My infinitely busy life doesn’t allow for all that much video game playing, but time after time, I’m sucked away form important obligations (sleeping, eating,…. love) and back onto the Playstation with the promise of continuing Guitar Hero fun. Even more than the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes or power up my madcore uber-blaster, playing the pseudo-guitar just has a certain mystical appeal. It’s just one of those games that seems to exist in its own universe, with its own physics, and its own completely unique brand of fun. I’ve collected and played the hell out of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, so the promise of new songs to play with ‘Guitar Hero : Rocks the 80s’ was appealing.

For the uninitiated, the Guitar Hero player holds a guitar-shaped controller with 5 buttons along the neck, a strumming bar-button where one would normally strum, and a whammy bar. As colored notes drop down the screen, one must press down the corresponding button on the neck of the guitar, and at the same time, hit the strum bar. Notes drop quickly, you build up points and ‘Star Power’ with increased accuracy, and the whammy bar can also be wiggled during extended notes for more points. It takes a lot of coordination, but once you learn the language, it’s almost automatic.

Because of this manual complexity, the Guitar Hero games have a lot of replay value as you hone your dexterity - many dozens of songs per game, four increasingly hard difficulty levels, the ability to earn money at gigs to purchase more guitars and more characters and more songs, the ability to play head-to-head games, and in some modes, the choice to play bass, rhythm or lead guitar. Game options and mechanics were improved between the two previous releases, and the selection of songs in each game is fairly wide - but a game that focused mainly on 1980s music was something that I had to pick up immediately.

I grew up on Oingo Boingo, Men at Work, DEVO, The English Beat and the like - all more along the lines of the new wave of the 80s. Only a few of these songs are represented in this game, since it leans very heavily towards the hair metal genre. I played through the game without looking up a setlist of available songs, hoping to be surprised by some lost gem of an 80s tune that I could rock out to, and I was pleasantly surprised to come across Oingo Boingo’s ‘Only a Lad’ - and familiarity with a song lends a LOT, at least in my case, to the ability to play it accurately. Aside from that, I was largely unfamiliar with the selection of songs. Maybe my generational perception is skewed, but the game feels much more like a ‘Rocks the Early 1990s’ than anything else.

This is not to say that hair metal is not a terribly fun genre of music, when you stop taking it seriously. Anyone who’s heard ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe (sadly, not included) knows what I’m talking about. While I anxiously awaited a song from The Darkness to come across the screen, in some form of self-conscious, self-deprecating reference to the ridiculousness of hair metal, it never happened, and all but one of the songs were genuine 1980s material - but while I didn’t get to thrash along to ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, that moment of all-important self-awareness came with the inclusion of Limozeen’s classic hit ‘Because, It’s Midnite’. Anyone who knows who Limozeen is will realize that this song was a perfect complement to ‘Trogdor’ on Guitar Hero 2. Both find their origins on Homestarrunner.com, a long-running internet cartoon of much hilarity. Alas, while Trogdor was a really hard song to play along to, ‘Midnite’ is unusually easy to play.

I played through ‘medium’ difficulty in a night without any failed songs, unlocked the character of The Grim Ripper (who is essentially Death, skeleton face, robes and all - but in the 80’s, he sports a giant Flava Flav clock and some 3D glasses), and even got to see the final stage where I giant squid attacks the background - but was very disappointed when there were no extra songs to purchase! As a result of these extra songs just not existing, the setlist is considerably shorter than other Guitar Hero games. This wouldn’t be such a tragedy, but for all of the decreased replay value and longevity, the game still cost 50 bucks. To charge as much as the previous Guitar Hero games, which had more functionality, and without notifying the buyer somehow that this was a lesser game, doesn’t sit well with me. I mean, does anyone REALLY care about buying a black finish for your guitar over being able to play the opening licks on DEVO’s ‘Gut Feeling’?

I think not.

