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Tag: rhythm game

PopStar Guitar: We have Guitar Hero at home.

For several years, it really felt like the mainstream rhythm games of the past, like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, had been thrown to the dustbin of the past. Mostly to be fondly remembered by those who played it. The diehard fans moved on to open-source versions of those games like Clone Hero and YARG, while challenging themselves with unique custom songs made by artists like Chaotrope and Exilelord. While Rock Band 4 was getting new songs regularly, it strictly was for those who bought in early. It seemed like if you wanted to get in, you should’ve gotten in 10 years ago or even earlier. Getting used guitars and adapters were being scalped for hundreds, sometimes thousands, more than getting an actual guitar would cost.

The king returns.

Then in December 2023, things started brewing again. Epic Games alongside Harmonix – the studio best known for bringing Guitar Hero and Rock Band to the world, also an Epic Games Studio – released Fortnite Festival, a spiritual successor to that rhythm game formula: A rhythm game with a highway where you tap notes in time to the instrument you’re playing as. While it strictly supported only gamepads and keyboard controls to start, just a few days ago they released Season 3, which had rudimentary support for Rock Band 4-era plastic guitars and the forthcoming RIFFMASTER guitar, with support for other instruments coming hopefully in the near future.

Thanks to Festival, I’ve been on quite a rhythm game kick lately. I rekindled my love for classic rhythm games, and really dug into the spiritual successors that people have been making like the aforementioned Clone Hero, YARG, and even fanmade mods for existing games like Guitar Hero II Deluxe.

Though, with the good we also have to take the bad. I started looking into the mostly forgotten, fairly busted games that tried to capitalize on the white-hot popularity that Guitar Hero and Rock Band had in the late 2000s. Though, in my case, it wasn’t the usual punching bags in the rhythm game community like Rock Revolution or PowerGIG: Rise of the SixString. Oh, no, I wanted to go deeper. Into the more crustier, mostly forgotten knockoffs. I ended up finding one that felt like I was playing the AliExpress of rhythm games, and that game is PopStar Guitar.

“Help, the guitars are trapping us!!”

Released in late 2008, this wannabe rhythm game was published by XS Games in the US, a noted publisher of mostly forgotten shovelware, and developed by Broadsword Interactive, makers of similar knockoff software of rhythm and racing games, including most infamously, Spirit of Speed 1937, a notoriously bad racing game released on the Dreamcast. (Side note: I recommend Cassidy’s Bad Game Hall of Fame article for more information on that game, it’s a doozy to read.) So, knowing the pedigree of these companies, I was already going in with low expectations.

Peak shovelware, right here.

PopStar Guitar had released on both the Wii and PS2, as expected for a lot of games from this period. You might’ve even heard about the Wii version and how infamous it is, being one of those games that required a lot of waggle motions to play. It even came with the AirG, a plastic shell over the Wiimote that could be used to make it easier to hit each of the buttons on screen. From what I’ve seen, it seems the Wii version is an absolutely insufferable experience to play because of that, so I went for the PS2 version instead, which supports conventional five-button Guitar Hero controllers just fine. Though, if you want me to suffer playing the Wii version, you could contribute to my Patreon and request it, perhaps? I’ll even buy the bundle with the plastic shell for maximum suffering!

A question for the ages: Can beats storm?

There isn’t a whole lot of story to be had. You make a band, create a name, customize all your band members, and start your way from being a bunch of nobodies playing at high school gymnasiums to being the true PopStar. It’s like Rock Band, where you Start a Band, Rock The World, but with only one instrument.

As expected, it’s a completely vertical highway. Blame Harmonix for owning the patents on that.

If you’re familiar with most rhythm games and especially Guitar Hero, it doesn’t take much to get started. Notes come down the screen, hold the button that matches that note, strum it with the strumbar when it hits the strike line, get score. Hit more notes than you miss and you’ll pass the song, gaining a score and some fans. Fairly common stuff for the genre.
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April 27, 2024
Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

(content warning: mention of suicide.)

My tastes in music are… rather eclectic. If you’ve ever been a longtime reader of the site, you’ve probably had me write about some of the weirdest stuff and sometimes finding good stuff in them. I end up picking up soundtracks a lot because of the licensed music. Hell, while I may not talk about it a lot on the site here, I really enjoy rhythm games. So when I saw a rhythm game based on one of the most notable EDM artists out there, I had to give it a try, even if I never heard of him before playing it.

Is he about to drop the sickest beat?

