The Next Guitar Hero's Track List is Perplexing

This is essentially what it sounds like. I'm mainly posting this because nobody has said anything in like a week on this blog, but this is music related after a fashion, and it caught my attention in a pretty significant way.

I think we can all agree, if we care about rhythm music games at all, that Guitar Hero 5's track list was kind of stupid and weird. It was largely composed of a few songs that were awesome and totally fun to play on a fake guitar("2 Minutes to Midnight" by Iron Maiden, "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits), songs that were terrible("In My Place" by Coldplay, "Plug In Baby" by Muse), songs from guitar oriented bands that weren't actually all that guitar oriented at all("Make It Wit Chu" by Queens of the Stone Age, "Sweating Bullets" by Megadeth), and songs that were awesome but had no business at all being in a guitar game("Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen).

Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is taking a weird approach to solving that problem. The good part is that a lot more of the songs look to be guitar oriented. The bad part is that a lot of those songs suck. And still, there are a couple of outliers that don't really have any business being in the game at all.

On the one hand:

• Been Caught Stealing-Jane's Addiction
• Bloodlines-Dethklok
• Children of the Grave-Black Sabbath
• Money For Nothing-Dire Straits
• Stray Cat Blues-The Rolling Stones

Whoa! Those are five awesome songs that will be awesome to play on the plastitar! I mean, "Stray Cat Blues"? Shit yes, son!

But then you look a little closer, and there's:

• Bat Country-Avenged Sevenfold
• Bleed it Out-Linkin Park
• Bodies-Drowning Pool
• Dance, Dance-Fall Out Boy
• Feels Like the First Time-Foreigner
• I'm Not Okay(I Promise)-My Chemical Romance
• Love Gun-Kiss
• Uprising-Muse
• Wish-Nine Inch Nails
• Psychosocial-Slipknot

Good Christ, that's a lot of completely terrible shit! With those two setlists combined, it's like if you won the lottery, only to find out that the money is only valid in Botswana.

And then you have a couple where you don't even really understand what they're doing there. Like:

• Bohemian Rhapsody-Queen
• Sudden Death-Megadeth
• Indians-Anthrax
• Sharp Dressed Man(Live)-ZZ Top
• Aqualung-Jethro Tull

Okay. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is mostly piano. "Sudden Death" isn't even out yet. "Indians" is by far one of the easiest, least remarkable songs from the otherwise pretty guitar-driven Among the Living. "Sharp Dressed Man" already appeared in their first game, and they ripped "Aqualung" from Rock Band 2's track list.

Should it really be this difficult to make an excellent game based on songs that have guitar playing at the core? I know there are a lot of things to take into consideration-licensing and lawsuits and so forth-but there's been such a humongous library of guitar music made over the last 50 years, it should be impossible not to please everybody.

I dunno. Do you want to make a better one? You should try, I bet you could. The full track list for the game hasn't been announced, but let's see how many people we can get to make a better set of songs then the folks who decided the tunes for Warriors of Rock.

This is assuming anyone who reads this blog has any interest in this kind of thing at all. If not then I might just make a list myself at a later date, since I love doing shit like this.

Anyhow...if you have ideas for some tracks you'd like to see, sound off in the comments section!

-CJ