Guitar Hero World Tour

Archive for November, 2008

Know, before we go on, that this will apply to very few of you. OK? Great, let’s go on. If you live in the US, and live in the US in an area that’s serviced by either AT&T’s high-speed internet or U-Verse TV, and don’t yet have either of those services, but are willing to sign up, then boy, have they got a deal for you. If you fit that bill and sign up (and don’t mind “qualifiers” like a mail-in rebate), you’ll get yourself a free copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour. Not the whole kit and kaboodle, mind you, just the game and guitar, but hey, if you were in the market for a new ISP, there are worse sweeteners out there.

[Guitar Hero AT&T]

Get your copy of Guitar Hero World Tour on sale Now!

I spent a chunk of the weekend picking through the 1,500 plus iPhone games out currently, as I started pulling together a gift guide for the iPhone. As you can imagine it’s quite a challenge to try and find a handful of gems among all of those games. Sure a bunch are shovelware, but there are also quite a few excellent titles.

Take for instance Gameloft’s Guitar Rock Tour. The GameLoft-developed title leans heavily on the Guitar Hero franchise for its gameplay mechanics and aesthetic, but it manages to do enough different to make it work on the iPhone that I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play.

The game comes with two instruments to choose from and 17 songs, all of which I suspect are covers. To play through a game using the guitar you just tap your way through the notes on the four-fret guitar as they fall toward you down the neck of the virtual instrument. The songs drop sustained notes and lines of notes at you as well as a number of double notes. If you come across a line of notes you can slide your finger across them as they scroll down. Once you build up enough rock power you can activate the familiar power-up by sliding your finger up the gauge to go into a power-up mode that doubles your points.

While some songs can be a tad difficult to follow along on the tiny screen, in general I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play. I wasn’t as taken with the game’s drums.

The game has just two buttons for the drum mode. One on each side of the “musical highway” that drops down your iPhone. For some reason I had a lot more trouble keeping up with the song despite having half as many buttons to push as I did with the guitar.

The drum mode also highlighted an issue both instruments have. The game tends to chug occasionally when you miss your notes. These occasional slowdowns can throw a wrench in your timing as you play through a song, leading to more chugs. Fortunately it didn’t happen so often that it broke the game.

Guitar Rock Tour includes both a tour mode with unlockable achievements and a quickplay mode. What it doesn’t include, at least yet, is any form of multiplay or downloadable content.

While the ten dollar game is certainly limited with its short set list and lack of multiplayer gaming, I still think this is one of my favorite games currently on the iPhone. I just hope that they plan to expand the title with more, free or cheap songs and perhaps another mode.

Get your copy of Guitar Hero World Tour on sale Now!

Guitar hero world tour

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Despite, well, warnings that they just wouldn’t stand for anybody creating then sharing real songs over Guitar Hero: World Tour’s song creation utility, people went ahead and did it anyway. During the game’s first week on sale, the GH Tunes “store” was littered with recreations of game tunes like the theme to Mario. And the theme to Zelda. You get the idea. Well, those are now gone. And the others that are still there – like tunes from Final Fantasy and Sonic – probably won’t be there much longer, either. Our advice? Get creative with those song titles. “Sonic Theme” is no good. But “Baby Stole My Heart And Stashed It In Green Hill Zone”? More subtle. Might get in under the radar.

‘Mario,’ ‘Zelda’ Tunes Deleted From ‘Guitar Hero’ Music-Sharing Service [MTV]

Get your copy of Guitar Hero World Tour on sale Now!

Activision has announced plans to target real musicians by installing full Guitar Hero World Tour set-ups in music shops.

Actually, should that read ‘targeting’ or ‘mildly insulting’? Very much depends on the type of customer that shop attracts, I would imagine. Most of the musical instrument vendors I have ever been into have a hard core of ‘Keep Music Live’ hardliners who I don’t imagine would take kindly to having their PROPER SKILLS being boiled down to a bit of button stabbing on a pretend fretboard.

Activision, of course, see things differently.

“For many years computer games have taken people away from learning a musical instrument,” said Active Music’s Les Worsley, “Here is a game that positively encourages it. This is a real opportunity for stores to embrace the platform and bring new customers into their stores.”

Guitar Hero heading to music stores [Casual Gaming]

Get your copy of Guitar Hero World Tour Now!

What’s the best way to counteract constant accusations that you’re the most greedy, soulless and creatively bankrupt publisher in gaming today? That’s right, you announce a massive charity deal! Activision have today pledged to donate “$100,000 worth” (so, around 1000 copies) of Guitar Hero III to the United Service Organizations, or USO as you’ll more likely know them as. The games are destined for USO lounges at US military installations across the world, and, while Activision’s motives are certainly cynical, the end result is still a good one, as the games should provide a welcome distraction for US troops no doubt engaged in activities nowhere near as fun as playing Guitar Hero.

Activision Supports The USO, Gives Guitar Hero to The Troops [Shacknews]

Let’s face it, you can’t compete against Rock Band with just guitars. You can decide to go your own route and own the Guitar-only rhythm game genre, but that seems like a formula to lose money and no one is in this business to do that. So Guitar Hero IV, aka Guitar Hero World Tour, had to come up with a band of its own. And the developers did it in spades rolling out a six-piece drum kit with two raised cymbals, a snare, and two toms, all of which are velocity-sensitive. Neversoft also made the guitar bigger, more realistic looking and added a fretless slider panel. And the innovation didn’t stop with the instruments; gameplay got a major overhaul too.

