For years now I’ve been pushing the Guitar Hero devs to expand their game to include more hip, obscure, indie music and now that they have, I’ve come to realize that my heart is made entirely of dark coal and bent nails.
Earlier today Destructoid EiC Nick “Angel Dust” Chester found the following on Major Nelson’s blog:
Title: Guitar Hero II
Content: Guitar Hero Indie Label Pack
Price: 500 Microsoft Points
Availability: Not available in Japan
Dash Text: [ESRB: T (Teen) MILD LYRICS] Detonation as performed by Trivium, Ex’s And Oh’s as performed by Atreyu, Bury the Hatchet as performed by Protest the Hero. For all song credits please visit www.redoctane.com There are no refunds for this item. For more information, see www.xbox.com/live/accounts.
Now of course all of these bands are the antithesis of your “My Chemical Romance”s and your “Fallout Boy”s — at least as far as their bank accounts are concerned — and as such, you’d think they’d get me as hard as a week-old baguette, right? Sadly, no. I get the feeling they picked up these groups not for their artistic merits, but because they were inexpensive and were the most obscure facsimilies of bands they were already using.
Take Atreyu for instance: the band’s allmusic profile reveals them to be a Death Metal/Screamo band from Orange County. I can’t count how many Death Metal/Screamo bands from Orange County I’ve had the misfortune of suffering through and I’m almost entirely positive that if I were to open my window and yell “my girlfriend just left me” I’d have three or four entirely similar groups asking me if I wanted to front them for an upcoming gig at The Roxy.
I love what Activision is trying to do here, and I heartily applaud it, but seriously, walking down the aisle of your local Target and picking up every album whose cover averages out to a malaise of dark red and jagged lettering is not the way to go about it.
