Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (Xbox 360)

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After having read all this way, I'd hate to send you kids home empty-handed. So let me tell you a quick story about one of my visits to Harmonix up in Boston a couple of years back.

Harmonix had brought in a few members of the press to loiter around the offices, drink all their soft drinks, and to get a closer look at Guitar Hero II, which was in development at the time.

Harmonix employee Daniel Sussman took us all out one night to some terrible Boston dive bars. After several thousand beers, Sussman casually mentioned that they were trying desperately to come up with a name for a new character in the game. Naturally, being the helpful sorts that we are, and wanting to all be part of videogame history, we immediately began peppering Sussman with potential names. We tried various combinations of our own names; for example, former PSM editor Kaiser Hwang was there, and one possibility that Kaiser and I cooked up was "Kaiser Jones."

As our time at Harmonix waned, we became increasingly desperate, making lame excuses to stop by Sussman's office to loft a few more name candidates his way. In the end, what Sussman and Harmonix settled on was "Casey Lynch," which was the actual name of a former Alternative Press editor who was also in attendance on the trip.

I was, quite honestly, mad as hell when I learned that Lynch would forever be immortalized in Guitar Hero II (and III; and in the Aerosmith version). To this day, I still feel that "Kaiser Jones" was a far superior candidate. The damn fools. The one sliver of a silver lining: Casey Lynch is a man in real life -- an actual man, with two kids and a wife and stuff -- but in the game, "Casey Lynch" is a stick-figure-thin rocker chick.

The lesson here is this: Sometimes in life, when you win, you lose. And sometimes, you're just living it up when you're going down.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.