Thanks to this cool little gadget, I just might have an alternative, however poor it might be. Enter the Pocket Guitar Hero Electronic Game.

I discovered it at Gadgets.co.uk, and while I am pretty sure it will not measure up to the experience of playing the game on the PS3, I really have no choice right now do I? This tiny little thing has 3 levels of difficulty, 5 levels of volume, and it can actually give you a cool experience. The idea is to beat all the levels. If you think that with only 3 levels, it should be pretty easy to do, think again. Before you can advance to the next level, you have to beat 3 riffs in each level.

As for the songs, there are 10 songs from the first two Guitar Hero games. Some of the most popular include Cherry Pie by Warrant and Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana. This portable Guitar Hero game will set you back by 14.95GBP.

Guitar Hero is not going to take things sitting down though as it recently gave more information on its upcoming Guitar Hero: Metallica game.

In an interview that appeared in USA Today, Alan Flore, lead designer for Neversoft, as well as Metallica’s Kirk Hammet and Lars Ulrich talked about the new game.

All three agreed that the game will be extremely challenging especially when it comes to the old Metallica songs. This goes across all instruments, with the drums featuring brutal double bass playing. The game will also not be sequential because of the obvious difficulty of earlier songs.

Players will begin the game by auditioning for Metallica through two tracks and once they are accepted they will tour with the band through some real-world venues. Other bands will also be appearing on tour but no details were given regarding this.

Finally, Ulrich hinted that Guitar Hero: Metallica will most likely be made available in March.

I play frequently enough that my skills are steadily improving but still responsible enough to stop playing during a work week. So there I was on a Friday night eagerly plugging in my Playstation 3 and popping in my game. And my guitar controller was not communicating with the usb receiver! I thought for a moment it may be the batteries so I popped in fresh ones. It did communicate, but only for a second, and then I got this intermittent signal drops. It was irritating as hell.

I went to online forums and discovered that this has happened to other RB players too. Unfortunately, no one has been able to pinpoint the problem yet, much less the solution. RMA’ing the guitar is the only solution, but that’s not a solution that I can take.

This only means I’ll have to spring for a new guitar. I guess between now and when Guitar Hero: World Tour is released, I’ll pretty much have RB-free weekends.

But even I have to raise my eyebrow at this new product.

Guitar Praise is new product that mixes the Guitar Hero idea with, uhm, Christian worship. The premise is simple, take Guitar Hero but instead of putting in songs from hard rock bands that “worship satan”, you’ve got a game that is filled with songs from Christian rock bands. I know there are a lot of Christian bands out there and some of them are actually pretty good but I’m guessing the pool is quite shallow.

Hopefully, they didn’t put Amy Grant songs to bulk up the song list.

Format: Nintendo DS
Available: Now
Price: Around $50

Now that Guitar Hero has just about hit every major home console out there, it was really only a matter of time before the developers decided that a handheld should get in on the action too.  In this case, it is the turn of the Nintendo DS – the now famous dual screen console with almost as much innovation on it as the home console big brother, the Nintendo Wii.

Shrinking the game down for the DS involves using an attachment that comes with the game, providing an extra four button unit with which to interact with the game.  Holding the console in the portrait position (that’s tall, rather than long) you then use the touch screen to strum part of the guitar while the other screen shows the guitar neck with sliding notes showing when you have to bash the four buttons.

There are 25 songs available in all, each of them in a different difficulty level.  On top of that, you can go head to head with the CPU or even another player. Perhaps one thing that makes it stand out against the console game is the four buttons – the home version has five – and is a little more awkward to play.  However, it is still a great game and if you’re a fan of the console games then you’ll no doubt want this.

It’s a good thing that Neversoft has announced that ALL instruments will be compatible with Guitar Hero: World Tour. According to the company, the game will automatically sense whether a six- or five-input device is plugged into the console and it will automatically remap the song to compensate. This is a nifty feature and a great service to rhythm game fans.

A small caveat though is that this announcement is only applicable to the Xbox 360. We’ll have to wait for Sony to announce whether this will also apply to them. Hopefully, it does because I don’t have an Xbox 360.

The Guitar Hero franchise really is one of the hottest game franchises right now.

And proof of this lies in Guitar Hero: On Tour, the game’s first trip to the Nintendo DS portable. On Tour has met with really mixed review but its sales prove that it is still a smash hit. In its first week on sale, the game sold over 300,000 copies, ostensibly establishing an Activision sales record, and outperforming all other DS game launches that came from the company by a whopping eight-fold. This gives it the preeminent distinction of being in the top five most successful game launches in Activision’s history.

The most surprising thing about this record though is that compared to other DS titles, Guitar Hero: On Tour is the most expensive DS title on the market at $50.