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'Guitar Hero Live,' behind the scenes trailerAnd let me tell you, when I'm messing up, and the drummer's giving me that face, and all the notes coming from me are screwed, and the punters have dropped their smiles and begun chucking (mercifully empty) drinks cups at my band: I'm feeling like I've royally fucked up. This is true fear, manifesting itself in my fingers, every one of which is failing to find its mark on the new Guitar Hero controller (six buttons, in two rows of three, corresponding to "up" and "down" icons on the game's runway). Then, from behind the always-encroaching notes in the center of the screen, one of my bandmates gives me encouragement. I begin to hit the right chords. The song shifts gear. The crowd turns. A few bars later, I'm on fire—50-note streak!—and the feeling that sizzles through my stomach, down and down, right to the tips of my toes, is little short of incredible. Shit, if this is what it's like to buzz on a stage for real, I messed up by never learning to play anything.
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The live-stage stuff is what's on the disc when you buy the game. There will be hundreds of songs, performed by a variety of flesh-and-bone bands designed – well, assembled, I suppose, of real living and breathing musicians – to represent a handful of genres from Mumford & Sons-like folk (ptui) to popular emo acts, all parent-bothering fringes and wild gesticulating. There's a growing list of what you'll be able to play, right out of the box, on the Guitar Hero website. But it's when you go online that the options really expand. Guitar Hero TV is a 24/7 "streaming" service that will constantly deliver new tracks to play along to, as their music videos are shown in the background, ensuring that there's always fresh content to riff your way into. In short: it's an interactive version of how MTV used to be. Sort by genre, or search by artist; simply play what's new or seek out an old favourite: Guitar Hero TV opens a world of possibility that this series never truly had before, reflecting in a video game how the music industry has largely moved from an record ownership model to one where streaming dominates listening habits.And there's a potential problem with this. As you play tracks, you'll earn points and unlock play tokens, which can be exchanged online for your very favorite songs that may have fallen out of rotation. You can also buy these tokens with real money, but you'll never be able to "own" a Guitar Hero TV track, as you can the songs on the game disc. A Party Pass will open up everything for a short while, ideal for friends-over local co-op sessions; but again, your console won't ever let you keep the songs you love the most. You'll constantly have to work to unlock access, or pay your way to playing them three times per day. The game's creative director, Jamie Jackson, told Kotaku that this system suits the play style of most Guitar Hero fans. I suppose time will tell if he's right—but Guitar Hero TV will at least monitor what type of tracks you're playing the most, and highlight newly streaming songs that you may like based on previous selections.I stuck with what I knew when testing Guitar Hero TV: Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, Deftones, System of a Down (I'm old, leave me alone)—but the on-disc "live" component pushed me out of my comfort zone to play along with a song by Paramore. And I enjoyed that just as much, as even though the track itself was nothing I'd listen to outside of the game, the stage set-up, having band members dance around me, was absolutely riveting. Again: the tingle, that electric rush that runs over your skin, is substantial, and lasting.As an experience, Guitar Hero Live is a clear statement of new-generation intent: There's no way a contemporary game that looked like its predecessors would really resonate so many years after the series' fortunes appeared to fade. While it might appear, on paper, to be a backwards step in bringing FMV to the forefront of the Guitar Hero model, stirring memories of appalling Mega-CD games, in practice it's pitch perfect, snapping you out of your play space and into the screen, onto the stage. I'm genuinely surprised at how much fantastic fun I got out of my hands-on with Guitar Hero Live, and right now, while typing this, all I'm really thinking about is how awesome it's going to be to play it again.Guitar Hero Live is released for Xbox and PlayStation home consoles, and Nintendo Wii U, on October 23rd.Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.New on Noisey: Hurray! Stream Girls Names' Third LP, 'Arms Around a Vision'