 because you have to get a fancy controller with it." Until they played it. The game had songs from everyone from Queen to Ozzy to Incubus to Pantera to the Stones. At first, every song on the game was a cover, but they were remarkably good covers. Harmonix really knew their stuff. Maybe their musical chops had been honed with Frequency and Amplitude, or maybe it helped that they were all musicians in real life. But they could tell the difference between a song that you'd want to listen to on the radio and a song that you'd like to play fake guitar to. When they found one that had both qualities, they would stick it in the game.

One thing not great about music games is the overlapping songs. There is 50 years of rock 'n' roll history to choose from, so why do we get a dozen songs that are the same on two games released barely month apart? I can understand band overlap - who doesn't want to be Kurt Cobain? - but making people pay almost 200 more dollars to play songs they've already played is almost criminal.

It's true: playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing real guitar, and if people actually practiced real instruments as much as they played games there would be a lot more starving artists on the streets begging for your change with their guitar. However, the drums are very similar to real life. You have a bass pedal and you use real drum sticks to play real drum songs. Move the pads a little farther away from each other and you have a real drum set. How many drummers for bands in the future will have gotten their start on Rock Band? We'll see.

Even though it's not the same as the real thing, playing fake guitar can be just as challenging as real guitar. You can't fake your notes. You can't play power chords instead of full bar chords. you can't tune to Drop D to make songs simpler. You have to hit every not that comes at you without making mistakes if you want the top score. Play Through the Fire and Flames on expert then try to tell me that it doesn't take real practice and real skill to be good at fake guitar just like real guitar.

With the invention of the Internet, face-to-face interaction in games has been, shall we say, stifled. Music games are bringing that back. Sure, you can play on the 'net with people on the other side of the world, but there's nothing like having your own Rock Band rockin' out in your living room, spilling beer all over your mom's couch. It recalls the days of the Halo LAN parties for the original Xbox, before Live had really taken off. Face time with like-minded peers has been lacking recently, not only in the game industry, but in other aspects of life as well. Its nice that, even in this troubled economy, you can still have some friends over for a good time. Thanks, music games.