Guitar Hero vs. Rock Band

By now most of you have probably seen the newest commercial for Guitar Hero World Tour. It features Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps, Alex Rodriguez and Tony Hawk. The casting causes our friends at Hugging Harold Reynolds to quip :

Did my eyes just fail me? Did I just see an accused rapist, drunk driver, accused adulterer, but definite stripper aficionado , and Tony Hawk dancing around in their underwear selling a product to children? Proceeding from my awestruck, this commercial may have a reverse affect by providing thousands of kids an “oh shit” moment when they see Phelps riffing. “Is that what I look like?” “I rock the axe cooler than him, right?” “Maybe I should dust off Madden.”

Here is the video, for those who have not yet seen it :

Besides the obvious lameness of the commercial, the first thing that comes to mind for me is how much they must have spent to make the bloody thing. Those “stars” don’t come cheaply, and it seems that they could have found a more effective use of the advertising budget. While I question the effectiveness of the commercial itself, it has garnered a fairly large amount of press attention, which I guess was really the point.

I can’t help but think that Rock Band 2 might have a more convincing video “promoting” their product. Grace Kim, an avid gamer who loves Rock Band, worked for Activision as a publicist for Guitar Hero. Now she is November’s Playboy Playmate of the month, and Playboy has released a video of Grace enjoying her favorite video game. Gaming site Kotaku has more:

“I was,” said Miss November, “secretly playing a lot of Rock Band.” In fact, the guitar Grace posed with in her Playboy pictorial — by now on newsstands and Playboy.com (NSFW), is her own Fender Stratocaster made by Harmonix exclusively for the original Rock Band. She bought it more than a year ago and brought it to her shoot. And on her data sheet, she lists her six favorite video games. Rock Band is there. Guitar Hero is not.

Here is her footage from Playboy’s School of Rock:

Which game are you going to buy?