In his latest movie, The Woman In Black, Dan traded his Hogwarts uniform for a totally new role as a Dad.
Natalia brings you the latest news on Adele’s interview with Anderson Cooper, Kristen Bell’s interview on Ellen is auto tuned, Ladyhawke’s latest music video and much more!
Natalia discusses what’s new with Pharrell Williams and her thoughts on Karl Lagerfeld’s mean comments towards Adele’s weight. She also shows a roster of animals behaving like humans and, wait until you see the new size of coffee available at Starbucks!
Natalia dishes the latest news on the Juno Awards nominees, the upcoming Spiderman 3D film starring Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield and is Katy Perry hooking up with Tim Tebow? Watch today’s episode to find out.
When The Kooks are in the studio they’re focused and most importantly, sober. Watch Hugh and Luke explain their reasoning below.
The Kooks released a new album called “Junk of the Heart,” and you would think Hugh and Luke would be very excited about it. Well, they seemed rather indifferent to be honest. We spoke about that and why they don’t care about critics.
Natalia dishes the latest in entertainment news on Joan Rivers, Lana Del Rey and a brand new trailer for the movie Hunger Games.
Natalia talks about how Snooki might be pregnant, Nicolas Cage’s Cage Rage, Elisabetta Canalis is dating Steve-O and more for Feb 1, 2012.
Natalia dishes the news on Miley Cyrus breaking her tailbone, a 100 year old woman who plays the Nintendo DS to stay young and Houston, Texas contemplating a statute of Beyonce.
David Beckham debuts a new line of underwear, the worst dressed celebrity – Shy’m and Matthew Broderick is back as Ferris Bueller with a brand new commercial airing during the Super Bowl on Feb 5th 2012.
Daniel Radcliffe is back with his new movie The Woman In Black. It’s a bone chilling remake of a film from the ’80s. Ironically, Daniel actually scares very easily but he’s not afraid of ghosts. In this interview he tells us what really gives him the creeps.
Next time you’re struggling to make conversation, try asking this question: “If you could invite anyone (living or dead) to the perfect house party, who would it be?”
Graffiti6 is starting to make their North American invasion, and they are hitting up the Tonight Show. Does this sound familiar? Well the Beatles made the exact same journey over 40 years ago. Naturally, @jordans_life had to make some comparisons.
Nick plays World of Warcraft. Not only that, he’s the head of his guild, demonstrating that it IS possible to juggle being a hardcore gamer with being a top-selling recording artist.
During a LIVE interview on andPOP.com Nick Carter gave out a number and took phone calls from his fans. These were real phone calls from real fans who we gave exclusive access to one of the biggest recording artists of our generation.
There were great questions about music, fitness, the backstreet boys but the most popular question, however, was about his underwear. In this clip Nick talks about his his ‘Haynes’ and covering his fans with glow in the dark paint.
When releasing new music today, half the battle is online promotion. However, contests, signed merch and giveaways aren’t always the best solutions. When working on their latest album, Hedley came up with a brilliant idea, they decided to make trailers.
It’s hard to prepare for an interview with Hedley. So in this interview, we threw caution to the wind, got a 24 of beer and broadcast the interview live on our USTREAM (andPOP.tv). Eventually Jacob, Dave and @jordans_life ended up talking about hairy legs, their newest music video and more.
Diamandis from Marina and The Diamonds talks to us about her very serious disease. It’s called synaesthetic. And we lied, it’s not a disease. More like a cool condition. Diamandis explains further.
Would you be embarrassed if someone scrolled through your iPod? We sit down with Spee and Brendan to talk about the diverse music on their playlist.
PARTY ON!
In early 2006 Harmonix split ways with the Guitar Hero series and went off with MTV to create Rock Band leaving Activision to contract Neversoft to re-build the game that Harmonix arguably perfected. This move marked the day that split the plastic instrument community right down the middle.
While some people saw no problem with the direction that Guitar Hero went in there is a hardcore contingency of people that would like nothing more than to see Guitar Hero vanish into obscurity and let Harmonix’s Rock Band franchise rule supreme. It has been said that ever since Rock Band was released Guitar Hero has been scrambling to avoid doing just that by “ripping off” Rock Band any chance they get. Well if that’s the case then on September 1st, 2009 they finally caught up.
