I'm liking the Facebook integration. It might be the closest thing we get on Wii to achievements.

I think Activision's attempts to keep Guitar Hero relevent are destined to fail because they completely miss what people want in the first place.

No one wants to buy these things 2 or 3 times a year.  No one wants band-specific games.  No one wants incremental changes made that makes their existing instruments obsolete.  No one wants cameos from famous rockstars or this goofy transformation shit.

All anyone wanted was to pick up toy instruments and make-believe being in a rock band with their friends while playing their favourite songs.  That's it.  That's all anyone wanted.  Guitar Hero introduced the concept, Rock Band expanded it to the band format and anything else since then has been counter-intuitive.  Once everyone had the hardware they just wanted more songs and a DLC model (with in-store track packs for people without internet) was the way to go.  But all this corporate bullshit has fucked that up.  They got greedy so they try to sell us a new guitar every year and they signed on with specific bands.  In retrospect the whole thing was fucked the second Activision and Harmonix split.  There should never have been two competing series and that probably is where all this band-specific bullshit started as each group tried to attract sales from the other with stunts and gimmicks.

Normally competition is good but this is really a rare case where what was ideal was one format.  And ideally innovation was largely unwelcome here as well.  This needed stability.  It needed to be something like CDs or DVDs where there is just this one format and people can choose to buy whatever content they want, in this case being something like iTunes.

Activision has poisoned the brand.  Guitar Hero is a joke and honestly if I was to declare one format to be the "standard" Rock Band would be it as I seem to be the only person I know with Guitar Hero (due to the incompatibility issues Rock Band 1 had on the Wii).  I think MTV Games, if they just stopped this Rock Band: Green Day type of shit and just decided "okay, Rock Band 3 is a the standard from now on and we're going DLC and track packs from now on" that maybe they could keep this thing going.  Assuming this whole genre isn't completely dead whoever resists the urge to "top" the other one with gimmicks and such will win.  This needs a standard, not annual sequels and spin-offs.

No one wants to buy these things 2 or 3 times a year.  No one wants band-specific games.  No one wants incremental changes made that makes their existing instruments obsolete.

Not literally obsolete but at least partially obsolete in that some new feature is introduced that this NEW guitar has but your old one doesn't so if you want to play the "full" game then you have to buy the new hardware.  It's usually something very minor and is a pretty obvious attempt to get people to buy instruments they don't need.  The goal seems to be to create artificial demand.

You could argue that for the slide bar, but it was two years and two games ago. The new GH6 guitar actually ditches the slide bar and is just a very slim and lightweight version of the standard five-button controller.

Ian's points stand as the reason why I haven't been too interested in any music games since picking up Rock Band 2. Even then, the genre gets stale pretty quick.

I must admit however, that I think this overblown story mode is what the series needed a long time ago. I remember playing Guitar Hero 3 and thinking that it should have been taken farther, to such a conclusion. It seemed obvious.

I've mentioned before in relation to Rock Band, but I think it deserves to be stated here as well. I really wish that these games would exist simply as platforms, dependent of the music itself. I hate having a publisher's song selections forced upon me. Give me twenty complimentary downloads or something... let me pick what I want to play. So many times I loose interest in play sessions simply because I don't want to listen to a certain song again... ever. :P

I'm definitely more excited for Rock Band 3, but Warriors of Rock is a very competent game. I also think its a smartly made game.

Also, the new guitar is very nice. As far as small issues of compatibility between instruments, you could argue against both sides since Rock Band's solo buttons don't work in Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero's cool in theory, kind of crappy in practice slide pad doesn't work outside of GH games. Guitar Hero does have those sections where you can just tap notes, which kind of does what the RB solo buttons do but without having to move your hand down.

At this point, I'm too invested into Rock Band (I've got somewhere between 300 and 400 songs on the Rock Band platform) to ever consider switching to Guitar Hero, but I kind of like where they're going with the franchise. They're not trying to add keyboard and outdo Rock Band. I sure hope they don't add a Pro Mode ripoff. They're making what Neversoft and Vicarious do best: video games. I wasn't a fan of GH: World Tour because of its Saturday morning cartoon presentation, but that was also because it was obviously trying to be Rock Band. Now that they're focusing on being their own game and experience, it's a lot more appealing to me.

Also, Guitar Hero 5 was a very good game. It's the first time since the Harmonix/Activision split that Harmonix seemed to take inspiration from the Guitar Hero franchise with party play and the ability to jump in or out, or change difficulty mid-song.