Guitar Hero
In April 2015, Activision announced a new entry in the series, titled "Guitar Hero Live". The title was developed by Activision's internal studio FreeStyleGames, who previously had worked on the "DJ Hero" spinoff titles. FreeStyleGames were given free rein to reboot the "Guitar Hero" series for next-generation consoles. One of their first innovations was to drop the standard five-button guitar controller, ultimately designing a six-button guitar controller, with two rows of three buttons each, allowing them to mimic actual guitar fingering. "Guitar Hero Live" was released with both a career and an online mode. The career mode used full-motion video taken from the perspective of a lead guitarist underneath the note highway, to create an immersive experience to the player. The online mode, called "GHTV", discarded the previous downloadable content approach and used a music video channel approach to stream playable songs to players, adding new songs to the catalog on a weekly basis. The game was released in October 2015.
Guitar Hero (video game)
"Guitar Hero" received critical acclaim upon release. It received a score of 91.96% on GameRankings and 91/100 on Metacritic. IGN praised the "fantastic soundtrack" and "great peripheral", further commenting that mini-Gibson SG controller "is what makes Guitar Hero, rather than what breaks it". GameSpot echoed these sentiments, stating "Guitar Hero" had a "great guitar controller" and "killer soundtrack" and was possibly the "best rhythm game ever made". Many reviews praised the game's gradual learning curve and difficulty approach through the song tier progression and the difficulty setting for each song. "Play" said the game "gives bedroom air guitarists a chance to live out their rock 'n' roll fantasies". GameSpys review commented on the length of the songs, in that "once you hit the three minute mark or so, things start to feel 'too long'". Eurogamer said, "the lack of international star quality about the roster of songs and the absence of the original artists is perhaps the only thing that may detract from the package from an importer's perspective" and "it would have been truly amazing with a better track list".