AskMen.com yearly Influential Men list contains quite a few tech related people, including Kevin Rose (Digg/TechTV), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) to name a few. However the inclusion of Rob Kay, a name most gamers might not even recognize right away, is a great nod to gamers, especially at how high up the list he was placed.
"There are few people who haven't, at one time or another, harbored dreams of chucking it all and hitting the road as a musician, which has surely played a substantial role in the massive success of Rock Band. Rob Kay has effortlessly allowed millions of guys to tap into their inner musician, and as a result the man has become an integral part of the current renaissance surrounding video games. Along with such touchstone titles as Wii Fit and the Grand Theft Auto series, Rock Band has proved instrumental in opening up the world of video games to everyday users and affords those who play it the temporary sensation of becoming a bona fide rock star."
These groundbreaking video games changed gaming forever and drew in scores of fans in the process.
The Guitar Hero franchise died in the wake of Activision's lust for Call of Duty, but we should be dusting off those plastic guitars for a new Guitar Hero game.
Guitar Hero was good. The problem was Activision started creating many versions. Guitar Hero had the every one year cycle like COD and people felt they were being robbed.
Why in the hell would one want to spend time to learn a button mashing order when you can lean to play a real guitar in the same time frame.
TheGamer Writes "Harmonix has proven plenty of times it can make Rock Band work without instruments."
I mean, yeah, but was anyone saying otherwise? The fact is people liked the plastic instruments rather than pressing buttons on a controller. They enjoyed the simulated experience.
"Work"? No, but to be good? It's absolutely necessary. Not having the accessories is like playing a lightgun shooter with an analog stick sure it works, but one experience is completely unique and fun as hell, and other is torture trying to make do playing in a way it was never meant to be played
I think CHEAP plastic instruments is THE reason why the instrument-genre ‘died’.
People invested in buying the game AND the peripherals, so the guitar, the dj-set, the drum, whatever, and the experience was absolutely fantastic. Great fun, great music, etc.
But then the instruments would break. A button would stop working, or your hits wouldn’t register, and that kind of hardware failure would end in you not being able to play the game as intended, and thus you not getting the scores you deserve.
So, now you had a great game, but a broken instrument, and nobody is gonna buy a new plastic instrument every 3-6 months in order to keep playing the game.
A solution would have been to release better quality instruments (obviously), at a slightly higher price, so you could have kept the new games coming and the genre alive, but sadly, that didn’t happen.
Bust a Groove, Gitaroo Man and Parrapa the Rappa were such good games. Neither needed any extra peripherals