Bang your head to '80s-themed 'Guitar Hero'
— -- Until recently, wannabe rock stars were limited in how to live out the dream: embarrass themselves at karaoke bars or dance in front of the mirror with a tennis racket.
Then came the wildly popular Guitar Hero video games, where players plug a guitar-shaped controller into a console and attempt to strum along to rock's greatest hits. If you play well, the crowd cheers you on, you unlock new songs and play bigger venues. Hit too many sour notes and you're booed offstage. Cutthroat? Sure, but hey, that's showbiz.
And while eager gamers await the upcoming sequel, Guitar Hero III (due out this fall), and another music game with a lot of buzz, Rock Band (which offers guitar, bass, drums and vocals), fans of pastel, spandex and hairspray will enjoy strumming through Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
As you'd expect from its title, this new Sony PlayStation 2 exclusive offers pop songs, "hair" metal ballads and new wave tracks from the 1980s. While it doesn't mess with the Guitar Hero formula much, it's a fun — and nostalgic — ride through that "tubular" decade.
Not unlike the other Guitar Hero games, you can choose an on-screen avatar (character), a name for your band and whether you'd like to play an individual song or the meatier Career mode, which challenges you to work your way up from a teeny bar to a huge outdoor stadium. Song selections range from head-banging rockers such as The Scorpions' "No One Like You," Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock" and Quiet Riot's "Metal Health" to pop hits such as Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran," The Romantics' "What I Like About You," The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" and The Go Go's "We Got the Beat." They're all cover tunes but sound very close to the original recordings.
Unfortunately, a handful of the 30 or so songs seem like filler material, such as obscure tracks from Faster Pussycat, Oingo Boingo, X and Limozeen. Plus in some cases, the game makers curiously opted for less popular cover versions of songs instead of the originals such as Krokus' "Ballroom Blitz" or White Lion's "Radar Love."
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