No thanks

​As announced yesterday, Activision is pulling the plug on their Guitar Hero franchise, signaling the end of the iconic plastic-guitar video-game series, which began in 2005 and has since offered six main games and countless expansions. To celebrate this weird, wonderful be-your-own-rock-star universe, here are the 10 songs we loved playing the most.

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​Def Jam Rapstar is the latest attempt to merge the worlds of hip-hop and video games. In the past, this has involved shoehorning playable rapper characters into cliched genres -- a Wu-Tang Clan beat-'em-up! 50 Cent's first-person shooter! -- or rappers licensing a few throwaway songs to the latest NBA Live soundtrack. But DJR takes a different route by letting you rap along with songs by Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, and Drake, alongside a bunch of Def Jam's back-catalog hits.

While most crossover-minded games have faltered, hip-hop has always been open about its love of gaming. Producers at all levels have found eight-bit sound effects and theme songs ripe for sample sources, whether it's Necro's underground flip of one of the Tetris themes for Non-Phixion's paranoid treatise "Black Helicopters" or Mannie Fresh using Galaxian lasers to usher in the bling-bling era of the Hot Boys. Rappers haven't been shy about their gaming habits either, with Sugarhill signings the Chilly Kids coining an early ode to gaming with "The Ice Arcade" and Gang Starr associate Jeru wildly predicting that the technology behind a nuclear bomb also "powers my Sega." Here, then, are the 10 best examples of emcees who know their Neo Geos from their 3DOs.

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Ryder Ripps

Poor lady

One detail that didn't emerge during our long conversation with Brooklyn chiptune composers Anamanaguchi, regarding their wish-fulfilling project of scoring the Scott Pilgrim videogame, was whether or not the band planned to release the tracks separately. So we wrote guitarist/NES guru Peter Berkman, who told us, "We're working out the details on the soundtrack. Hope we get it figured out soon!" But no fear about the logistics, @StrikerObi, Berkman promises that, one way or another, you will be able to have Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game MP3s on your iPod, wink wink.

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"I feel a huge connection to Scott Pilgrim: we all grew up playing in bands, we all grew up with the John Hughes-esque emotional drama drowning our lives. So all I had to do was write music and it would work."

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game pixel art by Paul Roberston

Every few years, gloriously awkward music nerds get their very own vulnerable onscreen antiheroes. This year, Scott Pilgrim will be for music-blog-scanning MP3 hoarders what High Fidelity's Rob was to SPIN subscribers in 2000. The title character of the most recent film from Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim is a scrawny bassist who falls for a rollerblading indie girl named Ramona Flowers. New to town, she has the unusual baggage of seven evil exes; in order to date her, he must individually defeat them all. Personified by geek heartthrob Michael Cera and based on illustrator Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part graphic novel, Scott Pilgrim the protagonist is as much creative-underclass epitome as fighting-game avatar: successful combat moves register numerical points and achievements (e.g. "64 HIT COMBO"); extra lives are gained from grabbing levitating pixelated faces; bathroom visits deplete Pilgrim's "Pee Bar."

So logically, with the August 13 release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World comes Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game on August 10, an 8-bit side-scrolling brawler that pits the unlikely warrior against his paramour's former loves. Also logically (and awesomely), Ubisoft asked Brooklyn's own 8-bit-punks Anamanaguchi to score the cartoon melee, an opportunity the band's chief composer Pete Berkman admits was a "dream come true." Hence, Berkman and guitarist/Gameboy manipulator Ary Warnaar were "psyched beyond belief" to get on the phone and tell us about the experience.

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​So cool, yeah, you're doing your best to hex the Phillies. You're going to become a bar mitzvah DJ. Bono is your rock & roll role model. You have a workout routine, it involves Fergie. "Big Girls Don't Cry," and all that, you told the Huffington Post: "I really like that song. I would sing it really loud no matter where I was at in the gym, and I know a couple other guys were singing and they won't say it, but I'm man enough to say that Fergie's 'Big Girls Don't Cry,' Crap! I would sing that in the gym." How about I go to Amazon or wherever you buy videogames right now, and buy your videogame, Jay-Z. And in return, you put something else on the wall, down in Tribeca, and I go to my grave not knowing which arcade game you preferred, back in the '80s. Oh, too late? It's Stargate? Fuck you. Go Phillies.

As we here at SOTC are demonstrably fond of rock-star-themed old-school video games, I suppose we ought mention N*E*R*D's "Seeing Sounds" concoction, currently available on their website. The plot, near as I can figure it: Pharrell, Chad, and Shae land on a mysterious planet and are promptly menaced by the ape from the Seeing Sounds album cover; you pick one of them and jump around on a grid of perilous, spike-laden platforms, collecting "brain power" that will allow you to rescue the other two. We recommend you play as Shae, because someone has to. And yes, by "brain," they mean actual brains, this time.

Rolling Stone, that bastion of baffling optimism about our dying profession, the magazine that actually dared to not only conceive of but actually make a reality TV show about rock writer interns, is now apparently lending its name to a video game the mag may or may not have actually had a hand in developing. According to Media Industry Newsletter:

Licensing media titles into console video games is common enough, but this is not a venue where you expect to find many magazine brands. Rolling Stone is leveraging its cachet in the music world to lend its name to a music simulation for the Nintendo Wii. "Rolling Stone Drum King" lets gamers imagine themselves as rock drummers playing into thin air. Partnering with 505 Games, the Wenner-owned title will appear in video game stores this spring.

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Is this 8-bit Hip Hop medley (Jay-Z's "Dirt Off Your Shoulders" into T.I.'s "What You Know" into etc.) better or worse than the last Girl Talk album? [via GvB]

This is what the people who made Guitar Hero did on 06/06/06. Seriously.
Photo courtesy of Harmonix, originally published here by yours truly.

You know you cried a little when you heard that the folks from Tony Hawk would be working on Guitar Hero III. Well, apparently that shift was to free up Harmonix, the Boston-based videogame company who made the Guitar Hero franchise along with Karaoke Revolution, so they could develop something insanely better: a full-on motherfuckin' rock band! Best part: if you don't have any real-world friends to make up the whole four-piece, you can play with ugly strangers online. Yep, US Today has the scoop.

In the popular game Guitar Hero, players tap color-coded fret keys and strum a guitar-shaped controller in time with scrolling on-screen notes. Rock Band "takes the core premise of Guitar Hero and expands it tenfold," says Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix, which developed the game and the Karaoke Revolution games. "It lets you create a complete collaborative band."

MTV is supplying creative and financial support to Rock Band's development, as well as helping make deals with various music publishers.

That means Rock Band will have performances by the original artists. In most previous music games, almost every song is done by a cover band. For Rock Band, some labels plan to supply original recordings. "This game offers a meaningful way for labels to participate in a segment of entertainment they, for the most part, have not been able to," MTV's Jeff Yapp says.

If you don't hear from SOTC for a bit, that's cause we just died and went to Hell. . . where Rock Band is already released. . .

Update: Official Rock Band site here.