Thursday, August 20, 2009

As made famous by...

I've never been too into the music games, but I am rather excited about the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band. In preparation for its release, I recently picked up both Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2, along with a full set of plastic instruments. I'm not yet sure whether I prefer one over the other, but the two combined have been keeping me pretty well-occupied while waiting for The Beatles.

Hearing that I could transfer over the song collection from the original Rock Band into Rock Band 2 for a small fee, I decided it was worth it to rent the first game for just that purpose. Due to licensing issues, three tracks from Rock Band could not be copied over, but the only one I really cared for was "Paranoid," as made famous by Black Sabbath.

Yesterday, before returning the game, I naturally had to give "Paranoid" a go. Trying first the bass track and then guitar, I felt that something was off, and I quickly decided that it was obviously because it was a cover version, with the vocalist an inadequate replacement for Ozzy Osbourne. So that was that, I thought, and all I could do was hope that the real thing might later make its way into Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

A day later, however, the tune has continued to repeat in my head, and I realize now what the problem was. What I really wanted to play was the vocal track. But instead of actually singing it, I wanted to play it on guitar. It was Rock N' Roll Racing on the SNES, you see, that introduced me to the heavy metal classic. In that instrumental version, the vocals were replaced by 16-bit guitar synth. Even all these years later, that's the version that I recognize foremost. Alas, though Rock N' Roll Racing developer Silicon & Synapse became Blizzard, which has since merged with Activision, I doubt we'll be seeing that version in any future Guitar Hero.

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