Activision has announced that Band Hero will be coming to the Nintendo DS Lite, complete with a Guitar Hero: On Tour-style guitar grip and an all-new “drum grip.”
In spite of its tiny size, Band Hero for the DS Lite will let gamers play guitar, sing and even rock out on the skins thanks to the special add-ons that will come with the game. The guitar grip is already familiar to DS owners, while the drum grip is essentially a large skin that goes over the entire unit, providing two small drum pads on each side of the handheld that cover the buttons and directional pad.
They’re a softer, more comfortable way to handle drumming, with a “really nice push-back, bounce-back feel to them,” according to Band Hero Executive Producer David Nathanielsz. “They fit your thumbs well,” he told Kotaku. “If you start banging on that d-pad [without it,] you’d get blisters.”
Given the somewhat lukewarm reception of Guitar Hero: On Tour, the launch of Band Hero and the creation of yet another piece of stuff for the portable system might be something of a risk. The music game genre has been incredibly lucrative but as Gamasutra notes, revenues of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band are down by nearly 50 percent year over year and June 2009 was the second month in a row without a title from either franchise being among the top 20 selling games, the first time that’s happened since September-October 2007. Is it merely a lull before the release of Band Hero, Guitar Hero 5 and DJ Hero, or is the genre experiencing a more fundamental slow-down as gamers grow weary of dropping big bucks on peripheral-laden games that offer little more than their predecessors?
Pricing and release date have not yet been announced, and unfortunately for DSi owners, the drum grip (and everything else) is only compatible with the DS Lite.
