Anyone who’s spent any amount of time around the Christian retail industry can tell you that the genesis of most ideas within that business come from the following formula: “Let’s make a Christian version of [fill in the blank]“. Which is why this generation of youth group children can now put down their Rock Band instruments and cleanse their ears of all that secular claptrap that game calls “music,” and instead start praising God while pressing buttons on plastic guitars hooked into the new game Guitar Praise.

Oddly, while most of Guitar Hero and Rock Band’s success has been through the Playstations and Xboxes of this world, those who want to play Guitar Praise will have to simulate their Christian rock stardom through a PC or a Mac. Sure, paying licenses to console manufacturers would be a downer to the bottom line. But who cares about that! Let’s check out some of the available tracks!

12 Stones, “Broken”
Bride, “Same Ol’ Sinner”
Caedmon’s Call, “There You Go”
Casting Crowns, “Lifesong”
Chris Tomlin, “Made to Worship”

Darrell Evans, “So Good To Me”
David Crowder Band, “Foreverandever Etc.”
Day Of Fire, “Reap and Sow”
dc Talk, “Jesus Freak”:

Family Force 5, “Love Addict”
Flyleaf, “Perfect”
Hawk Nelson, “The Show”
Hawk Nelson, “Friend Like That”
Inhabited, “Rescue Me”
Israel & New Breed, “All Around”
James Clay, “Franklin Park”
Jared Anderson, “Blind Man”
Jennifer Knapp, “Undo Me”
Jeremy Camp, “Tonight”
Jessie Daniels, “What I Hear”
Jonah33, “Father’s Song”
Josh Bates, “Perfect Day”
Kutless, “Beyond the Surface”
Kutless, “Hearts of the Innocent”

Lincoln Brewster, “Spin”
Nate Sallie, “All About You”
Nevertheless, “The Real”
Newsboys, “Something Beautiful”
Paul Baloche, “Rock of Ages”
Paul Baloche, “All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises”
Petra, “Backsliding Blues”:

Pillar-”When Tommorrow Comes”
Red, “Breathe Into Me”
Relient K, “I Need You”
Seventh Day Slumber, “Awake”
Skillet, “The Older I Get”
Skillet, “Rebirthing”
Skillet, “Savior”:

Spoken, “Wind In My Sails”
Spoken, “Falling Further”
Spur 58, “Sleepwalkers”
Stellar Kart-”Procrastinating”
Superchick, “We Live”
The Crucified, “The Pit”
This Beautiful Republic, “Going Under”
Thousand Foot Krutch, “The Flame in All of Us”
Thousand Foot Krutch, “The Art of Breaking”
tobyMac, “I’m For You”
Todd Agnew, “This Fragile Breath”:

Warren Barfield, “My Heart Goes Out”
Whitecross, “Who Will You Follow”
Whitecross, “When The Walls Tumble Down”

Christian rock is hardly known for Dragonforce-style guitar pyrotechnics, but it’s a little strange that the makers of Guitar Praise would stick so closely to the “Praise” portion of their title and include track after track of singer-songwriter-performed worship. The point of the original game is to press a lot of buttons in time with the music’s tempo, and some of the tracks in this list are as slow as some of the Low catalog. Still, I suppose the few nods to Christian hard rock make some sense, but where’s the Demon Hunter, the Living Sacrifice, the Underoath? It would have made some sense to include a Phil Keaggy track (considering they dipped back into archives far enough to drag Whitecross out of the cobwebs), since Keaggy is the genre’s token guitar god. Digital Praise, maker of Guitar Praise, you have disappointed me. Disappointed me, verily.

Guitar Praise [Official site]