Your face is a mess

So Kellogg’s or whoever it is that makes Fruit Loops has got a neat promotion going on right now. In boxes of certain cereals, they’re giving away little electronic Guitar Hero games. Sounds good, right? Well, my mom thought I would go nuts for the little guys, so she’s started buying lots of Fruit Loops so that I can collect them all. Only I was never overly intrigued by them in the first place.

And now that I actually have a couple of them, I’m no longer apathetic to their existence. Nope. More of a “slightly annoyed” feeling, really.

See, these little things are a neat idea, and for a cereal box freebie they’re not bad, but they mostly just bastardize the Guitar Hero name (not that Activision hasn’t been toeing that line for a while now). The black one is your standard cheap-ass LCD game. It gets the GH formula down pretty well, with notes scrolling down and whatnot. You have to hold the correct button and hit the strum bar when the note hits the target area. Pretty decent, no? No! There’s no sound! I didn’t expect music or anything, but there aren’t even the standard blips and bloops that come with these little games. It ruins the entire point.

Our red friend is perhaps the exact opposite. There is no game to speak of, which sort of gives it the spirit of real guitar playing over toy guitar playing, but it isn’t at all interesting after about 20 seconds. Each fret button plays a different repeating riff that plays for a couple seconds, and the whammy bar plays what I’ll refer to as “effect notes”. Basically a note or small phrase that’s been tweaked a bit. The idea, according to the back of the box, is to radically modify your notes for a killer sound or something to that effect. Nope. There’ll be none of that here. Pressing a fret button and then the whammy bar does not change modify the riff, but rather it just plays an effect note over top of the riff. Whoo.

There are two other toys in the set as well. One is an amp that plays a lead, rhythm and bass riff, and you can turn them on and off to make whatever combination your heart desires. But it’ll always just play the same three-second melody over and over. There’s also a “star power meter” thingy that provides another falling object game akin to that of the black guitar. Really, these are just a waste of plastic and whatever small bits of electronics they need to work, but because of them, my mother has temporarily lifted her Fruit Loops ban, and I can’t totally hate on anything that provides me with a means to a Fruit Loop. It’s just lucky that ol’ mom hasn’t noticed that these come in a wide variety of cereal boxes.