Gaming and Culture

For gamers, Christmas can, indeed, come early.

Because here is every gamer's dream wrapped up in a Christmas paper so beautiful that you might never play Guitar Hero in a living room ever again.

Please hail Ric Turner, who realized the holiday season was upon him and it was time not to keep up with the Joneses, but with the Brian Jones Massacre's. So, according to Make, he created this astonishing Guitar Hero Christmas lights extravaganza, which he calls Christmas Light Hero.

If you are not utterly entranced by the skill and wonderment of this technological exercise, then your fingers are pork sausages and your emotions are boiled semolina.

I know you are going to ask me how he did it. Thankfully, he explained to Make in some detail.

Here is just the first part of his explanation: "Christmas Light Hero is using 7 light controllers from Light-O-Rama built from kits to control 21,268 lights and LEDs. Each controller has 16 outputs and 2-3 TTL level control inputs that are used by the game system to fire different programmed light sequences depending on what happens in the game."

He continued: "It relies on the fact that the game sequence is very consistent. If the game and the lighting sequences start together, they will stay in very good sync through the length of the song."

For the full explanation--it goes on for some paragraphs--please enjoy the Make link.

Turner is so wonderfully talented (Oh, did I mention that he used to be a special effects guy at Disney Imagineering?) that he even thought about not disturbing the neighbors with renditions of Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover".

He said: "When you play, you watch only the Christmas lights, but the audio you hear is from the Wii, so your flubs are broadcast for all to hear (people in cars can tune 99.1 and crank it up as loud as they want.)"

If you happen to be passing Turner's house (a commenter on Daily What says it's somewhere near Disney in Burbank, Calif.), please know that it isn't so easy to get on the high score list.

He said on his YouTube posting: "Optional TV screen is available if you get in trouble, but if you use the screen, you don't get your name in the high score list."

I know some of you will be wondering how many bulbs are being put to such good use here. The Daily What reveals that it is 21,268.

May your neighbors be even one tenth as imaginative this holiday season.

Although several artists have been depicted in music games like Guitar Hero in the past, Gwen Stefani's No Doubt is having some trouble with its own likeness in the newly released Band Hero game from Activision.

According to a court filing obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the band sued Activision over a feature in the title that provides gamers with the opportunity to have band members perform another artist's songs.

The lawsuit specifically takes issue with the ability for gamers to have No Doubt lead singer Gwen Stefani perform the Rolling Stones' Honky Tonk Women. The suit claims that it "results in an unauthorized performance by the Gwen Stefani avatar in a male voice boasting about having sex with prostitutes," the LA Times is reporting, citing documents filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday. The suit also claims that No Doubt objected to the "Character Manipulation Feature," but Activision refused to remove it.

For its part, Activision says that it's not at fault. The company wrote in a statement cited in several publications, that it has a "written agreement" with No Doubt that justifies the use of its likeness in various features in the game.

"Activision has a written agreement to use No Doubt in Band Hero--an agreement signed by No Doubt after extensive negotiations with its representatives, who collectively have decades of experience in the entertainment industry," the company said in a statement. "Pursuant to that agreement, Activision worked with No Doubt and the band's management in developing Band Hero. As a result, Activision believes it is within its legal rights with respect to the use and portrayal of the band members in the game and that this lawsuit is without merit.

"Activision is exploring its own legal options with respect to No Doubt's obligations under the agreement."

No Doubt is asking for unspecified damages, as well as "a preliminary injunction and a permanent injunction against distribution of the game and for Activision to recall existing copies," the Times is reporting.

On September 9, classic rock fans will have a chance to strap on a plastic guitar and jam along with the biggest act in popular music history.

Artfully orchestrated buzz has been building for The Beatles: Rock Band since the start of 2009, and the team of developer Harmonix and publisher MTV Games (and distribution partner EA) hope to provide a bright spot in an otherwise drab video game market with one of the few video game products for the 2009 holiday season that has a real chance of appealing beyond core gamers.

We've gotten our hands on a final retail version of the game (minus the new Beatles-inspired instruments, but our old Rock Band gear worked fine), and gave it a test drive in CNET's AV Lab. Check out this video to see our extremely shaky music skills, and read our hands-on impressions below.

