Editor's note: The following article is solely the opinion of the author and in no way reflects the opinion of GotFrag DPAD or its parent company, Major League Gaming.

“Taken a few guitar lessons and realized how insufficient your skills will always be? Try Guitar Hero III! And for those of you who’ve dabbled in other instruments, we give you: Rock Band!” That might as well be the ad line for these games since they are so shallow and exploitative.

GHIII and Rock Band feed off of the embarrassing, yet hard to deny stereotype that there are two wannabe rock bands and one wannabe rapper in every American neighborhood. Nobodies from everywhere spend weeks of their lives playing these games and convince themselves that what they do is impressive, that there is some manner of sophistication or art to these games. In truth, these addictive, horrendously over-hyped games shine light onto some ugly aspects of the video gaming world: hypocrisy and cheap, rehash-simplicity tied to pop-culture.

The level of hypocrisy of many GHIII and Rock Band players is quite amazing. The same critics of Dance Dance Revolution rock their fingers off on the much easier games (but that’s OK since they happen to like it.) The same gamers who talk badly about casual games and gamers, or games that girls tend to like often play these two casual games, even as the venom drips from their tongues, and girls wait next to them in line for their turns. But again, it’s OK since these are games that they happen to like - these games, which are at base, no more than prettified, remedial versions of a true classic.

Do you remember Simon? For those of you who don’t, or are too young to know what it is, Simon (derived from the classic children’s game “Simon says”), was a small, circular, battery-powered memory game. Simon had four buttons of different colors that would blink (with various sounds) in random sequences, having the player repeat them by pressing. Key word: random.

Players worked their way up the sequence within a few minutes, and either passed or failed. To become a master of the game of Simon, one had to not only have an excellent memory, but be able to adapt on the fly to patterns that were never experienced before, nor would be after. (Most unlike the relatively simplistic and infinitely forgiving Guitar Hero and Rock Band songs; which even the mentally challenged can pass after experiencing the pre-set pattern a few times or so.) Even so, they continually sell well, though they can’t even begin to teach the instruments that they mimic.

Guitar Hero III has sold over a million copies on each of the Wii, XBOX 360, and Playstation 2, with nearly a million sold on the Playstation 3. Incredibly, the PS2 has more than three million copies under its belt. More stunning than that? Rock Band is knocking on a million sold, and it costs nearly $200 after sales tax.

In the end, Guitar Hero III and Rock Band are summed up in this way: Dumbed down games of the classic, Simon, fused with DDR, and played to popular music on pieces of plastic that are little better than Wii-mote attachments for Wii sports and Cooking Mama. This end result is a memory game where one doesn’t even have to be very smart to perform well, doesn’t have to expend many calories (so that we could at least call it exercise, like DDR), and can brag about one’s so-called skills within the already embarrassing mini-culture. Quite sad. But hey, at least you can pretend that you’re a rock star...