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A Look At Guitar Hero World Tour
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We got some hands on time with Guitar Hero: World Tour at Leipzig GC, and were very impressed with the game.
The developers were quite eager to show off the new instruments.
The Drums
The drum kit is quieter than the Rock Band kit, and has pressure sensitive drum heads. These are used to give you extra points if you hit certain notes harder than others, and allow you to play freestyle segments a little differently, playing crescendos, for example.
The drum kit is wireless, and true to form the batteries went flat during one of the demonstrations. This gave the developers a chance to show off a little 'finishing touch' in the game. If someone presses pause, or their controller goes flat / gets unplugged, then when you resume the game you get a countdown before the song starts again, helping you get back into the beat a little more quickly.
The cymbals don't look like much, and feel a little tacky to the touch - but once you're actually drumming on them, they work very well. It only takes a few beats to get used to them, and they feel very natural. They're responsive too.
What I fell in love with, however, was the kick pedal. It is much nicer, and more responsive, than the stock Rock Band one. I can do the Rock Band drums on hard, but struggle with many of the songs on Expert because I find the kick pedal to be too stiff. The Guitar Hero: World Tour one is much lighter, and much easier to use during fast sections.
The Guitar
The new guitar is pretty cool too. They have improved the connection between the neck and the body of the guitar, to fix issues that some people apparently had with their older guitars. The strummer is apparently 'more clicky' - although I didn't notice that on the one that I tried, but, since I was the last person to try it at the end of the show, I assume the guitars had been subject to a LOT of abuse, and in that case, I'm impressed at how well it stood up to use by random people - I've seen how my fellow press treat demo kit, and occasionally it isn't pretty :)
They've moved the guide button and the start button on the 360 version, which is nice, as it means it's a lot harder to accidentally hit them. The Select Button has been changed into a bridge near the strummer, and can be used to activate Star Power. You can still tilt the guitar if you wish, but the button is a nice extra option.
There is a touch sensitive strip below the five normal fret buttons, which can be used in a similar way to the extra fret buttons in Rock Band. You can slide your fingers up and down these to produce effects during held notes, and use the buttons during complicated solos, if you find them easier. I found the touch sensitive strip really hard to get used to, but I'm the kind of person that relies on touch a lot when typing / using a controller, so I found the lack of feedback, and the lack of individual buttons, felt really strange. Some of the other journalists in my demo group took to it within seconds, so it seems that it is just a matter of personal taste.
The Mic
The microphone was made by Logitech. There's not much to say here, it was, erm, microphone shaped :)
It did seem to be fairly well made, and was quite good at picking up the voice of the singer, whilst not being too badly affected by any background noise - even when the sound on the game was turned up to a very high volume.
The singing is well done - there is a line showing 'what you should sing', and a second line that charts 'what you actually sang', making it very easy to chase notes. I got the impression, from my brief attempt at singing, that you have to have good timing, and that you have to pronounce the words - humming doesn't seem to work very well. I didn't get a chance to confirm this with the developers, however.
The Game
The developers seemed quite eager to show off the character creator, and understandably show. It offers a huge amount of freedom in terms of customising your build, facial features, and accessories. You have a lot of freedom, and can make a character look very good, or very silly, depending on what you do. It is possible to make girls that look haggard, with messy hair and smeared liptsick, or guys with broken noses - although oddly enough, that option isn't available for female characters.
The level of freedom in the character customisation is something that would be expected of an MMO, and is very different to the choice made by Rock Band, where they went for a simpler set of options, with most of the differentiation coming from clothing.
The next thing they wanted to demonstrate was the GH Tunes feature - you can record your own music, and then design an album cover, and upload your creations to GH Tunes to share with other users.
There is a simple wizard which offers some pre-set beats for you to play around with, or you can use the full recording studio to record lead, bass, and rhythm guitars, as well as drums, and a keyboard track. The singer can sing along, but unfortunately you can't share a vocal track on GH Tunes.
You can do everything on the guitar - even record the drum tracks. There is a 'drum machine' that will do some basic rhythms for you, and you can tilt the guitar to make the drum machine speed up or slow down. When you are recording the keyboard, you just press guitar frets for each note. You can select the 'voice' of they keyboard, and other instruments, from a simple menu.
Once you're finished with the wizard, you can refine the tune in GH Mix, playing it back, pausing it to tweak various notes, etc. The game will automatically alter the charts for the song to create a version for every difficulty level.
By default, you can share five songs on GH Tunes. Players can download the songs and rate them, and if your creations are popular, your account will be flagged and you can share more songs. At the moment, the maximum number of songs a creator can share is 20.
Conclusion
I was very impressed with Guitar Hero World Tour, the setlist, while not as extensive as Rock Band 2's, includes a lot of very good songs, and the instruments are very very good quality.
I can't comment on how well charted the songs were, as there were only a handful of songs available to play, and they weren't very difficult ones. The game did feel very 'Guitar Hero Like', however, with fairly relaxed timings on the drums, so I'm guessing hard songs will play the same way they did in the later Guitar Hero Games.
If you're looking for a game that is fun to play, with good instruments, then I think Guitar Hero World Tour is a good choice, the game has the multiplayer options that were lacking from Rock Band, although the GH Tunes feature is let down by the lack of an ability to share vocals - although I can imagine that if vocals were allowed it would be a nightmare to moderate the content. I think the long term playability of the game will depend on how much downloadable content there is, but as long as they offer lots of it, I think it could take the rhythm game crown.
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