PopStar Guitar

Description

There are excellent music/rhythm games available for the PlayStation 2: Guitar Hero, for example. If you want to see an example of the opposite, check out PopStar Guitar, a clunky, fugly music title with a bottom-of-the-barrel track list. While it is clearly aimed at a younger audience than Guitar Hero, this is a wholly unnecessary piece of shovelware, and kids deserve better.

PopStar Guitar is, obviously, a guitar game. Any licensed non-USB guitar peripheral should work. You know the drill by now: colored circles fall from the top of the screen and you hold down the matching frets and strum your controller when the "notes" cross a timeline. But the note tracking is awful and is often completely out of synch with the music, making this an entirely non-musical experience.

PopStar is set up like many music games: you start out playing your high school gym and progress through bigger and bigger venues. There are just two songs available at each spot, with none of the fun stuff you'll find in Rock Band like mystery set lists or local showcases. The track list is also terrible, made up of the cheesiest teeny bopper dregs around like All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, and Maroon 5. Even if you can stand this stuff, only about half are master tracks and the rest are covers -- which is no longer acceptable in music games. If you don't care enough about your game to get the master tracks, don't make the game.