You play with friends, all at Expert? Ever tried that? o_O

Sure, the game sucks at any difficulty only involving 4 buttons.

I never understood why they were still so popular.. especially since the controllers are so expensive and its basically the same shit year after year.

Guitar hero is awesome,I've never played rockband though.

Got me.  They're neat for some people... but to me they just feel like timed action sequences set to cheezy music.

I don't get people who spend £100 and master tapping buttons on a crap chunk of plastic when they could spend £50 and master the real thing and have much more fun and a genuine skill.

I guess just because it's much easier, which automatically makes it more entertaining for impulsive and casual fun, especially with friends. It's also as far as music goes way faster gratification.

I played classical guitar for a few years, like any other activity you master it's great once you have a nice piece of music down, but unless you're strumming chords it takes a long time especially time before you start working on anything that sounds great. People quit before they can read notes. Plus your fingers hurt quite badly the first few weeks :)

And the only way you can really enjoy that with friends on the same level is to be in a band.

To me Guitar Hero/Rock Band have very little in common with actually playing an instrument. Biggest merit of the likes is that they make people listen to music, and maybe inspire a few to pick an instrument to play. And have fun of course.

To tell you the truth, I was always interested in learning guitar, and Guitar Hero made me go one more step: I actually bought a real guitar last summer! I pratice the songs from the game just for fun too because I know them good (since I've listened to them so much). Besides, it's not that different from the plastic thing. You still need a good sense of beat! =P

I also want to say that it introduced me to ''mainstream'' music. I usually listened to video game music and other older stuff that my parents used to listen to, but that was about it.