Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

“Love your enemy and celebrate their success”.  Many have said this famous quote, and nobody knows who the originator was, but it is just as true today as it was throughout history.  Whenever you square off against a rival, you should watch their technique, learn it, and recognize an opportunity to learn and grow when you are defeated. 

Rock Band and Rock Band 2 have enjoyed a healthy lead, with the first band title released in November of last year, with the sequel hitting just last month.  Obviously with a near 500 track headstart, Guitar Hero World Tour would have to bring something new and exciting to the table to take the top slot.  Brand new guitars, an all new drum set, and new techniques for bass promise an all new experience for the music genre.  Sporting a brand new pair of Travis Barker Zildjian sticks, it was time to put Guitar Hero World Tour through its paces.

The graphics in Guitar Hero World Tour are superb.  In keeping with the world tour portion of the title, the game features San Francisco’s AT&T Park, House of Blues, Sunset Strip, Amoeba Music, Ozzfest, a carnival, and many more.  Similarly, Activision has teamed up with the real companies that provide gear to rockers everywhere.  This includes Pork Pie Percussion, Regal Tip, Sabian, Zildjian, Vox, Marhsall, Mackie, Krank, Guitar Center, Evens Drumheads, Ernie Ball and Ampeg, just to name a few.  The sponsors helped pay the development cost to be sure, but it also lends quite a bit of realism to the game. 

Speaking of realism, the character in Rock Band and Rock Band 2 were essentially goofy archtypes, but in terms of customization, there was little to be had. Not so with Guitar Hero World Tour – imagine the Tony Hawk character creator, stuffed into the Tiger Woods character creator, and then amped to 11 – yea, it’s that awesome. 

You can create up to twenty characters of your own, or modify the existing characters including returning Pandora, Clive Winston, Eddie Knox, and the rest of the set.  Creating a character is a simple menu-driven process that starts with selecting your sex, and then things open up drastically from there.  Selecting your style from Goth, Rock, Glam, Black Metal, and roughly a dozen more gives your character their overall character.  From there you can adjust every aspect of your face including age, width, cheek bones, lips, eyes, and more.  There are roughly a dozen facial hair options including goatees, soul patches, mustaches, and even more ways to adjust your hair.  You can even change what your music highway looks like, if you don’t like the defaults. 

Tied into the sponsors in the game, you can purchase quite a few instruments and modify them to your heart’s content.  Similar to the character creator, you can adjust the skins, bass heads, fret boards, pickup, drum shells, microphone stands, and far more.  Granted, nobody who is playing is going to see any of this, but the folks watching will get to see the results of Neversoft’s work. 

Not content to stop there, Activision and Neversoft brought some big names into their on-site motion capture studio.  This means that when you play Purple Haze, you’ll be playing with the legendary Jimi Hendrix.  Ozzy Osbourne, Zakk Wylde, Billly Corgan, Sting, Ted Nugent, Travis Barker, and Hayley Williams also make an appearance – truly an all-star cast.  The team seems to have done VoCap as the body motions match the voice work perfectly. 

One of the areas where I dogged Guitar Hero III was the framerate – I’m happy to report that after several hours of play in both the single player and quickplay, nobody saw a single framerate hit.  While the debate rages on whether folks like the art direction or not, I think it looks pretty fantastic.

Just like graphics, sound is a pretty subjective area.  I’m a huge fan of Prog Rock like Rush, but I can’t say that I’m a big Smashing Pumpkins fan.  I dig songs from Lacuna Coil, but I can leave songs like On The Road Again from Willie Nelson on the side of the road.  The track list for Guitar Hero World Tour has been released to the Internet, so you’ll really have to judge for yourself.  I’ll give you some of my insight from the Guitar Hero World Tour review party I held last Saturday.

Due to technical issues (we’ll get to those later), we ran through the Career mode to unlock all of the songs.  The interface looks like a cork board with songs lists, and you’ll select which one you’d like to play.  You usually have access to two or three sets at a time, and completing one unlocks another.  We were flying through the tracks until we reached the track from Dinosaur Jr.  We played through the track with the needle buried in the green until about 99% and then suddenly it redlined and we failed.  We played the song again and failed at 99% again.  We dropped the difficulty again and failed again.  After the sixth time we failed the song, we finally all bumped down to Easy difficulty and barely squeaked through.  Unfortunately the frustration had already set in and the party was on a downward ramp.  Since nobody could identify why we failed, we all just felt a little aggravated. 

Moving through the rest of the track list, we noted that arguably 15 songs out of the 86 master tracks were really slow.  Another 4 tracks weren’t in English.  It didn’t take long before the party goers noticed that roughly ¼ of the tracks were not to their liking.  Toss in duds like Willie Nelson and that so many of these master tracks have been played to death on Rock Band 1 and 2, and party goers were readying pitchforks and torches to get me to switch to Rock Band. 

As I mentioned, several of the tracks in Guitar Hero World Tour are repeats.  This begs obvious comparisons in difficulty.  One that stuck out for me was Everlong – in Rock Band 2 the song is difficult on Hard, but not impossible.  In Guitar Hero World Tour, the track is actually quite easy, even on Hard (I scored a 94%).  Bumping to Expert however ended my hubris fairly immediately. 

