VARIOUS GUITAR HERO GOINGS ON

I think it’s now safe to say that Guitar Hero is a genuine cultural phenomenon. Last night’s brilliant South Park episode, “Guitar Queer-o,” was exemplary of the show’s usual satirical intelligence: it took the structure of your clichéd rise-and-fall rock stardom story, which served to illustrate how dumb the game actually is (which is not to say I don’t really enjoy the game – I love it – but it’s not a real “skill” per se, now is it?). Plus, it had enough hair metal in it to make you think you were hanging on the Strip in ’85.

Now International Society of Supervillains has posted an article entitled “Real-World Scenearios in Which Guitar Hero Skills Could be Useful.” An example of one such scenario:

“Terrorists have overtaken the local Best Buy and have threatened to shoot all the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ DVDs out of a gun fashioned out of parts from several Plasma TVs and a refrigerator at the people at the Target across the street. The terrorists are bested, however, when a brave young player gets every note in the Expert version of ‘Killing in the Name’ at the store’s demo kiosk, which makes the terrorists realize that, fuck you, they shouldn’t do what you tell them. As a result, they give up on terrorism, buy some Rage CDs and go smoke in front of Forever 21.”

I highly recommend you read the rest of the piece and seek out that South Park episode (it’s not on YouTube – fuckin’ Viacom!). Hi-larious.

-AR