Oh and he himself confesses, he does not play video games.

Why should he play video games? This is the world of video games now. You need to have a franchise, something you can make lots of different versions of and charge lots of money for each version, and launch a different version every year. You dont need to play it to sell it. You just need to see what the trend is, get one of those games, and turn on the milking machine.

This is what he did with Guitar Hero, and with Call of Duty. This is also what he couldn’t do with Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend, a game Activision got after they merged with Vivendi.

Last July, almost a year after Activision had dropped Tim’s game from their lineup Schafer said this:

“His obligation is to his shareholders,” Schafer tells Eurogamer. “Well, he doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he? I think there is a way he can do it without being a total prick. It seems like it would be possible. It’s not something he’s interested in.” (source)

I think that this is a totally understandable thing to say. Specially since after Kotick dropped your game, they then went after EA to try and stop them from publishing at all. It really is a dick move.

Well that’s Bobby Kotick for you. He then goes on to say that he’s never met Tim Schafer, that the decision to cut the game was because Double Fine (Schafer’s company) was always late, over budget and because “it doesnt seem like a good game”.

If Kotick had said, “Well, the project didn’t have the franchise power that we like our games to have”, that would be one thing. He instead, comes out and says that the game was not very good? According to who? Sales? It must be sales. Because the game was excellent.

Good things take time, and when you’re creating a world from scratch you cant really just rush through it.

Thats why Guitar Hero’s metacritic scores have hurt so much. Starting with a 91 in Guitar Hero, the latest game in the series dubbed “Warriors of Rock” (it would be #6 if numbered) scores a 73. There have been 11 Hero games (not counting portable consoles) between 2005 and 2010 and the average score is 79%. For comparison Rock Band, the main rival has had 5 games for the mayor consoles, including a Lego version for younger players with an average score of 84%. With the sixth game being released later this year which includes a keyboard and a “learn to play music” Pro mode.

Tired of music games? Well good, because now we’re going to talk about first person shooters. Call of Duty was making Activision tons and tons of money, in fact, they had two developers working on it at the same time. They had Infinity Ward doing most of the development work for the engine and then they had Treyarch doing the ‘hold-over’ game in the off-year.

This setup worked well, Call of Duty 4 was released (IW), then 5 (Treyarch), then Modern Warfare 2 (IW) and finally 6 is coming later this year (Treyarch).

Sadly Infinity Ward seemed to be tired of doing just Call of Duty and they thought they could expand and do something different. Well they got their wish, since the leads at IW were fired for insubordination and half the IW team defected to the newly formed Respawn Entertainment over at Electronic Arts.

I mean, Infinity Ward has made you so much money, all they wanted was a little artistic freedom. A development cycle off the treadmill. It ends up in drama. Everybody knew it would. Its the way Bobby Kotick does business. This is why Activision has replaced EA as the “evil” company in the last few years.

While EA has spent money creating and publishing new exciting franchises like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge. Allowing some developers to just build a big playground like Burnout Paradise, and even taking risks in some games that, while they may lack universal appeal, are too good to never be published like Brütal Legend. Activision has spent their time trying to make Guitar Hero formula (game + cheap accessory) work in other ways, like with DJ Hero and Band Hero (not counted in the above tally of Hero games) and with Tony Hawk (now with $100 skateboard!).

Now, before you tell me that Activision is just trying to survive, just remember that Activision’s name is actually Activision-Blizzard. Blizzard is operated quite differently than Activision though. Blizzard still concentrates on its own properties like StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo. Games that dont have many iterations yet make the company staggering amounts of money because of how addictive, polished and entertaining they are and their ridiculously long shelf life (Diablo II was released in 2000, its last patch was in March 2010). This is why I separate Activision from Blizzard whenever I talk about the company.

There is no better proof that you dont need to churn out crappy versions of games just to make a buck better than… Activision itself!

With all this being said. How they are not aching for money, how they can take risks and decide not to, and how they just decide to try and sell you plastic crap I will leave you with this. This is a quote from Bobby Kotick a few weeks ago about Respawn Entertainment, the people from Infinity Ward that he let go:

“That’s one of those really difficult decisions as the CEO of a company, where you step back and say, ‘No good is going to come of this. They’re going to leave and probably have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again, and we’re going to lose some talented people, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ And there wasn’t.” (source)

What a total prick.

Well, this has sucked.

In Rock Band mode the guitars just keep pressing X (green) in turbo mode, making it impossible to control the game. After some searching around it seems like this is an issue with Rock Band 2 and the way to fix it is to set the controller to Guitar Hero mode.

Now for the fun part, apparently firmware 3.10 broke the controllers. Well it didnt break them, it just made them not get their connection straight.

To fix this I made sure I had one Dual Shock taking slot 1. Then I proceeded to plug in the ‘footpedal’ in Rock Band mode, this should make the controller turn Blue. Then you need to go into Guitar Hero mode and hopefully it keeps the Blue light when it auto-adjusts. If it doesn’t then you need to keep turning the knob back to Rock Band and re-syncing until you do get the Blue light and then go into Guitar Hero mode.

This might take a few tries. Have patience. It sucks, I know!

Some have suggested using two Dual-Shocks so that the guitar is actually controller 3. This worked for me as well but i didn’t have any better luck than with just the one controller.