Gallery: The Beatles: Rock Band

Dan:
Music aside, this is essentially the same Rock Band game you've been playing for two years, but with nicely done overhauls of the menus, graphics, and interface, including some very cool animated Beatles segments. The biggest change to the actual gameplay is the inclusion of three-part vocal harmonies (you'll need three USB mics). We found out the hard way that these songs are actually pretty tough to sing, and nailing the harmonies is even tougher.

The Sony Walkman outsold Apple's iPod in Japan last week, the first time in more than four years, according to a study by Japanese electronics research company BCN.

Sony's slice of the market for digital music players in Japan rose to 43 percent for the week ending August 30, narrowly beating Apple's 42.1 share. The survey didn't include sales results for the iPhone because that device also serves as a cell phone.

While Apple's 8GB iPod Nano took the top sales spot, Sony's Walkman devices outsold all iPods for the week.

(Credit: BCN)

Sony achieved its victory through pure sales volume and number of players, said BCN. Apple's 8GB iPod Nano hit the top of the sales charts with a 21.7 percent share of the market, while Sony's mini NW-E042 Walkman came in second with just a 6.2 market share.

But Sony captured six of the top 10 sales spots with different models of its Walkman. In addition to its top 8GB Nano, Apple took the remaining three slots with its 16GB iPod Nano, iPod Classic, and iPod Shuffle.

Sony's win be may due to a variety of factors, according to BCN. The company focuses on lower-cost music players, with the average price of a Walkman dropping in recent weeks while Apple's prices have stayed firm. BCN also said it thinks Apple may be competing with itself, as more Japanese consumers have opted for iPhones rather than buying both an iPod and cell phone.

BCN said it believes the battle for market share will heat up again following Apple's September 9 event, in which the company is expected to announce new iPod models.

Sony's varied line of Walkman players have picked up generally favorable reviews.

(Credit: Beatles: Rock Band)

Beatles lovers will soon be able to feel what it's like to sing and play with the Fab Four in the interactive game The Beatles: Rock Band. But what famous Beatles tunes will be featured on the disc?

Rock Band makers MTV Games and Harmonix revealed 19 more songs Tuesday, bringing the total of known tracks to 44 and leaving the final tune a mystery.

The Beatles: Rock Band lets players sing, strum the guitar or bass, or hit the drums to play with John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they tour the world. Players can join in with the Beatles, starting from their early days in tiny Liverpool clubs to their final performance on the rooftop at their Apple recording studio.

The game's origins stem from a conversation between Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison, and MTV President Van Toffler. Harrison eventually took the idea to the Beatles' Apple Corps and also sold the concept to Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono.

Though part of the Rock Band franchise, the Beatles game was designed from the ground up with new graphics, menus, and interfaces.

Beatles: Rock Band is set to hit stores on September 9 for Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. The software alone sells for $59.99. The Premium bundle sells for $249.99 and comes with all the Rock Band equipment, including Beatles-branded drums, microphone, and mic stand.

The 44 songs in the game so far are:
A Hard Day's Night
And Your Bird Can Sing
Back In The U.S.S.R.
Birthday
Boys
Can't Buy Me Love
Come Together
Day Tripper
Dear Prudence
Dig A Pony
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Don't Let Me Down
Drive My Car
Eight Days A Week
Get Back
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning
Hello Goodbye
Helter Skelter
Here Comes The Sun
Hey Bulldog
I Am The Walrus
I Feel Fine
I Me Mine
I Saw Her Standing There
I Wanna Be Your Man
I Want to Hold Your Hand
I Want You (She's So Heavy)
I'm Looking Through You
I've Got A Feeling
If I Needed Someone
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Octopus's Garden
Paperback Writer
Revolution
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Something
Taxman
Ticket To Ride
Twist And Shout
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
With a Little Help from My Friends
Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows
Yellow Submarine

Faced with heat from iTunes and other digital downloads, the nearly-three-decade-old music CD is slowly melting away.

iTunes-purchased songs now account for 25 percent of the overall music market--both physical and digital--in the U.S., says an NPD Group report released Tuesday. However, CDs are still the most popular format for music lovers, winning a 65 percent slice of the market for the first half of 2009.

