"I wanna be a rock 'n' roll star." Surely there is hardly an American -- indeed, a citizen of the Free World -- who hasn't thought that, from time to time. And since games are what let us play out our fantasies, it's a wish that's obviously a strong one to build games on.
Yet the single mainstream title that succeeds in addressing this fantasy is a simple beat-matching game with a fancy UI device -- Guitar Hero. It's an excellent game in its own limited purview, to be sure--but its limitations illuminate the intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream games.