The soundtrack for Guitar Hero World Tour is truly a mixed bag.  There are a great deal of songs that are simply not a lot of fun to play.  On the other hand, tracks like Our Truth, Misery Business, and the three song set from Tool are all fantastic.  As I said, you’ll really have to study the soundtrack list to determine if it is for you.

I’ve gotten more questions about Guitar Hero World Tour’s instruments than anything else about the game.  Obviously the drum is of great interest, but there are some changes to the bass and guitar that bear mentioning.  Let’s talk about the drums.

The drum set is roughly the same size as the Rock Band 2 set, but there are obvious differences.  The first thing you’ll notice is that there are three drum pads instead of four, in addition to the two half-cymbals that serve as high hat and crash.  The pads are larger than the Rock Band set, and the feet are parallel instead of pointed outwards.  The bass pedal isn’t attached to the feet, allowing you to move it where you wish.  Since I personally play with my pedal off to the right, this is a good thing for me.  Activision and EA have stated that the instruments will be cross compatable for the two games, so it was time to see if that was true.

The first thing I noticed about the Guitar Hero World Tour drum is that it featured a plastic flexible bass pedal.  Having seen the drummer from Neversoft play on this pedal on Expert, I can’t imagine that he thought it was a good thing to ship it with a plastic pedal.  I grabbed the metal pedal off my Rock Band 2 kit and tried to use it – no joy.  I grabbed my steel chain-driven pedal from Rockpedal.com and found that it didn’t work either.  (They assure me they are working on a dongle to fix that)  The plastic pedal was a source of much complaining at the party. 

Before we get to the merits of the drum that ships with the game, let me answer a question that has been asked time and time again – “How does the Rock Band 2 drum work with Guitar Hero World Tour?  There isn’t an orange drum!”  Well, it’s simple – the game simply omits it from the songs.  The yellow cymbal is your ride and crash.  You’ll see the four track highway that you would be used to if you are a Rock Band player.

I mentioned that we ran into technical difficulties with the game, and the source was the drum kit.  We played for roughly 20 minutes the day we got the game, and set it aside to get ready for the party the next day.  Roughly 2 hours into the party all of a sudden the green tom no longer worked.  Since we had four Engineers in the room, the drum head was quickly disassembled and we found the source of the issue.  The drum pickup is controlled by two wires and one of them had come loose.  We were tempted to break out a cold solder kit but the wires were so small and short that we could neither strip them nor attach them in such a small place.  I guess I just have bad luck with drums as I ran into similar problems with Rock Band 2’s rig.  Activision had a new drum in my hands inside of two days, but I can’t speak to how the consumer will fare in a similar situation.

Back on the new drums, I have to admit that once I got past the learning curve of having cymbals again, I was really enjoying this new kit.  Most songs have some sort of ride throughout, and having the cymbal felt more like playing the real deal than I’ve ever felt in Rock Band 2, minus using the Ion kit, of course.  As a drummer, I really enjoy that the cymbals are elevated, and I like that the toms are slightly bigger and have a different tone to each one.  The ability to double-stick the cymbal and then cross to the snares and toms is a huge plus for anything above Medium difficulty. 

Moving on to the other instruments, the bass has an all new trick – a sixth note.  Since the guitars are cross compatible, obviously Neversoft couldn’t simply add a button, so they instead added an ‘open note’.  The open note is simply strumming the bass without hitting any of the chord buttons.  I routinely play Expert on Bass in Rock Band 2 and there is very little challenge – hats off to Neversoft for making it interesting again.

The guitars got a bit of attention as well.  If you have ever watched Eddie Van Halen play any of his faster songs, you know he tends to tap the fret board.  To simulate this, Neversoft has added a ‘slide board’ that appears on screen as notes that are tied together with a purple string.  You can play them as regular notes, but the awesome way to play is to move up to that slide board and simply move between the colored positions on the neck.  These are similar to the solo frets at the bottom of the Rock Band guitars, but a whole lot more cool. 

On the microphone side of things, you now have two options for your display – static or scrolling.  This is similar to a Karaoke machine, or scrolling by like you’d see in Rock Band 2.  There are new sections in the song where you’ll see hands clapping in place of your lyrics – this is your opportunity to hype up the crowd.  You can also activate your star power by smacking the side of the microphone.  Since there aren’t any tambourine or cowbell parts, it is really the only way you’ll use it.

There is one thing I have to talk about in the Quickplay section of Guitar Hero World Tour – longevity.  The way the songs are laid out at this point, you have a big list of tracks with little in terms of information.  You can sort it by artist or by song title, but there are no indications of song difficulty or any other sorting options.  Given the amount of DLC scheduled to be released on Guitar Hero World Tour, this list will become unmanageable very quickly.  Also, since the folks at my party didn’t know a great deal of the songs on the list, we had no idea which would be harder to play.  Obviously Everlong and Eye of the Tiger are worlds apart in terms of difficulty, but you won’t get any indication of that from the display. 

