The "pile of shame" is literally a pile of unplayed video games that every true gamer has. We buy games we want to play but then get caught up in something else and most of us never get back to the pile. I'm stopping the cycle and playing through all my old games before I allow myself to buy new ones.
I am a fairly hardcore Guitar Hero and Rock Band player. I play guitar/bass, almost always on Hard, and can play for hours at a time. I realize I'm not a real rock star, but I enjoy the level of interactivity with songs that I enjoy listening to.
The reason I've embraced the Rock Band series over the Guitar Hero games is that Rock Band "speaks" to me more than the other. What I mean by that is that Rock Band just feels right. I feel like I'm playing along with lots of my favorite songs. Guitar Hero, on the other hand, features a lot of songs from genres I cannot stand, and charts those songs in the most frustrating ways, seemingly catering to hardcore music gamers who end up building robots to play the game for them. I'm not knocking Guitar Hero for this, I'm simply stating why one series works better for me than another.
Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is a collection of songs from the first three games in the series, along with a handful from GH: Aerosmith and GH Encore: Rocks the 80s. All 48 songs now include full band support, and unlike in the past, all the songs are master recordings from the original artists.
I didn't start this series until Guitar Hero 2 came out for the 360, and therefore was never able to play the first game or the 80s edition since they were Playstation only releases. Unfortunately, the bulk of the songs in the playlist come from the games I've already played to death, and considering that I only play guitar/bass, the game essentially offered me nothing new.
Playing through the career mode quickly became a tedious chore, as the songs got worse and worse as I progressed, eventually becoming nothing but the finger-melting squeal-fests that I can't stand. And of course the game concludes with "Through the Fire and Flames" which if that song was a person I'd punch it in the ovaries.
For a small fee there is an export feature where you can download 21 of the 48 songs to your hard drive to play in newer Guitar Hero games, and that was fine for me. I got to export "Freebird" and "Nothin' But a Good Time", which is probably all I would play anyway. After the export, there was no reason for me to keep the game, and I managed to sell it on Half.com for three times what I paid for it.
So yes, this became the first Guitar Hero or Rock Band game that I didn't keep in my library. I think that says it all.
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