Avicii Invector is a rhythm game developed by Hello There Productions, a small developer based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. Originally released in 2017 on the PS4 as simply Invector, the game was updated and re-released in 2019 to more prominently feature the artist whose music was used in it, Avicii. Avicii is the stage name of Tim Bergling, a Swedish EDM musician who was a major worldwide success, releasing two major albums and a few EPs in his lifetime.

Tragically, Avicii committed suicide in 2018 at the young age of 28. In the years that followed, there’s been work released posthumously, an Avicii museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and his family launching The Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health/suicide awareness charity, in his honor.

I grabbed this game on a cheap discount on Fanatical, a digital discount storefront. Since I’m a fan of rhythm games – glancing at the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on Rock Band and Guitar Hero stuff over the past decade – I figured I could probably enjoy this game even with only knowing Avicii as “a guy who has a game dedicated to his music.”

So I’m basically Faith from Mirrors Edge but piloting a spaceship? Cool.

The story is rather barebones: A female ship pilot has to send things to various planets, while blasting the songs of Avicii to get from planet to planet. These cutscenes play every few songs, and while they’re mostly non-contextual, they bring a bit of life to the game’s overall feel. After all, if you’re a rhythm game, you either play it super-serious like a Rock Band or you go full over-the-top like a good chunk of the Guitar Hero games did, so for Hello There Games to go for the latter route is a wise call.

I assure you it’s a bit more complex than this.

Avicii Invector plays rather simply: Press buttons in time with the music for points and to build a combo. While most of the time you’ll be pressing the face buttons, sometimes you’ll also need to hit either shoulder button for lines that are on the track. Changing lanes is handled with the left stick. Higher difficulties add more buttons to press and a lot more lane shifting, which can be quite disorienting if you’re not used to it. Much like most modern rhythm games, if one hits enough notes, they can activate a booster with the triggers which doubles score for a brief time.

While I’m used to games like Rock Band where it’s less about timing and more about making sure you hit the notes, Avicii Invector takes its cues from games like Dance Dance Revolution, where hitting notes right on time gets more points and a bigger combo. This took a bit for me to get used to, but thankfully the timing seems to be rather generous, even with that little gameplay quirk.
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September 20, 2023
The random Big Rock Endings of Rock Band – 10th Anniversary Edition.

2017 marks the tenth anniversary of the best damn music game franchise in video game history. I’m talking about the most awesome fake plastic rock game around: Rock Band. Screw your DDRs, your Beatmanias, and all that. Rock Band is where it’s at.

And thus, a franchise was born.

Sadly I didn’t get into the instrument rhythm genre until 2009, the year Activision totally thought releasing six Guitar Hero games at $60 a pop was a sound business decision. GameStop was already giving away excess Guitar Hero II 360 guitars when bought with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, which was on sale for $10. Needless to say, this gave me an easy way to get into the genre proper, after my previous experience of sucking on Even Flow on Easy in Guitar Hero III. I later snagged the then-recent Rock Band 2 a few months later. Alongside getting The Beatles: Rock Band set for Christmas that year, that was when my Rock Band journey truly started.

The first Rock Band is 10 years old, and I’m gonna celebrate it by pointing out how proud Harmonix was of its new features.

Oh Harmonix, you cheeky little goobers. (This is probably using a fake song as this doesn’t match any song in the game.)

Rock Band was the first western game to implement not just guitar and bass, but drums and vocals as well. Using their experiences from making tons of Karaoke Revolution games, as well as making drums simple and complex, they made a game that became one of the best damn party games around. Provided you had the room and space to hold all the plastic instruments.

But there was another feature that they were particularly proud of: The Big Rock Ending.

Ram on those buttons! Slam those drums! Annoy your neighbors!

In older Guitar Hero games, a fair share of songs ended up with a ridiculous flurry of notes, which was an annoying shift after playing something like “Smoke on the Water”. To counter this, Harmonix introduced the Big Rock Ending. In this, you just strum any note, and bang on any drum to amass points, then hit a specific set of notes at the end. Hit them all, you successfully bank the bonus. A single miss, and it goes up in smoke. Literally.

This solved the problem Harmonix had with the Guitar Hero games at this point. Give them the chance to be a rock star while not making a song harder than it needed to be. They were very, very proud of this new feature. Naturally they had to pad part of the 58-song setlist with them.

In some places, this works out. Stuff like “Flirtin’ with Disaster”, “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or the cover of “Green Grass and High Tides” fits it perfectly considering how the song is. In others, well… Not so much.
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November 20, 2017