Scott Bush

An SAT-level anal­ogy ques­tion begins this entry:

Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion is to Asian teenagers as what is to nerdy (yet sexy) guys in their late 20s:

1. Macarana revivals
2. Star Trek conventions
3. Gui­tar Hero
4. Mod­ding XBoxes

Answer: 3 (though half-points would be awarded for either 2 or 4)

Yes friends, RedOctane’s Gui­tar Hero (GH) is here and it’s going to destroy more fin­ger­nails than Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion (DDR) did to dam­age rela­tions with your down­stairs neigh­bor. I, along with a few friends from high school with too much dis­pos­able income, wasted—nay, invested—Sun­day after­noon in an activ­ity that can only be described as Rock­ing Out.

For the sadly unini­ti­ated, GH can be summed up like this: take a Fischer-Price style toy gui­tar with col­or­ful but­tons along the fret and a fat tog­gle switch on the base. Con­nected to said instru­ment is a PS2 dis­play­ing col­ored “notes” that accom­pany awe­some cov­ers of heavy metal songs in cat­e­gories such as “face-melters.” Con­nected to the gui­tar is you: off-beat, swear­ing, cramped-handed and (after an hour or so) sweaty. It is (with­out as many hand cramps) essen­tially DDR on a guitar.

** WARNING **: This prod­uct WILL cause fin­ger cramp­ing equal to slam­ming your left hand in the door of a Hum­mer (and H1, not a wimpy H3). Addi­tional injuries can occur when whip­ping your gui­tar up to ini­ti­ate “Star Power,” should you rock hard enough to earn such a privilege.

When I took gui­tar lessons years ago from a good friend (he’s in a sweet band, Cen­tral Ser­vices), I learned two things: 1) how to play a decent G chord; and 2) play­ing gui­tar is hard. There­fore, I was sur­prised when my on-screen char­ac­ter was wail­ing away to mad applause from the psuedo mosh-pit in the game. Sure, I was on the game’s easy set­ting, but I didn’t fare too badly on medium, either. Hard kicked my mullet-wearing ass, how­ever. My favorite track was “I wanna be sedated” not by the Ramones, but “made famous by the Ramones” (remem­ber, these songs are all cov­ers). Metal Church’s Iron Man, I was sur­prised to learn, sucked com­pared to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s remake years later. Live and learn, that’s what I say.

But I’m get­ting off track. If you own a PS2 but not GH, you are—forgive me—a fool. If you don’t own either, you should run, not walk, to Best Buy or where ever and Do the Right Thing. If you own GH but not a PS2, well… that just doesn’t make any sense. What’s wrong with you?