An iTunes playlist

(Credit: Screenshot by Lance Whitney)

Digital music downloads have jumped in recent years, said NPD, hitting 35 percent of the overall market for the first half of this year, compared with 30 percent last year and 20 percent in 2007.

For the first half of 2009, iTunes itself snagged a 69 percent share of the overall digital music arena, trailed far behind by Amazon.com with 8 percent.

"The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple's success in holding that market, has increased iTunes's overall strength in the retail music category," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD Group.

The CD, though, marches on. Among CD retailers, Wal-Mart leads with a 20 percent chunk of the physical music market, said NPD. Best Buy took a 16 percent share, followed by Target and Amazon at 10 percent each.

Still, the days of the CD seem numbered.

"Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical products," said Crupnick. "But with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010."

Correction at 3:30 p.m.: The venerable audio CD is actually 27 years old.

In the newest version of the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero 5, as many as four players can all play guitar at the same time, instead of just two. Further, any combination of instruments is now possible.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

SAN FRANCISCO--The first couple of weeks of September are going to be a banner time for music video games. On September 9 (09/09/09), the much-anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band will hit store shelves, just eight days after Guitar Hero 5 gets its chance to rock living rooms everywhere.

With the Beatles game, it's easy to imagine long lines and huge sales figures. After all, this will be the first time that any of the recent slew of music-oriented video games will feature any Beatles songs, let alone dozens of them.

But with Guitar Hero 5 (see video below)--has so much time gone by already that there could even be five Guitar Hero releases?--one has to work just a little bit harder to envision the big bucks that its publisher, Activision Blizzard, surely is hoping to bring in.

Still, the guys at Neversoft, the game's developer, have proven time and again that they know what they're doing. The Guitar Hero franchise has produced hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and created a dynamic in which people everywhere are now comfortable picking up and jamming away on a guitar, albeit a plastic one with buttons instead of strings.

And with that in mind, one has to give the Neversoft team the benefit of the doubt for their new game, which will be released for all the major video game platforms.

On Thursday, I stopped in at a Guitar Hero press event here and had the chance to speak with two of the executives most responsible for the new game: Brian Bright, the project director at Neversoft for Guitar Hero 5, and Tim Riley, who oversees the Guitar Hero franchise's music licensing.

Among the big-name rock stars who appear in Guitar Hero 5 as characters is Carlos Santana.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

One of the things I was most interested in was the rationale for a new Guitar Hero game. To be sure, game companies like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two have a mandate to generate massive revenues, and so franchises like Guitar Hero are tried and true in that regard. But in spite of that, each new edition of a franchise game has to have something significant to offer to entice enough customers to earn its keep.

To hear Bright tell it, the best rationale for Guitar Hero--besides its 85 new songs by 83 artists--is its "Party Play" mode in which players can jump in or out of songs any time they please, all with the click of a single button.

What that means, Bright added, is that Guitar Hero 5 will offer a potentially broad new audience an entirely new level of "accessibility," in particular because in the previous versions, many people playing for the first time would have found themselves needing a little hand-holding to get started. Now, he said, that's no longer the case, and players new and old will be able to easily and quickly go right into rocking out.

Another important Guitar Hero 5 innovation, Bright said, is an "any instrument" selection that will, for the first time, allow more than two people to play guitar at the same time rather than someone in a foursome having to play drums and someone having to sing. And even if there isn't a mad rush to grab a guitar, this features means that any combination of instruments is, for the first time, possible, whether a group is playing cooperatively or competitively.

Downloadable content
Given that many players of the game's previous iteration--Guitar Hero: World Tour--likely paid to download songs, Activision is making it possible to port most of those songs to Guitar Hero 5. The company said 152 of the 158 downloadable songs from the earlier game will be compatible with the new one, though users will have to pay a "nominal re-licensing fee," the amount of which the company hasn't publicly spelled out yet.

Among the innovations in Guitar Hero 5 is the ability for Xbox players to use their Xbox Live avatars.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

And that means that with the 85 songs Guitar Hero 5 comes with, plus new downloadable songs, the new game's players can have set lists of potentially hundreds of songs, Bright said.

I wanted to know a little bit more about how Activision persuades musicians to allow their songs to be included in Guitar Hero, especially after learning how the Beatles were won over for the forthcoming Rock Band game.

