New Guitar Hero Track Pack

Red Octane continues to bleed us dry with incremental track packs for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II, and I continue to eat it up. Granted, this time around the offering is something new (three tracks by My Chemical Romance) as opposed to re-releases of tracks from Guitar Hero's debut outing.

Well, immediately upon their release, I forked over the Microsoft Points and subsequently played through the three tracks. My opinions on My Chemical Romance aren't secret; I don't much care for the band.

I will forego a lecture about my own musical tastes at the moment for a lesser point, which is to say that the fundamental draw of a music game hinges upon your ability to enjoy the music. What differentiates the "rhythm experience" of Guitar Hero from brain stem reflex of hitting buttons is listening to the music being interpreted. An inherent enjoyment of the music will engender an inherent enjoyment of the game. This leads into the answer to a common question: "Why don't you like DDR?" I don't like DDR because I loathe J-Pop and house music. Simple as that. And because you can't really dance to rock music, or any of the music I like, they won't make a DDR game around it, and subsequently I will not play DDR.

So, the songs themselves are already a black eye for this demo, because I dislike the glam-emocore it offers. However, a closer examination of the gameplay they offer would be more to the point of this review.

Three tracks are offered, all of them from The Black Parade. They are as follows, in order of ascending difficulty: "Famous Last Words," "Teenager," and "This is How I Disappear." All three songs present an interesting question, will bands be eager to publish songs in Guitar Hero (or Rock Band) format if, by doing so, they are revealing in a very visual and colorful form the simplicity of their work?

All three songs are illustrative of the structure My Chemical Romance seems to depend on, which is a riff consisting of power chords, each repeating for one or two bars before ascending or descending, whichever the song calls for. "Famous Last Words" is most guilty of this crime. Structurally it's similar to "Mother" by Danzig or "Holy Diver" by Dio, in that the song is mind-numbingly easy for the majority of its run time, interrupted by a solo whose difficulty is maddening when contrasted with the rest of the song. Despite the solo, upon completing it I earned a few point achievements I neglected to get in my rush to beat the game this spring. This is a testament to the song's ease, repetition, and interminable length.

If "Famouse Last Words" is the low point of the update, then "Teenager" is the high point. It's the most pleasing song to listen to, being light and rhythmically diverse when compared with the dark and plodding feel of the other two tracks. The difficulty is consistent throughout, making it a song I'd be likely to play through again if I felt like it. If I were to compare the song to any other, it would be MCR's other track offering in Guitar Hero II, "Dead!", except it's even less monotonous than "Dead!" is, which is a compliment considering how enjoyable the song is despite its formulaic refrain.

The final song in the track pack is "This Is How I Disappear," which in both sound and gameplay is a rehash of "The Beast and the Harlot" by Avenged Sevenfold (A7x, as their fans enjoy calling them, because brevity is apparently their thing). That's all there is to say about it, really. It will exercise your ability to double strum, and the solo is alright. That's all I can muster to write about it, really, which leads to kind of an anticlimax for this review which fits the anticlimax the song represents in the track pack.

Overall I'd rate this downloadable content as less than average. While its offering disappointed me, it may please devoted MCR fans who also like Guitar Hero. What I am pleased with is the precedent this sets. Obviously bands are interested in offering their music to the game industry, meaning that there could be track offerings from other bands in the future. Such a venture would be a race against the clock, however, because Guitar Hero III is due out soon enough, as well as Rock Band. The publisher's choice is such: wait until these new games are out to provide the content, or blow our load now? Seems like the former will prevail. Personally, I can still dream that there will be a Queens of the Stone Age track pack before the new titles release. I invite you to entertain your own wishes in this subject.