Overall, it’s a great expansion onto the Guitar Hero collection of games, and I’d love to see a whole set of ‘Encore’ games that focus on collections from certain genres or musicians - but for fifty dollars, increase the setlist, or at least offer some kind of bonus material should you also have other Guitar Hero games saved in your memory blocks. I feel a bit shortchanged. Bathed in the warm glow of intense fun, but still shortchanged.

Buy it, but wait until it drops into the 20 dollar range in 6 months. It’s not going anywhere.

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I probably wasn’t the only kid to watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time and shed a single tear, thinking, ‘Man, I’m just like that Scissorhands guy… except my scissors are in my SOUL.’ I didn’t have a hilltop castle to retreat to, nor a Winona Ryder to awkwardly grope on (even though a surprisingly reasonable facsimile was found in my girlfriend at the time), so I’d retreat to my own inner sanctum and blast the Scissorhands soundtrack, safe from the angry and ignorant townsfolk.

The soundtrack, of course, is by Danny Elfman - one of the more distinctive names in modern cinematic composing, noted for scoring pretty much every Tim Burton film ever made, as well as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and countless other films both dark and light. Around the same time that I was falling in love with his eerie angelic choirs and carnival melodies, I was equally appreciative of his non-soundtrack work with his band Boingo, previously Oingo Boingo, previously Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Sure, there probably isn’t anything in the world better than The Breakfast Machine from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, but it was all pretty good stuff.

I had a few musical collections as I was growing up, all of which were fun to complete in those scary pre-internet days when you actually had to go to the store and talk to people, digging through the alphabetical tape and CD racks until you found an album that you didn’t even know existed. Among my complete collections of The Beatles, DEVO and Jethro Tull, there was my growing Elfman collection. Oingo Boingo was primarily a West Coast phenomenon, with a majority of their eclectic fanbase living on the opposite coast from myself, so I often resorted to the Oingo Boingo Secret Society Underground Newsletter for my information and to become acquainted with my more well-informed Boingo-friends, but locating albums usually required a trip into SoHo and a lot of luck. For the record, ‘Boi-ngo’ and ‘Dark at the End of the Tunnel’ were pretty instrumental (no pun intended) during my teenage years, because I really found very little appeal in whatever was on the radio in those days.

And I gave up on Jethro Tull the day they named an album ‘J-Tull.com’. Seriously guys, pretty goofy. Way to sell out.

The Elfman love that I was exposed to through the Secret Society was pretty enormous, and I’ve remained in contact with a few people from the SS all these years. We communicated in odd video clips of Elfman interviews and obviously lip-synced Boingo telethon performances, candid photos and weird demo tapes. I was exposed to the cinematic bludgeoning that is ‘Forbidden Zone’, a black and white exploration into nonsensical perversity written and directed by Danny’s brother Richard Elfman (also father of the more well-known Jenna Elfman), in which Danny Elfman plays the Devil and performs a Cab Calloway musical number amid topless women, ending in a charming decapitation. The odd Elfman preoccupation with Day of the Dead themes found its way into my own collections, eventually inspiring my own accumulation of skulls and other such items.

Boingo filmed their last performance on Halloween in 1995, and recorded the whole thing on both video and audio for posterity, marking the end of my Boingo collecting days. Elfman himself has recently stated that he has no interest in bringing the band back together due to the hearing loss that he suffered while performing. A few odds, ends and unreleased things trickle in, but this was a case of a collection choosing to end itself after ten albums (and countless compilation and ‘greatest hits’ collections that I avoided), since my interests in Danny Elfman never really extended into looking at his unusual face for hours at a time and dreaming of what could be. My interests is purely musical.

Elfman’s most recent project is the Serenada Schizophrana, an orchestral exploration unassociated with any film, though two ‘Music For a Darkened Theater’ compilations of selections from Elfman’s soundtracks have also been released and are still very available. All of this is quite an accomplishment for a music who calls himself ‘self-taught’. So, happy birthday, Mr. Elfman. You weird creep.