Guitar Hero 5 seems to have fixed everything “wrong” with Guitar Hero World Tour and thrown in all the improvements we have received from the side games that followed (Metallica, Smash Hits). What we have now is a sleek interface with incredible graphics which still retain the trademark over the top Guitar Hero style mixed with a bit of Rock Band’s low frame rate use to give the illusion of a music video. Guitar Hero 5 also boasts a different take on some of Rock Band’s innovations: the ability to “save” your band mate once they fail through maintaining a long enough streak of notes hit, individual star-power for each member of the band which if maxed out will overflow to other members, and band moments which work much like Rock Band’s “Unison Bonuses” however focused on band multipliers rather than added star-power/overdrive.
The really big feature however is Party Play mode which combined with the fact Guitar Hero 5 allows any instrument to join allows you to have just that- a party. As soon as the game loads up the music starts playing and all you need to do is press Yellow (Y Button on your controller) and you are able to join instantly! Pick your instrument (Guitar/Bass) your difficulty and off you go! Same thing applies to vocalists and people with drums, I especially liked how it remembered my hyper-speed settings dependent on the slot my instrument was connected to (Player 1, Player 2) and yes Hyper-speed is now in the options of quickplay- it’s no longer under cheats!
Another nifty feature in party play is making playlists of up to 125 songs and you don’t even need to play them you can just sit back and watch the animations and join at anytime! If your group of friends has a fondness for the music Guitar Hero licenses this will no doubt be a hit at parties- I mean come on… Who doesn’t like a bit of Rammstein followed by Stevie Wonder.
Contraversial digi-Kurt, an in-game character.
Track lists are of course subjective by nature but I really feel that the setlist for Guitar Hero 5 while not having the most insanely difficult “ow my hand hurts please make it stop mommy” songs it still has some fairly challenging Guitar songs (Scatterbrain by Jeff Beck, Done with Everything Die for Nothing by Children of Bodom) it does have a 14 minute song by Peter Frampton after all complete with Talkbox solo and an outro solo that may take you by surprise. If I had to guess though that as we go forward with these games the focus seems to becoming more about drummers and vocalists because with Guitar Hero 5 it surely delivers on that front. 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson and Brianstorm by Arctic Monkeys will give any expert drummer a run for their money- or hard difficulty drummer even. Another plus is that the Rock Band drum kit which is 4 pads as opposed to Guitar Hero’s which is 5 has been modified so that the orange crash note is now on green- which allows more a much better feel while playing the reduced charts.
As vocals are primarily my main instrument there are some real interesting picks here, who would’ve thought singing Bush’s 90s hit “Come Down” would be so fun! There’s quite the challenge in store for you as well if you play expert vocals as vocal phrases are now scored by how much of each phrase you hit. Singers with high lung capacities and accurate pitches are rewarded with higher scores and Neversoft has finally given us a visual feedback meter to help us determine how much of the phrase we are hitting akin to Rock Band’s pie meter.
Everyone should know by now that Kurt Cobain is in the game as a playable character and unlike Hendrix (in Guitar Hero: World Tour) you can play other songs with him! Of course if you choose to do that Kurt won’t be left handed anymore and you wouldn’t want to do that, now would you? It’s great to play Lithium and Smells Like Teen Spirit with his character however and it’s an experience only had in the career mode of the game, which can be played with any combination of instruments and online!
Use your Xbox Live avatar as an in game rock god? SCORE!
To add to the replay value each song in career mode has a challenge associated with it I won’t list them all but to get some of these diamond challenges you are either going to have become really good at expert guitar or find someone online to play with you and that goes for any challenge (vocals, drums, bass) as long as they are in your band you get the challenge unlocked.
Another great thing about Guitar Hero 5 is the ability to import my World Tour DLC into the game which feels brand new in comparison, and additionally a portion of songs (which is rumoured to expand eventually) from World Tour and Smash Hits for a small fee of $3.50 US for each game (approximately on Xbox Live). However you must actually have the manual from the game in your possession, and with the way people are I could see the code being copied at stores and people being unhappy when they buy it and have their code show up as invalid. It’s nice to see my song list up to 195 songs though.
The online mode has also been revamped with new competitive modes that while still are about hitting all the notes provide an added challenge through modes such as Momentum, Do or Die, Perfectionist, and Streakers. I’ve played them and they were a blast and a nice change from who can use starpower at the better opportunity while hitting every solo ever.
In short while Guitar Hero 5 doesn’t have the level of expert difficulty Dragonforce gives us or Guitar Hero: Metallica it’s still a great game with tons of replay value especially if you are willing to play different instruments. This game is great for parties I can’t stress it enough- being able to join instantly in the middle of a song may be the best idea ever for these games. Plus the game has King Crimson – 21st Century Schizoid Man if that won’t sell the copies I don’t know what will.
Gameplay: 5/5
Graphics: 5/5
Sound: 4/5
Replay Value: 5/5
