Guitar Hero 5 allows song importing from previous GH titles – for a price
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One of the biggest issues with every new Guitar Hero game is that, now that you’ve purchased the updated edition, accessing your old rock library will require switching back and forth to the old titles.
Fancy some ‘Trapped Under Ice’ by Metallica? Guitar Hero Worth Tour. Want to follow up with Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In the Name Of’? That would be on Guitar Hero Greatest/Smash Hits.
With Guitar Hero 5 this is all about to change with the introduction of a new track importing feature.
Compatible with the aforementioned Guitar Hero World Tour, its expansion pack Smash (Greatest in Europe and Australia) Hits and the upcoming Band Hero, faux-rockers will soon be able to download a free GH5 update that introduces backwards compatibility with previous titles. It’s not all big hair and never-ending groupies however as if you want to actually then rip the tracks from the previous games to your hard-drive, Activision will charge you a “nominal re-licencing fee”.
Re-licencing. Fancy words for “paying for something twice” in our books.
In fairness, we can understand this nefarious business model to some degree as, without some sort of second payment mechanism, we’re envisioning Guitar Hero parties happening around the globe with mass ripping of songs by people who didn’t pay anything for them in the first place. That said, it’s regrettable that people who paid for the songs already will need to pay again — or they could just switch discs of course. We suppose it isn’t that nefarious after all.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that of the 158 songs available from GHWT and GHSH, six have mysteriously got lost on the way to the gig. We’re looking forward to finding out what tracks got pulled, undoubtedly due to licencing issues. We’re looking at you Metallica.
