Well, alright, maybe it’s a heartwarming story anyway. The jamfest was put together by Pro vs. G.I. Joe, which arranges morale-booster multiplayer competitions between sports stars and service members overseas. Via Xbox Live and a satellite connection, Roethlisberger (git-tar, second from right), and his offensive line – Ramon Foster (guitar, left), Willie Colon (vocals) and Trai Essex (drums, looking like he’s playing on easy) took their Guitar Hero 5 skills up against the Army’s 336th Military Police Company.

Afterwards, Big Ben orated:

To be able to interact with these guys and enjoy it – and I could see the joy on their face – and get to beat them a little bit in some Rock Band. It’s a lot of fun.

Facepalm.

Madden NFL 10 cover boy Troy Polamalu didn’t play, but he did show up in grass-covered sniper camouflage (yes, really.) I bet Hines Ward’s eyes got real big when he saw that, thinking that getup would be perfect for his next out-of-nowhere blindside hit on Keith Rivers.

NFL Super Bowl Champion Steelers Connect with Soldiers in Iraq for Guitar Hero Competition [Ripten]

After opening his article for The New Republic with a reference to how he and his fellow “smug old children of the ’70s” lament the passing influence of the music of their youth, critic David Hajdu discovers a cruel twist. The music games that are so popular on consoles today bring older music to younger audiences, continuing what he considers to be the lamentable tradition of letting an older generation condescend to a younger one that older music is superior music:

For another thing—and this is the main failing of music games, and it is a significant one—they have the insidious effect of glorifying classic rock, a music with an already bloated reputation that is founded on its very bloatedness. In the games’ absorption with technical prowess, speed, flash, grandiose show, and fakery, they not only affirm the enduring allure of classic rock to kids and young adults, especially males; they also advance its tyranny. People like me who have kids of video-game-playing age no doubt get many things wrong about these games, and chief among the errors of our age group, I think, is inflated generational pride in the 1970s-style arena rock that Guitar Hero and Rock Band promote to our descendants—kids who might otherwise, and perhaps more appropriately, use their after-school hours to nurture interests in music of their own. The games reassure us that our aftercomers are our heirs. They are male-oriented tools of cultural primogeniture, applications of twenty-first-century technology with a very ancient mission.

The full article will appear in the magazine’s December 2 issue.

Pretending [The New Republic]

Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Activision’s Guitar Hero business, tells MCV that we will “probably see fewer SKUs” from the publisher in the company’s 2010 slate, “but the focus on making the best-selling, most fun to play, best-reviewed games will continue.”

“[There will be] more DJ Hero, and the next iterations of Guitar and Band are on the way,” Rosensweig says. “But we will see how the market plays out. What you will see is the games will live longer and be more vibrant through DLC.”

When you ship over 25 games featuring the Hero brand — Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Band Hero, DJ Hero — and do so with multiple SKUs of each title — full band kits, guitar only bundles, “Renegade Edition” turntables — it might be difficult not to ship less. Especially when a company like Activision takes a look at the sales of titles like DJ Hero and notices that the PlayStation 2 version only sold 3300 copies at launch.

Heroic Deeds [MCV via Joystiq]

The application’s just been filed; it hasn’t been assigned to an examiner yet. Standard trademark filing, covering “Drum Hero” for use in all video games.

Now, just because they filed a trademark doesn’t mean this is a project in development. They could just be moving to protect the “Hero” franchise, pairing that word and its synonyms with all sorts of instruments just to be on the safe side. So be on the lookout for Sousaphone Hero, Gutbucket Paladin, and Banjo Myrmidon.

Activision ‘Drumming’ Up New Hero Game [PlayStation Lifestyle via Hot Blooded Gaming, thanks Troy A.]

You can no doubt imagine the kind of shambling corpse that’ll be trotted out as Guitar Hero 6 (or whatever it ends up being called), and that’s not even bringing up the inevitable band-specific, re-release and handheld versions we can no doubt expect from the series.

