Gaming peripherals maker Mad Catz is an NYSE-listed company as Mad Catz Interactive, Inc. (NYSE: MCZ), a status it brandishes in most of its press-releases. All is not well for the company, as it runs the risk of being delisted on account of low selling share price. The stock exchange recently served the company with a notice that unless it improves its share price over the next six months, it faces delisting.

The MCZ stock is currently selling at a little over 0.15 a share. The company has been bleeding money, with underwhelming sales, a $11 million loss on its decision to co-publish "Rock Band 4" with Harmonix, and laying off 37 percent of its workforce. The company also recently sold off its subsidiary Saitek, which specializes with flight and motorsport simulator peripherals, to market leader Logitech. Mad Catz, on its part, is looking to raise stock price by performing a "reverse stock split," in an attempt to consolidate (lower) the number of shares, and raise share price, to stay listed.

Since Harmonix and Activision went their separate ways, each company is developing a new rock-based game. Activision is busy developing Guitar Hero 3, and Harmonix is making Rock Band. Over at Gamasutra, Activision explained why they think Guitar Hero 3 will be the better of the two...by claiming that Rock band is a Guitar Hero imitator. Activision implied that Rock Band will merely be a Guitar Hero retread rather than an original game. However, one could claim that Harmonix has every right to, considering that they originally made the game, and they helped make Konami's Guitar Freaks series.

Since acquiring the Guitar Hero license and franchise from Red Octane, Activision has handed it over to Neversoft for development of Guitar Hero 3. Harmonix decided that it will do Rock Band with the help of MTV and Electronic Arts (EA).

We already posted a press release which talked all about how there really was going to be a Guitar Hero 3, and how it was going to be for the PS2 and Xbox360. The press release went on about how sweet Guitar Hero was going to be.

While Guitar Hero 3 looks good on paper, IGN actually went through the trouble of reviewing a pre-release version of the game.

Guitar Hero 3 is much different from either of the two previous versions of the game. The first thing dedicated fans of the game will notice is Neversoft's interest in tweaking the difficulty. At this point, they aren't doing a good job...Guitar Hero "experts" were constantly failing songs in the pre-release version of GH3. Neversoft claims that when they actually release the game, the difficulty will be "just right", between the first and second game's level of difficulty.

When Guitar Hero 2 is released for the Xbox360 (in March, perhaps?), it will have a ton of Xbox Live content. This means that Red Octane can upload new songs, saving them the trouble of developing an entirely new game. They may also use Xbox Live to let people play online with each other.