Riley, the publisher's music licensing specialist, said that as the Guitar Hero franchise becomes better-known, he and his team have an easier time of it. In part, that's because "the larger the game gets, the more known it gets within the (music) industry (and) with the artists themselves."

And that means that Riley and his team have now had the chance to get musicians like Arctic Monkeys and Elliott Smith--whom they've never worked with before--to contribute songs to the game. Indeed, he said Guitar Hero 5 features songs from nearly 20 artists who have never allowed their music to be in a video game before.

Of course, it doesn't happen overnight. In the case of Arctic Monkeys, Riley explained, it took multiple visits with the band to show them demos and explain what the Guitar Hero franchise is all about to get permission.

One big factor, Riley added, was being able to assure artists that their music is "safe" in Guitar Hero, meaning that users won't be able to easily pirate the songs from the game.

At the same time, he explained that for a lot of musicians, games like this are now seen as an attractive way to get their music in front of large audiences, particularly because the record industry is becoming more and more notorious for doing a poor job of helping distribute new music.

"Just by having a song in the game," Riley said, "kids become familiar with the song, or the artist, and will go out and buy (it) or go out and purchase more music from that artist."

If you're an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you'll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.

It's more complicated than posting a song to iTunes, but you'll get placement on a more exclusive platform.

(Credit: MTV Games)

To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year.

You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game. Next, you'll have to submit your song for other creators to critique and finally to MTV Games for approval.

Once approved, the song will enter the Rock Band Network. All songs will debut exclusively for 30 days on the Xbox 360, and the Rock Band team will pick stand-out songs to make available to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles.

Under the network terms, musicians can charge between 50 cents and $3 per song, and they will keep a 30 percent cut of all sales. That may seem small, compared with the 70 percent cut musicians get for selling their songs on iTunes, which requires much less work, but Rock Band is a much more exclusive platform--you're much more likely to stand out here than among the bazillion songs available through Apple's music store.

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A screenshot from the iPhone version of The Sims 3, one of thousands of games available for the Apple smartphone.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Most iPhone games are clearly appropriate for all audiences: puzzles, brain-teasers, mazes, and the like. But others, including some of the most fierce shooter games, may not be kid-friendly, at least from parents' perspectives.

But at least right now, there are no ratings for iPhone games, unlike for console or PC titles, and the president of the Electronic Software Ratings Board thinks that needs to change.

The ESRB--which is controlled by the video game industry's leading companies--rates games according to their content. The ratings include "C," for young children; "E," for everyone; "E 10+," for ages 10 and up; "T," for those 13 and up; "M," for ages 17 and older; and "AO," for adults only.

According to Kotaku, ESRB President Patricia Vance thinks it's a no-brainer that iPhone games should be rated, so that parents can have a sense of whether games on the hit mobile device are right for their kids.

"ESRB ratings empower parents to do their job," Vance told Kotaku. "Considering the fact that the vast majority of parents are already aware of and regularly using ESRB ratings, Apple's adoption of them for iPhone games seems like a no-brainer."

That's particularly true, Vance added, because Apple, in its announcements on Monday about the newest iPhone firmware upgrade, said it would offer the ability to block movies and TV shows on the iPhone based on content. But the company said nothing about games.

"Adding ESRB ratings to the controls (Apple) already plans to offer," Vance told Kotaku, "would give parents the ability to exert control over the games their children play as well."

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board rates games, but its president is asking why Apple has not offered such ratings for iPhone games.

(Credit: ESRB)

And Vance has a point. Games are clearly one of the killer apps for the iPhone, what with thousands of them already available on Apple's App Store, and many of them among the most popular apps. And while Apple attempts to filter submitted apps for some level of appropriateness, there have been many documented cases of apps of questionable taste making it through.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request by CNET News for comment.

One has to wonder if this is something Apple has thought about, or how much extra work it would take them to add ESRB-style ratings. On the other hand, adding the ratings would also create a situation where Apple might find itself embroiled in controversy if a game ended up having hidden--or difficult to find--content outside the applied rating. That, of course, is what happened with Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2005, a scandal that reverberated across the games industry and into politics.

Perhaps Apple has decided it wants none of that.