Bob Dylan Headlining Guitar Hero 5 News

Activision has announced that Bob Dylan will be a featured artist in Guitar Hero 5, which will not only be the first time that a Dylan track has featured in the game series, but one of the few times that the iconic folk singer has licensed his music for promotional use by a third party.

A watershed was passed earlier this year when Dylan approved the use of his track 'Blowin' In The Wind' in a advertising spot for the Co-operative Group, which was the first time he had approved the use of his music in an advert for the UK market.

The Co-operative Group's moral approach to business was supposedly a big part of Dylan's decision to license the music, although we'd strongly question whether Guitar Hero and Activision can be considered under quite the same ethical umbrella.

Nevertheless, at least one Bob Dylan track (Activision hasn't announced which one yet) will feature in Guitar Hero 5's final set-list alongside other music from the likes of Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Kings of Leon, The White Stripes, Santana, and Vampire Weekend.

Activision certainly won't be skimping on the big acts this year then, with more than 85 artists being featured in total. The publisher also isn't skimping on new modes either and has announced Party Play and RockFest modes as new additions for this year's iteration.

While Party Play will allow gamers to drop in and out of tracks seamlessly, RockFest will provide five new head-to-head modes for gamers both on and offline. Additionally, in a new feature for the series, gamers can now play with any four-piece combination of Guitar Hero's instruments.

The feature, which is accessible in all of GH5's modes, will allow variations such as 4 players on drums, or 3 on vocals and 1 on guitar etc. In another new feature for the series, the game's entire set-list will be accessible in Career mode straight out of the box.

Downloadable content from Guitar Hero World Tour will be compatible with GH5 and any users with DLC on their HDD will have their GH5 games immediately updated the first time they switch the game on. However, Activision is warning that this backwards compatibility, "Does not apply to a limited number of songs".

Finally, Activision and Neversoft are promising some refinements to the GHTunes mode that was debuted in World Tour and a new Band Moments feature that tasks bands to hit "special note streams" together. We're not quite sure what that means but it sounds interesting nonetheless.

Guitar Hero 5 will be released this autumn on the usual platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, and PS2.