Music Games Rock E3

The recent Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles showed that not only are western gamers embracing the music and rhythm-based games that are popular in Japan and Korea, but developers are producing welcome additions and refinements to the genre as well.

Guitar Hero, last year's breakout hit for the PlayStation 2, will get a sequel that adds rhythm and bass guitar tracks for co-op jam sessions. The as-yet-unconfirmed track list apparently adds legendary Can-rock track "YYZ" by Rush as well.

Publisher Red Octane (recently acquired by Activision) gets style points for its rockin' booth, too. They had a stage with live shows each day and an autograph session with guitarist Judy Nails, who performs all the motion-captured guitar slinging in the game.

Over at Konami, which pretty much invented rhythm action gaming, there were new Dance Dance Revolution games for PS2 (SuperNova), Xbox (Ultramix 4), and Xbox 360 (Universe). They were also showing new versions of Karaoke Revolution based around country music, American Idol and a party version that features multi-player modes. The company also showed Beatmania, the game that started the whole music game craze (and where the Bemani genre got its name) and that finally came to North America this spring.

As good as DDR and KR may be, other companies are looking to compete by bringing out similar games that add new features. Codemasters' Dance Factory for PS2 is a solid dancing game that lets you use tracks from your own CDs, and Sony showed a new version of SingStar for the PlayStation 3. The game is out in Europe for PS2 already, but will have a slick new look and downloadable music tracks when it comes out on the new console.

Other games that aren't music-based per-se, but definitely benefit from their soundtracks include the upcoming Lumines 2 (PSP) and Lumines Live! (Xbox 360) from Q Entertainment. The latter features downloadable video tracks such as Madonna's "Sorry." New sports and racing games from Electronic Arts and Activision's new Tony Hawk titles will also have a slew of licensed music to keep players' ears entertained.

Overall, more music games are being released and they're becoming more diverse. Online features like downloadable tracks will entice new players who haven't been interested in the pop-based genres that have thus far dominated existing games' track lists. Almost everyone wants to be a rock star at some point, and for those of us who can't really sing or play instruments, these games should give a good outlet for our inner diva, dancer or guitar god.