14 DAY TRIAL // By now, the buzz on the street has been that Guitar Hero 5 from Activision and Red Octane has been outselling The Beatles Rock Band from MTV Games and Harmonix by a significant margin, proving that, sometimes, marketing trumps star power and giving the publisher another important hit for the year. So, the iteration-based culture at Activision must be looking for the next big things, which will make video gamers pick up the next edition of Guitar Hero when it comes out, probably in about one year.
Speculations have been going on that integrating Microsoft's Xbox 360-based Project Natal will be the next milestone. And Kai Huang, who is the current president and one of the co-founders of developer Red Octane, has fueled these speculations, by telling Digital Spy that, “We've definitely been evaluating Microsoft's Natal technology along with a lot of other different technologies that could enhance the Guitar Hero playing experience.”
He believes that, “Natal is very interesting because there's so many different things you can do with it, whether it's the motion detecting, maybe sensing how you're playing, or the ability to use it for interactivity purposes and taking advantage of it for party purposes.”
It's tempting to think of a near future when players do not need to worry about somewhat unreliable and odd-looking, plastic guitars and drums and can simply simulate all the moves so that the Natal motion-tracking peripherals can pick them up and integrate them in Guitar Hero 6 or 7. It would make practitioners of the art of guitar-playing very happy to be able to play without any peripherals and would probably bring a new level of hilarity to music-simulation titles.
Of course, integrating motion controls into video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band could also bring trouble. Both Microsoft's Natal and Sony's wands need to be first released and proved to be reliable before big publishers integrate them into their flagship series.