Freestyle Games creative director Jamie Jackson is showing me Guitar Hero Live's ambitious Guitar Hero TV mode, in which scores of frequently added music is curated for you based on your song preferences throughout the rest of the game. He's demoing a Premium Show – in this case, a three-song live concert set from an actual Pantera concert – riffing along to show off the note highway in the series reboot, as this is my first time seeing it in action. He pauses the gameplay to show me some of the things you can do in the menus, right from inside the song.

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"It's our always-on, 24-hour playable music network," he begins to explain.But I notice that the song doesn't stop. The music video keeps playing in the background, it's just that the note highway is gone while we poke around in the interface. I ask if you can actually pause the song proper – you know, in case the phone rings or someone knocks on the door. No, I'm told. Not in a Premium Show. Apparently the show must go on with or without you. Which makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, especially when you consider that Premium Shows are always more than one song long. [Editor's Note: An Activision representative contacted IGN to inform us that the lack of pausing "only happens when you're in the channels. When you're in [a] Premium [Show], you can pause and go back to gameplay right where you paused -- right where you left off."]Meanwhile, the music videos in GHTV and live-action footage starring "you" in the on-disc Live mode aim to make the experience more real, but a slew of power-ups dubbed Hero Powers – like the ability to drop a bomb to wipe out a difficult section of a note highway (Clear Highway) or reduce the frequency of notes on the screen (Dial-Down) – are the most video game-y features you could possibly imagine. As if it matters anyway, because it's physically impossible to fail in Guitar Hero Live, even when the crowd in the Live campaign mode is booing you mercilessly and your bandmates are giving you the most stink-eyed "WTF bro?" looks they can muster.Indeed, Guitar Hero Live doesn't seem to care if you're playing it or not, just so long as you turn it on (to clarify: you are literally rewarded with in-game currency for turning the game on). Which is a shame, because there are good ideas here that are worth exploring further. First is that GHTV will offer hundreds of songs right out of the gate, with more added over time. In fact, just in my short demo, I saw everything from Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" to Pantera's Cowboys From Hell" to Fallout Boy's "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark." Even better, there's no subscription fee for GHTV, though you can fast-forward through certain challenges by spending real-world cash. Instead, you earn Plays for the GHTV content by simply playing the game. It's a clever approach to keeping the game fresh.But I'm a 34-year-old Gen-X dinosaur. Downloading custom note highway skins and player cards – another two features Jackson showed off – don't matter to me; how each song feels to play does. And that part, with GH Live's new six-button guitar, proved an enjoyable challenge. I felt like it was 2007 again, when I first picked up Guitar Hero 2. So my brain was pulled in two different directions, but fortunately, I attended the demo with someone who had a different take on it: IGN's Esmeralda Portillo – a "Millennial." She loved the Guitar Hero reboot, found its casual gameplay approach to be appealing and appreciated its come-and-go-as-you-please mentality. While I worry that the note charts for all those GHTV songs can't possibly be any good if there are so damn many of them for the developers to chart (time will tell on that, but hopefully that fear won't be realized), she appreciates the quantity over quality (potentially, since it's still far too early to judge the quality of GH's note charts ). It's Guitar Hero Live's "Pandora" factor, as she called it, that intrigues her.I did my best to block out the snarky, knee-jerk Internet LOLz that were directed Guitar Hero Live's way following its reveal. Parts of the new GH either don't make sense to me or seem at odds with other parts, but after finally playing it, I can honestly say that I'm eager to play more GH Live, if for no other reason than my fond recollection of physically learning how to play the guitar and drums of last gen's music games. That decoding of a new video game language and accompanying sense of discovery are immensely rewarding, not to mention the fact that GH Live is quite fun to watch, even if it's sometimes for the wrong reasons. Finally, it's laudable that it's making a committed effort to try something genuinely new in the music game space, so that we don't have two nearly identical titles competing for the same rhythm-genre dollars. Even if you end up preferring one or the other, the two revived rock-n-roll games can coexist.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.