Do the masters-only massive setlist, new instruments and gameplay give Guitar Hero World Tour the competitive edge in the band music genre or is the game destined to spend its remaining days treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry?

Loved
The Difficulties All Go To Five: Perhaps sensing an expanding interest in an untapped market, this latest Guitar Hero includes a fifth difficulty level. But instead of using the extra level to make things harder, Neversoft used it to make things easier. If I had a child not already indoctrinated into the cult of band games, I’d be elated.
Quite Exciting, This Computer Magic: Playing Guitar Hero World Tour, I was blown away at times by the animation of character models in the game. From the on-stage moonwalk, to head-banging guitarists, this latest Guitar Hero really amped up the things their characters do during a set.
It’s Such An Interesting Concept: It’s easy, I bet, when riding the tidal wave of success and money generated by a popular gaming franchise to get stuck in a rut, to take the no-risk route of more music but same mechanics. I was happy to see that Neversoft avoided that this time around. Granted they did need to come up with two new instruments for their band game, but they did so with a sense of panache. The drums have cymbals which makes drumming a bit more fun, more immersive. The guitar is chunkier, has a new fret-free slider bar and the microphone, well the microphone is just a mic.
The Sustain, Listen To It: Along with tweaking the existing and new instruments, Neversoft seems to have put a lot of thought in how to pull more out of the game play mechanics as well. The new slider on the guitar, for instance, lets you slide your way through whole sections of songs. You can also use it to tap the neck to hit notes and deliver wah during sustain. Other changes include a bass note that is fret free and sections of vocals designed for talking to the audience mid-song.
We say, “Love your brother.” : Neversoft went well above and beyond in making sure that competitor Rock Band’s instruments work with their game. Not only can you use the microphone, guitar and drum, when you use the RB2 drums in Guitar Hero World Tour it actually changes the way you play. The game reduces the number of “lanes” on the musical highway from Guitar Hero’s five to Rock Band’s four. Pretty impressive and a great service to cross-title gamers.

Hated
I Don’t Hear Anything: You can have the best hardware design on the planet, but when your game ships with faulty controllers it just doesn’t matter. While I love the slider on my guitar, the yellow button doesn’t register at all. Others have reported having trouble with drums not registering hits. This isn’t unique to Guitar Hero World Tour, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
It’s Such a Fine Line Between Stupid, and Clever: One of the things I liked about Guitar Hero III was its story line told through animated cut-scenes. Sure it was incredibly light, but it still helped give the game a bit of character, showing it was something more than Karaoke 2.0. This time around the game still features a bit of the same animation storyline, but it’s really only delivered at the very beginning and the very end. The gap is so long I was confused about what I was seeing when the game’s career mode wrapped up.
I’ve Got a Small Bit of Bad News: Guitar Hero World Tour has some tremendous high notes during the career mode, from Jimi Hendrix stepping on stage to jam with you to facing off against Ted Nugent. But none of those high notes come at the end of the career mode. Instead you’re left with an odd mix of famous faces packed into a single band playing the sort of music they would NEVER play if they could ever be convinced to jam together. And the end credits’ song. Really?
Money Talks, and Bullshit Walks: Product placement in absurdly popular video games are quickly becoming an inevitability, so we’re all going to have to get used to it. But I don’t think they should be as noticeable as they were for me in Guitar Hero World Tour. Plugging for musical instruments and venues: Fine. Plugging for KFC and Coke: No Thanks.

Guitar Hero World Tour has made me a believer. I don’t think I could choose one distinct winner between Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour, mostly because they seem to be taking different routes to the same sort of excellence. But I love, for instance, how the drums feel on Guitar Hero World Tour. Drumming through long sections that require cymbals is just plain out fun. Some of the other changes feel a bit gimmicky, but overall it’s a very solid experience and one that certainly isn’t dwarfed by the competition.

In the long run this genre is anyone’s game. I’d like to think that the two could peacefully co-exist but the pain of not being able to play a particular musician based on which game you have is going to eventually become too painful to bear.

Guitar Hero: World Tour was developed by Neversoft for the Xbox 360 and PS3, published by Activision and released on Oct. 26 for Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Wii and Xbox 360. The Band Kit retails for $189.99 USD. Completed single-player tour using guitar, played many songs using bass, drums and microphone and tested coop offline and on.

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Filed under: News

The solution announced last week that proposes to fix the problems occurring with your brand-new plastic drum set from Guitar Hero: World Tour is now available for download. Officially named the Drum Controller Standard Tuning Kit, this Windows program (sorry Apple and Linux users!) should solve your sensitivity troubles. Too bad though, cause you’ll also need an midi-USB cable, which you are unlikely to already possess. Luckily, you can get one for free from Red Octane. Of course, you’ll still need to wait for the cable to get to you … and who knows how long that will take.

You can download the tuning kit here and request for a midi-USB cable here.

[Via Joystiq]

Guitar Hero: World Tour drum tuning kit now available originally appeared on PS3 Fanboy on Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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