Call of Duty, though, that’s a little more interesting. With this month’s Modern Warfare 2 developed by Infinity Ward, next year is a “Treyarch” year, with rumours suggesting the game has moved completely away from the Second World War and will be set in an era with not only more menacing Russians, but better music as well.

As for Spider-Man, yeah, he’s back, along with a Shrek game that’ll no doubt be based on next year’s Shrek movie.

Good ol’ Activision. They’re nothing if not dependable.

To promote the track “Underdog” from British rockers Kasabian, a group of footballers play “Football Hero”.

Seventeen games to get 76 percent — you try to do better! Dazzling stuff. Great tune, too.

Guitar Hero played on a massive scale using soccer balls [I Heart Chaos]

Welcome to Bobby Kotick’s nightmare, a world in which Guitar Hero controllers could be rendered useless, a world in which video games can be played by monitoring muscle actions. A brave new air guitar future!

In reality, this technical demonstration of muscle-computer interfaces, as shown at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, looks far less precise, far more finger straining than playing with traditional plastic. But the work done here by Scott Saponas, a PhD student at the University of Washington, and his peers could provide some of the tactile feedback missing from other motion control options, like Microsoft’s Project Natal.

The non-gaming applications are just as fascinating, especially the theoretical car door opening baby carriage. Much better than the personal jet packs and silver jumpsuits I had planned for my own futuristic lifestyle.

Guitar Hero without a guitar [Procrastineering]

If you had any doubts about the ever-growing importance of Facebook to the game industry, look no further than today’s Activision announcement, heralding the impressive number of fans the Guitar Hero Facebook page has gathered. It’s not about sales. It’s not about review scores. It’s about people clicking on a little button, and one million (1,084,288 as of this writing) people clicking a button is certainly impressive.

The page is used mainly to request feedback from the Guitar Hero community, asking the community which songs are the hardest to play, what bands they’d like to see, and generally gathering data that could be used to make future updates and versions of the game more tailored to community tastes.

That, or they could just be generating random conversations, though I’d like to think it was the gathering data thing.

So, are you one of the million fans?

Huang, co-founder of Red Octane and parent of the Guitar Hero franchise, went so far as to predict that this generation would be the last to own physical media. In five or 10 years, he said, everything would be digital download-based.

Moore — current head of EA Sports and former overseer of all things Xbox — agreed for the most part. He said that the console model of video games (where you get one complete game on a disc for $US60) was a “burning platform.” As in, do you stand on a burning platform and face certain death or jump into the waters of digital distribution and face probably death?

Clearly, you want the digital distribution. Right?

Despite Moore and Huang’s faith in the future of digital distribution, however, both developers are releasing three to four disc-based games on console a year. Complete with plastic peripherals which cost even more money to manufacture than video game software, mind you.

Huang explained Red Octane’s Activision’s motivation behind ubiquitous releases as accessibility. “We need to give [our users] channels to access additional content,” he said. Not everybody is ready for the DLC revolution, apparently, so they have to keep putting out physical media for the next five to 10 years. Or however long it takes for my physical-media-dependent generation to die out and accept digital everything.

Young had a slightly different take on the digital future. He would, because he develops games almost exclusively for the iPhone like Rolando and Eliminate. Young said episodic content doesn’t work because you can’t chop a complete game into tiny pieces. Rather, said Young, game makers should be looking at ways to monetize usage. To him, this means making a game that’s free to play and then finding ways to trick you into microtransactions. Like shelling out for extremely nerdy clothing for your virtual avatar in a free-to-play role-playing game.

It all comes down to the fact that the video games industry is risk-averse. If console makers believe that the next generation of gamer won’t shell out for $US60 for a disc that gets scratched up eventually anyway, then we can expect the next iteration of console to not have a disc tray. And when that happens, maybe we can all stop shelling out for plastic guitars and a new copy of what’s essentially the same football game every year.