What if I have 2 Nyko Frontman guitars?

Its the same process for both I did one guitar first, and then the other (Blue and then Orange). It has been taking me like 10 minutes to get them to sync correctly, but once i do, they just work.

This is not the nicest of solutions, and I am honestly quite annoyed by this situation but the guitars work and I got the game for cheap. I’ll search around tonight and update this post if I find any better solutions.

UPDATE (11/29/2009) :

If the controllers come up SOLID RED in Guitar Hero mode, turn the knob back and forth (to Rock Band and then back to Guitar Hero) this will toggle the controller and make it try and find a new open channel. Wait for it to go to a new solid color, if it goes red again just turn the knob once more, repeat this until you get a different color. Its really not a pretty solution. *sigh*

While there are only 3 Rock Band SKUs in the horizon there seem to be atleast 5 billion Guitar Hero SKUs. I think I know which of the two franchises is following through on the whole ‘platform’ thing.

Lego Rock Band sounds cool but it was not what called my attention, it was all that orange.

Original Source: Joystiq

With that said, I feel that I have not talked much about a little phenomenon that has been going on for the last two years. Guitar Hero and it’s latest (greatest) competitor Rock Band. If you haven’t heard of these games I really think you are better off and I wont worry about mentioning them to you. Odds are you have so here is my take on them. Enjoy them while you can, pick the one you like the most, forget about the ‘competition’. If you have not bought a game yet, wait until they really make an announcement on it.

Activision and Harmonix will try their best to ruin this genre for everyone by releasing more and more SKUs and while Harmonix has been calling RockBand a ‘platform’ all this time I really don’t see it. Yet.

Guitar Hero was there first, the first game was a mild success but got enough people exicited for Guitar Hero 2 which was a complete breakout hit. Activision saw this and immediately started preparing Guitar Hero III and MTV/Harmonix saw an opportunity. Guitar Hero was great but it was mainly about the guitar, actually, it was ONLY about the guitar. Then came RockBand, which promised to expand the genre with the addition of a microphone and a drum set. These both sold like hot cakes.

Then of course came this year and how they needed to have new products again Rock Band made their “instruments” better in Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero  played catch-up adding all those instruments to their line-up with their Guitar Hero World Tour.

Rock Band retailed in the US for $180 for the complete set and it was not 100% compatible with Guitar Hero and vice versa. Rock Band songs were transferable to Rock Band 2, but only after paying a fee. Guitar Hero… well, you’re out of luck unless all your DLC is Metallica’s ‘Death Magnetic’. (Wow, I never thought I’d mention that shitty band on my blog)

Additionally to that, it seems like if you are a very well known band, you will get your own game, your own, individual, $40-50 game. Proven by Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and the yet-to-be-named Beatles game by Harmonix.

Activision (who refuses to release Brütal Legend because it is not a game they can make a sequel of immediately) has already said that there will be twice as many ‘Guitar Hero’ SKUs next year as there were this year. I am going to take a step back and talk about what I think they should do, and then I’ll talk about what they are doing.

They should build the next iTunes. I would not mind paying 50 cents or a whole other dollar additionally to what I already pay if you make this music available for me on my iPod. With the amount of media you are selling through these games everybody would make a killing and everybody wins. Music would be something you discover while playing, and when you like something you put it in your iPod and you share with your friends. The RIAA has been looking for an iTunes killer to get them back more control over their music. This is that.

Secondly, stop bickering over the controllers. Take a cue from Sony and Microsoft and leave the peripheral building to third parties. You can make your own controllers to bundle, don’t get me wrong. But make your games compatible with each other so that you can start licensing your name to the plastic toy manufacturers. That way you spend more money on the game than you do on the development of the plastic toys that go with it, you take a kickback from the licensing of your name for a drumset to say ‘compatible with x game’ and thirdly, you dont alienate the players that bought the competitor’s game and want to buy your game too.

My next point was about how I disliked that the Beatles and Aerosmith were getting their own individual releases and how I think that they can be specially priced packs for the main games, but really I think what I mean is… I don’t want to have a billion games I have to switch between just because I want to see Aerosmith in the background of the music tab and I want to play Yellow Submarine. If I buy Guitar Hero Aerosmith make it so that I get a special download code that lets me get all the Aerosmith content inside my copy of Guitar Hero World Tour. Its the same game, with a few character changes, It can co-exist. Also it takes away any real re-sale value of the game, only people who buy new copies can get this new DLC that lets them access the well-known artists from within the main game. This will really take away a lot of the fatigue I think people will start to feel.

Finally, numbers of both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour are out and they are less than stellar. I don’t know who thought people would be willing to pay $200 every year for a set of plastic toys but the market has spoken and I guess they were wrong. Make mayor revisions to the game every 2 years and create content packs for $15-20 every few months. I would love new venues or new countries and of course new challenges, but I would not want to have to buy a whole new set of plastic toys to do it.

I think Activision and Harmonix will not listen to what I just listed, they will continue to push their products out in more frequent intervals even. They will make a lot of money, but they will completely ruin the genre and will end up losing money because they were not able to really stretch it out for as long as they could have. Just like the fighting games in the 90s and the shooters of today, people are getting a little tired of the same-old, every 9 months.