MIDI Week Singles: "Sweet Sacrifice" - Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (NDS)

"Sweet Sacrifice" from Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (2009)
Album: The Open Door
Composer: Amy Lee & Terry Balsamo (Evanescence)
Label: Wind Up Records
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Vicarious Visions

Last week while listening to soundtracks from the Nintendo DS, I came upon Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, and I thought, "Oh yeah, these games use existing music.  Huh."  And then I spent the better part of the day debating if I should use existing music that was not specifically composed for use in a video game.  But since we are here, it seems pretty clear where I landed.

While not my favorite song from Evanescence's second album "The Open Door," it is one of the heavier songs, and choosing this song from their 2006 album to go on a compilation of Modern Hits released in 2009 does say something about the possible longevity of the song; although the game was released in June 2009 so you figure that Vicarious Visions was looking at what was popular towards the end of 2008; maybe?  It is a pretty standard Evanescence song in that it features more of Amy Lee's vocals than intricate guitar work by Terry Balsamo and John LeCompt.

Honestly, though, I feel a lot less competent talking about the modern live real person singing music than I do talking about music composed for video games.  The sound quality is about what you would expect from the DS speakers (not great, not terrible) and as for the Guitar Heroeness of the song, there does seem to be a lot of chugging riffs as opposed to quick "Through the Fire and the Flames" fingering, because thank the gods; I did play one of the Guitar Hero games on the DS back at PAX 08 and after playing the first song on easy, my fingering hand was pretty cramped so I can only imagine how it would be at the end of a maximum difficulty song.

Well, this was (somewhat) fun.  I do not see us going the full hog and featuring songs from the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises just so we can play non-video game music, but I know that it will not be the last time either.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
But He Knew It Couldn't Last