Band Hero

No Doubt sued over this one. The band had licensed their likenesses as playable characters, then discovered the unlockable avatars could be made to perform any song in the game, which meant Gwen Stefani's digital double singing in a male voice through material she had never agreed to touch. The case dragged through California courts for years and became a small landmark in celebrity likeness law. It is a strange legacy for what was, mechanically, a family-friendly reskin.

Underneath the branding this is Guitar Hero 5 with the edges sanded off. The same five-fret highway, the same drop-in and drop-out band play that let a second or third person grab a controller mid-song without kicking anyone back to a menu, the same freedom to build a band out of any instrument combination rather than the mandated one-of-each lineup. The PS2 edition, handled by Budcat rather than Neversoft, loses the online play and runs at a coarser resolution, but the note charts and the feel of the strum bar survive the downgrade intact. Anyone who owned a plastic guitar in 2009 could pick this up and play it without a moment's adjustment.

What changes is the music. Where the main series leaned on metal and classic rock, the setlist here is chart pop and radio filler aimed squarely at people who found Dragonforce intimidating: Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Blondie, a run of songs that mostly ask for steady rhythm rather than finger gymnastics. That makes the guitar charts easy and the vocal parts unexpectedly the most interesting instrument in the room. Drummers get the short end. There are only so many ways to chart a mid-tempo pop backbeat.

It arrived in a year when Activision put out four rhythm games, and the market did not survive the flood. Band Hero is the clearest evidence of what went wrong: a competent, cheerful product built from parts that had shipped eight months earlier, chasing an audience that had already bought the plastic instruments and had no reason to buy them again. Played now, with the peripherals long since boxed up or landfilled, it works best as a party curio for a group that already owns a guitar and wants something less punishing than the main line.

The engine is good. The songs are pleasant. Neither fact stopped the genre from collapsing under its own release schedule, and this game sits close to the epicentre.