Tapulous has had the music rhythm game scene to itself on the iPod for a long time, but now Harmonix and EA have ported their phenomenally successful Rock Band game to Apple’s iPhone, meaning that you can embarrass yourself pretending to be a Rock star on the train now.
The iPhone game will feature the same 4 instruments (guitar, bass, drums, vocals) as the console version, so if you’ve got 3 friends with the game you can nerd out in the doctor’s waiting room, or on the schoolbus. Rock Band costs $9.99 in the US app store and features the following songs:
Ace of Spades ‘08 – Motorhead
All The Small Things – Blink-182
Attack-30 Seconds To Mars
Bad Reputation – Joan Jett
Bad to The Bone – George Thorogood & the Destroyers
Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
Debaser – Pixies
Everlong – Foo Fighters
Girls Not Grey – AFI
Give It All – Rise Against
Hanging on the Telephone – Blondie
Hymn 43 – Jethro Tull
Ladybug – Presidents of The United States of America
Lazy Eye – Silversun Pick Ups
Learn To Fly – Foo Fighters
Move Along – All American Rejects
Sabotage – Beastie Boys
Simple Man – Lynard Skynard
Take The Money and Run – Steve Miller Band
We Got The Beat – The Go Go’s
If you don’t have any mates with iPhones, or your mum drives you to school, Tapulous have released the 3rd version of their Tap Tap Revenge Game, which looks equally shiny, flashy and comprehensible only to Japanese people and those under the age of 20. Tapulous’ offering costs a tenth of EA’s game (99c), and has 100 free songs, as well as ‘premium‘ tracks from bands like Blink 182, Fall Out Boy, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, No Doubt, Tiesto, The KillersKorn, Megadeth, QOTSA, Weezer, AAR, AFI, Keith Urban, Crystal Method, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The world favourite cheesy multi-player game Guitar Hero has created a franchise, that to start with, was original, fun, super user friendly and managed to spawn some reasonably good cousins too, Guitar Hero 80’s, World tour and others. DJ Hero is planned to be released in the US for October 27th. Developed by Harmonix Music Systems and published by Red Octain Guitar Hero is decided to be worth around the $275 million mark, while having made sure that they haven’t become too samey and boring. Fighting off the odd critic after the dirty mistake that was Kirt Cobain rising from the grave was a low point, but you have to expect the odd bit if controversy nowadays. If anything it makes their “I am a rock star” simulation game all the more real, ya’ know with court cases and overdoses and erm, zombies……
But DJ Hero, really! We think not. I’m not denying that the sort of songs likely to turn up in a DJ game wont be good,there are a tonne or super dance tunes that would make the idea fun, but it just doesn’t make as much sense as the Guitar Hero or Rock Band Games. How often do you (don’t lie, you know who you are) get caught doing your best “air dj” moves around the living room? Thought so. The game does boast a nice fun, versatile DJ Controller, three buttons (instead of five) sit in what represents your record/scratcher and a slider, for star power no bout. The playlist is quite handsome too with around 100 tunes or more with around 60 different artists.
The artist list is a bit sporadic though with some obvious acts right where you’d expect them, Daft Punk for example with others that make you think are just stoking fillers, like Rihanna and Gwen Stefani, who’s in there with the same song three times! The developers don’t seem to have enough good artists in the bag to make it interesting enough, as well as the original songs being recycled all through the game, the second artists, the ones providing the mash up extras are guilty of this too. A super idea that was rushed me thinks. They could have released it later on, early next year maybe, without the cheeky re-offenders having to beef up the playlists. We’re not yet convinced.
Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss) could arguably be responsible for the way, modern music at least, is enjoyed and has been developed as well as its electrical recording techniques. Les Paul, who’s death was a mixture of age and pneumonia, was one of the pioneers in the development of the full-bodied electric guitar in 1941, multi-track recordings and numerous reverb an echo effects. Many due to the frustration of the, at the time, limitations of guitar effects and recordings. The invention of the guitar pick up is one of the few things that he is solely responsible for, which basically involved his breaking a recording desk to pieces and using the magnet pickup of the tone arm inside to “pick up” the vibrations of his strings, you can work out the rest. After that the design just had to be refined down to what is now almost a standard issue “wammy bar” on a guitar. The Gibson Guitar corporation were the first people to incorporate Paul’s suggestions and present the idea to him , he was impressed enough to sign us with them, and the Gibson Les Paul was born.
Dying at the age of 94 he was gigging to the last breath putting on shows live in New York in 2006 and winning Grammys for his album ‘Les Paul and friends: American made, world played’. Les was inducted into countless halls of fame as well as being an honorary member of the Audio Engineering Society. Les died peacefully with his family and friends by his side yesterday (August 13th).
Metallicas has finally confirmed that they will be getting their own Guitar Hero branded game. It was confirmed on the Metallica website and will likely be released in the first half of 2009.
The game allows you to play as us in either single instrument or band career game modes.
Adding to the atmosphere will be famous setting associated with the band’s career, including Moscow’s Tushino Airfield, the site of the 1991 Monsters of Rock concert, and “new venues with in-the-round staging.”
There will be 28 Metallica songs in all, although the full list has not yet been announced. Songs from Alice In Chains, Foo Fighters, Slayer, Machine Head and Queen can also be played.
Lastly, in a feature sure to thrill Lars Ulrich devotees, “Guitar Hero: Metallica” will boast an “expert” difficulty level that employs two bass drum kick pedals. The Metallica edition follows an Aerosmith-dedicated “Guitar Hero,” which was released in June.
The latest issue of Harmonix’ Rock Band Community Zine included some staggering statistics detailing the performance of the music platform’s downloadable content.
Most notable is the company’s claim of pushing over 28 million Rock Band track downloads to date. The Rock Band store now boasts 345 downloadable tracks by 239 artists, and has seen DLC added for 55 consecutive weeks.
Harmonix also reports that it has hit the 500 total song mark for the Rock Band platform, doing so with weeks to spare on its target of the end of 2008.
Only 6 million songs had been downloaded for Rock Band as of March 20, 2008. Harmonix released the in-game Rock Band music store on that date, and launched Rock Band 2 in September.
Acclaim has decided that they didnt want to battle Guitar Hero and Rock Band and instead have launched an online music game called Rockfree. Players can battle it out with up to seven other people over the internet, and it”ll feature licensed tracks including Iron Man, Fat Lip, and Woman. A closed beta kicked off this weekend, with a full launch scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
WMG, Sony and EMI are on board for licensing – which indicates that Acclaim is ponying up a decent amount of cash for song rights, since WMG is apparently playing hardball on this score with games publishers right now.
Currently, the game is free to play so it is going to be very interesting to see if Acclaim will make money from advertising, or even push though affiliate sales to iTunes and Amazon. All I know is that this is a very interesting idea and it is good to see that Acclaim is moving away from just being a console publisher and now turning into a real games publisher.
The world favourite cheesy multi-player game 
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