Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits

Echo & the Bunnymen lead singer Ian McCulloch has dismissed music games as "crap" - and wished instant death on everyone who plays them.

A very long time ago, when PlayStation 2 was still king of the world, before Wiimotes and Milo & Kate and prior, even, to the launch of Xbox 360 (celebrated with a prescient cover image by Time Magazine, I just discovered), Guitar Hero was an expensive import luxury: a novelty rhythm game made by legends of the niche and published by a company previously best known - and 'known' is pushing it - for third-party dance mats and joysticks. These days, it's big business - big enough to get Ringo and Macca out of bed anyway.

It's also a very different business. When RedOctane originally licensed the songs for Guitar Hero, little did it know we would be tripping over plastic drum-kits and impaling ourselves on microphone stands on the way to the fridge just a few years later - and let alone doing so in its name. Guitar Hero may have a music store these days, but step-daddy Activision can't just sling the original soundtrack on there without new licensing agreements and additional note charts for those of us who prefer to croon or drum.

This, presumably, explains Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits - a compilation of 48 songs that began their rhythm-action lives in Guitar Heroes 1, 2, 3, Rocks the 80s and the Aerosmith spin-off, games that were mostly released before the rise of premium downloadable content, vocal tracks and novelty drum-kits. Developed by Activision's Beenox Studios, Greatest Hits brings some of the best songs of the preceding Heroes into line with modern thinking.

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