Guitar Hero to encore News

Those of you tired of us banging on so much about Guitar Hero a month before you can even buy it in the UK (April 7th remember!) will be pleased to hear that we ought to be banging on about it for at least another couple of years, as Kelly Sumner, CEO of publisher RedOctane, has told MCV we'll see a further "five or six" titles by the middle of 2007.

"We are working on Guitar Hero 2, which will have 40-plus new tracks," Sumner told MCV. He also confirmed that genre spin-offs including Country Rock for the US and a Metal edition are on the cards. He even pointed to further possibilities for the peripheral, adding, "you could absolutely do a plug and play version".

The first edition of Guitar Hero, which is a PS2 exclusive at the moment, is largely rock and metal focused as you'd expect, with everything from Bad Religion and Ozzy Osbourne to David Bowie, Queen and Queens of the Stone Age. Dunno why I picked those five, but I did.

And in case you've not been keeping track at all, Guitar Hero is a game with a slightly scaled down Gibson guitar peripheral where you have to hold down frets and strum a bit of plastic that tilts up or down to simulate the string movement, all the while music plays and little prompts tell you when to strum, when to hold notes and so on. As you get better, you use up to five frets, and combinations become ridiculously troublesome. Having been going a bit mad on the US version, we're expecting it to be a big deal when it hits the UK next month for £50 including one guitar. Were you to have two of course, you could play together. Rocking.