Some hits and misses in terms of quality and layout here.  The drum quality is obviously a concern, but I also have no doubt that mine was likely the first off the assembly line.  Quality control has never really been an issue with Red Octane, and I can’t imagine that’ll start now.  The new guitars are a nice improvement, and the gameplay changes are welcome.  The sixth note for bass is a game changer, and it makes the instrument challenging again.  Hardware aside, the interface could use some work – this is one of those instances where you might want to learn from your competition. 

The party didn’t go as planned.  Since we didn’t have an unlock code (you have to pre-order through GameStop to get it) we had to unlock the songs via the career mode.  Put simply, the career mode has far too many slow and emo songs to be conducive to the party atmosphere.  It won’t take long for the code to be freely available, so it isn’t likely you’ll run into this issue unless you are a day-1 purchaser. 

Once I got my replacement drums, I sat down with the family and we blew through the rest of the tracks on Guitar Hero World Tour.  It is every bit as interesting and fun as Rock Band 2, but one thing was clear – the game is far less forgiving.  Often it doesn’t take much for a drummer to fail out the entire band when playing on Hard, so you better know what you are doing when you move up the ranks.   Since everyone contributes to the overall pass/fail gauge, there is no ‘saving’ somebody in your band.  Once they fail, everyone fails.  It is in this single thing that I feel Rock Band and Guitar Hero differ the most.  While Guitar Hero World Tour offers a Beginner mode which is essentially an individual no-fail mode (instead of the whole band) that allows players to get the rhythm instead of necessarily what note they have to hit, Rock Band 2 encourages everyone to cooperate to ensure that the band succeeds.  Guitar Hero World Tour rewards players for everything they do with cash they can use in the store, but even then it is focused on individual effort – not the success of the band.  Nothing makes somebody feel horrible faster than letting the party down.  If you can bring them back from that horrible solo, it isn’t such a big deal.  When everyone has to replay a Dinosaur Jr. song for the 6th time, it is discouraging.

One of the big features that Neversoft has included in this title is the ability to record and remix your own tracks.  Even better than that, you can submit them to the community at large for a rating.  You can submit 5 songs for approval, and if you are consistently rated highly that number can increase.  You can record drums, bass, guitar, and keyboard, but not vocals.  Obviously to prevent people from committing DMCA violations, the tracks will be screened by Neversoft, so no recording YYZ and submitting it, Rush fans!  Much like the editor that shipped with Neverwinter Nights and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, once the community gets hold of this utility you’ll see some high quality original tracks.  While I lack the skill to use it to its full potential, it took me a matter of moments to create a pretty decent track. The system automatically tries to snap the track to a beat, so even the most chaotic flailing tends to come out reasonably clean.   There are several tracks by the folks at Neversoft included at the bottom of the Quickplay list.  These aren’t full fledged songs per-se but simply warm-up songs.  Boring for the singer (your singing doesn’t count), but a good source of warm up rhythms if you don’t have your own regimen already. 

The Guitar duals from Guitar Hero III make a return, but you’ll only see them in the solo guitar career mode.  You’ll square off against the various motion captured folks mentioned above, but you know what to expect here so I’ll spare you the details. 

All told, much like the instruments the gameplay is a mixed bag.  The song selection coupled with the interface makes for awkward party play, and the uneven difficulty causes mysterious fail-outs that just frustrate players.  I have to admit that after two Rock Band titles to serve as an example, I’m shocked that Guitar Hero World Tour changes so little from the Guitar Hero III formula. 

Guitar Hero World Tour features 86 master tracks – a first for the series.  Every track in the game is the original, or has been re-recorded specifically for the game.  Much of whether you feel that it is worth the cash is tied to the soundtrack.  Since the controllers work cross-platform, you do have the option of picking up just the disc, but you’d miss out on the new five-drum / cymbals fun.  You’d also miss out on the new fret board gameplay that the new wireless guitars bring.  The game already has Metallica’s Death Magnetic album, a Classic Rock pack, an R.E.M. pack, and the new Oasis Dig Out Your Soul album slated for release.  Obviously this track list is only going to grow – so we’ll see how Neversoft addresses the interface sorting issues.

The game features band vs. band online play, but my recent surgery prevented me from hitting my scheduled time to test it out.  I apologize, but I’ll have to amend the review with this data as it becomes available.

As the party closed I found myself surprised.  The anticipation for Guitar Hero World Tour was palpable, and to see the party turn South the way it did was a bit concerning.  There are no reports of widespread drum failures, but obviously 2 hours is a pretty short mean time to failure.  The soundtrack for Guitar Hero World Tour was fairly hit and miss with the party crowd, as was the difficulty level, so it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out with a wider audience.  With something so diverse as musical tastes, I suspect we are going to see some very divergent scores for this one.

Gaming Trend Score

83

1. Graphics: 100
2. Audio: 80
3. Controls: 75
4. Gameplay: 80
5. Value/Replay: 80
6. OVERALL:83