It may not look like it, but the above guitar is actually a game controller. It's also a guitar. It's both, actually. The guitar was created by Seven 45 Studios, a music hardware company based out of Boston that has been making real guitars for years. And now they're expanding into the realm of rhythm games with their new title, "Power Gig."

The basics of "Power Gig" should be familiar to anyone who has played a rhythm game in the last 5 years. It'll feature drums, guitar and vocals, and requires players to match beats in time with the music. Pretty familiar, right?

But once you take a look at the "Power Gig" guitar controller, you can see where the difference lies. For one thing, there are strings. Playing a note actually requires that you hold down a real fret and strum on actual strings with the right timing. Frets are labeled by color on the neck of the guitar, but they're still strings, just like the real world.

Apart from the strings, the gameplay in "Power Gig" utilizes its unique controller. Beat matching is one mode of the game, but there's also a chord matching game which requires that players learn the actual chords required to play a song. There are on-screen prompts, of course, but it's definitely a lot closer to learning the guitar than any other rhythm game before it. In theory, the chords you're playing are identical to the ones you would play with the real song, on a real guitar.

So that's the game. But the "Power Gig" guitar hides one more surprise. Hit a toggle switch and the guitar is suddenly a real electric guitar. Plug it into an amp and you're playing. It even has the heft of a real guitar, which makes sense given that Seven 45 have so much experience creating real world guitars. It's the game bit that they're newcomers to (though they have hired game industry vets to tune up the software).

The question, however, is whether "Power Gig" is coming too late to the party. The rhythm game genre is definitely pretty full, with juggernauts "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" taking up much of the spotlight. "Power Gig" is looking to launch later this fall, so we'll know then whether a unique controller and some more realistic gameplay is enough to push this one ahead of the pack.