As if this week hadn’t already been awash in news and announcements, there’s this: Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, a project by Boston-based newcomers Seven45 that aims to narrow the distance between game and instrument.
Power Gig is a music-rhythm game that uses a specialized controller: an actual guitar. Or, well, close enough — it’s a specially designed guitar that can be plugged in and played like any other, only it also comes with integrated wireless controller capabilities, a color-coded neck, and a special mute that locks down the strings for playing the accompanying game (or, it seems, pretty much any other music game).
This all seems very early — the game and guitar are expected to release this fall — so the company isn’t showing off gameplay footage or revealing any songs in the setlist. But the USA Today describes the gameplay thusly:
Instead of the standard music game note-streaming “highways,” the music is represented in a vertical DNA-strand string of streaming colored orbs. Placement of orbs and color prompts give players a heads-up to upcoming notes.
And 1UP puts it this way:
Power Gig’s note tracks and graphics (at least in the pre-alpha build the team showed off) bear a strong resemblance to the Guitar Hero/Rock Band setup. The traditional colors (green, red, yellow, blue, and orange) correspond to the fret that you’ll push, while numbers on top of the games “notes” indicate the string you strum. So, if you see a red six, you’ll know to hold the right fret and strum the red string.
And here’s Joystiq‘s take:
Instead of notes being represented exclusively by icons, a stream connects the flow of notes, providing better indication of where to place your finger. It may look different, but should prove to be a minor change for most guitar gamers.
As for the soundtrack, Giant Bomb drops this intriguing snippet:
The gents from Seven45 claimed that having a real guitar is helping them make headway with artists and bands that have been put off by the plastic controllers used by Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but as those discussions are still ongoing, no examples of licensed bands have been officially confirmed for the game.
The game will also apparently support drums and vocals, but the company’s not revealing any details about those yet. Now, I’ve made no mystery of the fact that I find the idea of playing music games with an actual guitar pretty damn compelling, so I’m definitely intrigued to check this out. But is an entirely new franchise what the genre really needs?
That’s not really as rhetorical a question as it sounds, actually. I’m genuinely curious — do you think a solid new player in the music-game space could revitalize things any?
I love the idea, but I’m fully prepared for it to be crap also.
I’m kinda interested – I’d love to learn how to play a guitar or bass, and this strikes me as a step in the right direction…
Ok – for those who are about to lecture me – I’ve tried lessons, I’ve tried books, dvds, friends teaching me, everything… so far I’ve failed every time – RockBand for some reason just makes sense to me – I know it’s nothing like playing a real instrument, it is just a game, but at the same time I can start to seem some potential for something new… and this might just be it. Ideally, I’d love to play a demo of it to see how it feels, but being in the UK I can’t see that chance from happening….
I’ll believe it when I see it. Companies have been demoing games like this since 2007 and I’m still waiting for an actual product. The two I can remember are Guitar Rising and Disney Star Guitarist. I think there was a third, but maybe that was only the Headliner digital guitar now apparently renamed the heromaker that is supposed to be a real guitar you can use to play rockband, which I don’t think is an actual product yet either.
I got too many questions about this. It’s ambitious but as a real guitar, what will the price be? If the guitar alone will cost more than a GH or RB bundle, then why bother?
And although I never tried it, I don’t really like the idea of playing GH or RB with a guitar like this, holding down the strings instead of buttons. With the plastic guitar, you feel you are hitting the right notes because there is only one button you’re allowed to hit, but if you can hit any string I can imagine it would feel like you’re just hitting strings at random, which gets boring fast.
I played bass for real, will they have a seperate bass instrument?
Maybe it will be cheap and awesome, I don’t know, but I’m not prepared to drop the RB platform. I’ll still follow this to see how it turns out.
If it does what it says, this is the game iv been waiting for,
PLEASE BE AUTHENTIC!!!
On a completely separate note, do you think that guy’s jeans are French cuffed?
I cropped out the collars to save your sensibilities.
If this “real guitar” controller with “DNA strand colored orbs” instead of “highways” actually works well and feels like authentic guitar playing….. this could be a revolutionary progress from the current plastic instruments ONLY IF they incorporate these new instruments and new highways into the upcoming future Guitar Hero and Rock Band releases (like Rock Band 3 or Guitar Hero 6 bundled with these new “real” guitars) This Power-Gig instrument should not start a new franchise, but instead become the new instruments for allready existing franchises.