Killed in a smiling accident.

Guitar Hero - Aerosmith is… Aerosmith-y. This isn’t terribly surprising, what with it having “Aerosmith” in the title and everything, and a picture of Aerosmith on the cover just in case you missed that; 29 of the 41 songs in the game are by Aerosmith (or Joe Perry), you play them as motion-captured Aerosmith, there are short snippets of Aerosmith interviews between the levels as the game tracks Aerosmith’s career from playing a high school dance to intergalactic megastardom, you can play as one of the Aerosmith guitarist on the rest of the tracks if you buy/unlock them as a character in the Vault, playing signature Joe Perry Gibson guitars

If you’re unsure whether you should get the game or not, here’s a detailed in-depth questionnaire to help you decide:

1) Do you like Guitar Hero?
a) Oh yes! It’s a work of plastic instrumental genius!
b) It’s OK I guess.
c) No, it’s a stupid waste of time, learn to play a real guitar.

2) Do you like Aerosmith?
a) Oh yes! Who doesn’t like the multi-Grammy winning biggest selling American hard rock band of all time?
b) They’re OK I guess.
c) No, I hate them and everything they stand for.

If you answered:
Mostly (a): buy the game right now
Mostly (b): maybe rent the game, see how you like it
Mostly (c): don’t buy the game

Hope that helped.

Personally I remain fairly ambivalent towards Aerosmith, they’ve got a few catchy songs but I’m not rushing out to buy their entire back catalogue, so the game’s a neat enough diversion while waiting for World Tour rather than something I’ll play solidly for the next few months. If you love Aerosmith, though, I’m sure you’ll love this (unless you hate Guitar Hero).

Just to prove my own point I fired up Audiosurf for a quick five minutes last night, and wound up playing through most of the Solaris soundtrack, which produced some amazing looping tracks. Oh, and then the Ying Tong Song.

While on a music game kick, there’s been a whole bunch o’ plastic instrument type news in the last few weeks. Still no sign of a UK release date for the Wii version of Rock Band; I’ll keep an eye on reviews when it’s out in the US in a few weeks, see how it measures up to the other consoles, but I suspect I’ll give it a miss thanks to a slew of rivals out there. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is out at the end of June, so I’ve stuck an order in for that to get an immediate fix of plastic guitaring. I don’t know much Aerosmith past their singles, but the song list looks like there’ll be enough to keep me going for a while at least. If nothing else it means I shouldn’t be so tempted to do something rash like get the Nintendo DS release, Guitar Hero: On Tour, though watching the promo video had already altered my interest level from “hmm, possibly intriguing” to “FLEE! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The biggest news, though, is Guitar Hero IV, or Guitar Hero: Roman Numerals Are So Passée And Colons Are In So It’s Not Guitar Hero IV But “Guitar Hero: World Tour” Just To Sound A Lot Like “Guitar Hero: On Tour” So You Can Get Them Confused A Lot, to give its full title. World Tour, perhaps inevitably, brings drums and vocals to the Guitar Hero series, as well as a few other new features like the ability to create custom songs. With the Wii version of Rock Band being somewhat cut-down compared to the PS3 and 360 versions, notably lacking Downloadable Content, it remains to be seen how many World Tour features will make it to the Nintendo system, but there are encouraging noises about downloadable functionality for the Wii. Scheduled for an October release in the US, with a bit of luck we might see it in the UK before the end of the year if the Guitar Hero III release dates were anything to go by, though if Rock Band is any precedent then the mid-23rd century may be more likely. In the past couple of days, word is also emerging of Guitar Hero: Metallica for early 2009.

Not content with the possibility of a mere two plastic drum kits cluttering up your living room, Konami have announced Rock Revolution, though I haven’t seen much about that apart from the drum set. There are murmurings of Rock Band 2 for this Autumn as well, so October/November may see a Plastic Instrument Battle Royale on a scale not seen since the Bakelite Beatles vs Rolling Polyethylene Terephthalate Stones duels of the 60s.

Based on the current situation, it seems unlikely that many, if any, of the instruments will be compatible between games, which is a shame. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “to have one plastic guitar cluttering up the living room may be tolerated by an understanding wife, to have three plastic guitars, a bass or two, three drum sets and an assortment of USB mics is probably pushing it a bit”. We’ll have to see how UK pricing and release dates pan out, but it’s looking like interesting times in the world of pushing buttons and pretending to be a rock god.

You know that you’ve been playing a game too much, and that there’s cause for concern, when you start basing your enjoyment of a new song played on your iPod by whether, for example, the solo would be too tricky for you to perform when combined with that awkward to reach orange button.

In unrelated news, Audioslave’s Your Time Has Come was just piped into my head hole.

I hit 800 “performances” in Guitar Hero 3 last night, if the guitarhero.com stats are accurate, which I think is pretty reasonable over four months (or perhaps more accurately “mental”, according to Mentat in IRC). As a result I’m getting a bit tried of the GH3 songs, but not to worry! Exciting plastic-instrument-related news about the European release of Rock Band (available in the US since the early 16th century) finally arrived!

The good news is Rock Band is coming to the UK, for a while it seemed like they were just going to flick V-signs across the Atlantic while rocking out over there. The bad, if not entirely surprising, news is the only confirmed date is for the XBox 360 version (May 23rd), with PlayStation 2 and 3 versions in “the summer”, and the Wii version “when the still sea conspires an armour and her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters”, according to spokesperson Geoff Madeupquotes.

On the plus side, rather than the naff plastic instruments in the US bundle, the UK will be getting titanium drum kits, solid silver guitars with inlaid emeralds and diamond microphones with strontium edging. Either that or we’re going to get stiffed on the price, with it being £130 for the instruments and £50 for the game, so £180 for the lot compared to the US bundle price of $170.

Hrm. I was already wavering over the Wii version, lacking DLC as it does. At £130 I doubt I’ll bother with the instruments; I would’ve picked up the game alone, just for another 50+ songs to guitar along to, but with Neversoft and Harmonix (or more likely Activision and EA) getting stroppy with each other it doesn’t look like a Wii Guitar Hero controller will work with Rock Band, so… bah.

To get a rock fix until Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is released, I’ll have another crack at getting the Wii guitar going with Frets on Fire. I sort-of more-or-less had it running, but the bluetooth stack seemed a bit flaky (least, that’s my excuse for only hitting half the notes), I’ll give it a bit more of a poke.