Guitar Hero: World Tour

It came out Sunday. I grabbed the Guitar + game pack for $100.

I haven’t played much yet. It doesn’t yet work properly with The ion rocker drum set and I’ve been drumming a whole lot since I got that kit. Strangely they had their QA staff working overtime weeks ago to make sure the patch that let it work the Ion (among other things) would be ready for launch but they didn’t release it yet.

The guitar looks to be very good. Compared the Les Paul it’s bigger, heavier, and feels sturdier. The strum bar is far longer, the pull is a little lighter, and slightly quieter (I think). It makes an effort to integrate the Xbox controls into natural looking parts of the guitar so it seems like less of a toy. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with the touchpad slider yet but it’s interesting.

Pretty much all aspects of the interface are worse than Rock Band 2. In the song, it’s harder to get a quick glance at your multiplier, crowd meter, star power, etc. They also dedicate less area of the screen to the note chart and more to the band graphics, which I dislike since most of the time I’m trying to look ahead at the music, not the characters. I also find the note chart to look a little messier somehow.

The in game menu system doesn’t seem that great. There are weird aspects to the multiplayer. Like - if you want to play cooperatively with a friend in quickplay mode where one of you plays guitar and the other bass, that works fine. But if one of you want to play drums and the other guitar, then you have to select a full band, at which point it automatically tries to fill in your band with 2 random xbox live players. Maybe there’s a way around this, I haven’t played with it too much.

There is a 4 vs 4 full battle of the bands mode that RB2 lacks (I think) which could be really cool.

The graphics are different than Rock Band. It’s hard to describe. The Rock Band graphics sort of give the impression of watching film, whereas the GH graphics feel more like video - less cinematic, more edgy. GH seems to have some really awesome stage designs, more varied and creative than RB2’s. The character creator is also much more flexible, somewhat like Oblivion, allowing you to do stuff like set the spacing between the eyes or the fullness of the lips.

The song set seems okay - I was hoping for more prog rock and metal. It annoys me that Tool finally made its way to these games and they managed to pick the worst 3 songs they could. GH4 and RB2 seem to share about 10 songs. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or they both happened to find the songs in their selection process for some reason (I have a hard time believing that two seperate development teams decided that Dinosaur Jr’s “Feel the Pain” somehow belongs in their game) but it’d be nice to reduce the overlap to have more songs available to people who own both. There’s no music store within the game that I found (you have to use the xbox live marketplace).

Strangely, Metallica’s Death Magnetic is 1.3gb as DLC. They use a lossless compression and there are 4 or 5 seperate instrument tracks. The other DLC is more appropriately sized. It’s strange that Metallica is apparently so concerned with the sound quality for that album when the CD version is so atrociously mastered (the GH4 version is substantially superior in sound quality to the CD version).

The unique feature it has over RB is the music creator, allowing community created custom music. I tried one song and it was decent and well charted. At the end of the song it asks you to rate it, so after some time there will be a lot of community feedback and the best stuff will rise to the top. It’s a cool feature.

I hear the drums are of questionable reliability. If you’re a fan of the various band games, I’d recommend buying the RB2 special edition set and then the GH:WT guitar bundle. That way you’ll end up with 4 instruments and both games. (Of course if you really like these games, I recommend the Ion drum rocker kit instead, it’s awesome).

Edit: Actually, I’m not sure how smoothly using RB1/2 drums works with the GH4 game, so the game has 1 more instrument on the drum track. I’m guessing it just binds 2 instruments to one pad. There are expansion cymbals for RB2 coming out soon which may let you play the GHWT note tracks correctly.

Well, my friend tells me the patch that fixes some online crash issues and Ion compatability is out. I’m too tired to test it but I thought I’d mention it for any Ion owners who were considering the game.

Thanks for the review.

I’ve already got too many plastic instruments so I was thinking about just picking up the game by itself.

At this point I’m more interested in songs than anything else. I have so much DLC from the Rock Band series that I’m not giving up on it anytime soon but the user-created songs in GH could make it become a must-have.

Bah - what am I talking about? With Fable II and Saint’s Row 2 waiting to be opened and Far Cry 2 on the PC I don’t have time for another music game!

If you’re buying the game anyway it’s only $40 on top of it to get the guitar. Too good a deal to pass up IMO. Sell one of the older ones on Craigslist, or have a backup for when one breaks.

Edit: And oh yeah, the patch they did for the game makes it treat the Ion set as if it were a rock band set, with the 4 pads + pedal. Which is stupid, since the Ion set is completely capable of handling more instruments than the RB or GHWT set.

I picked it up Sunday, and I’ve only played it a few times so far but –

On RB/RB 2, I can clear almost all songs on expert Vocals in the 90%+ range. I don’t have a bad voice and have pretty good pitch. On GHWT, I am scoring in the 70%-80% range on MEDIUM. These are songs I know well already. Not sure if it’s due to GH seeming to score note-by-note and not by phrase as RB does, but it’s rather annoying. I will grant that this might be due to me not quite knowing the flow of the game yet and I may well improve with time as I learn to sing the songs the way GH wants them done.

I have sort of a rhythm impairment :wink: but I like to play drums on RB/RB2. I really haven’t tried anything past Medium ever on it. GH drums – the Beginner level is mind-numbingly easy. My freakin’ cat could do it. On the next rank up, the songs range from comparable to RB Easy to WHOA OMG MAKE IT STOP CRAP GONNA FAIL.
On RB Easy drums, I again usually score in the ~90% range.

I don’t play guitar/bass so no comments there.

The characters are freakin’ fugly. Yuck. I am a not a very girly girl but I do like pretty avatars and the GH ones are not so nice.

I don’t like not being able to bail out other band members. I also don’t like the lack of warning that someone is about to fail.

I do like the setlist, though.

Overall? I think I’ll stick with RB2 and maybe bust out the GHWT for friends/kids’ friends when they come over.

Hmmm…sounds like I’ll be sticking with RB2 for now.

I already have 4 guitars - the wired versions of both Guitar hero and Rock Band 1 and the wireless versions from GH Aerosmith and RB2. So I think I’m set for guitars, unless something drastic happens.

Still working through Far Cry 2 on the PC, so I haven’t even started Fable II or Saint’s Row 2. It looks like Rock Band 2 will only be a part-time thing for me over the next week or so, but that could change if someone else is playing.

FYI I’m strictly a medium player, but I can 5-star anything but vocals on medium.

If we didnt have RB/RB2, this would be a kick ass addtiion to the GH franchise… but we do, so it isnt.

The graphics are great - consistently inline with prior GH animations and improved… the charectors ‘interact’ with each other and even do stage tricks that you would expect them too (watch the singer during “Beat it” or Ozzy during “hot for teacher”).

most annoying thing - only ONE band is created - all money earned goes into one pot. While you can create 20 charectors and play as them - the scores are all “player one/player 2” - no starting over in a different difficulty.

Best thing? Being able to stop during a song and switch difficulties (you restart the song, but no thte gig) without any apparent negatives.

There are/were 20 or more overlapping songs with RB2 - and its very clear based on those that they use a very different charting mechanism - just look at “Eye of the TIger” in ‘hard’ on both games - big difference.

I did like some of the additions that they made to the guitar charts (holding a sustained note and hammering on another sustained note for a chord). They also added an “open string” base note on hard + charts - (strum with no frets depressed) that really amped up the base difficulty.

It definitiely does not have the replayability factor that RB/RB2 has - but there are a number of things during the playing that are lots of fun.

ETA - I like the new guitar - dont l;ike the slidy thing - but the original GH guitars are fine, and you can just tap the frets during the solos if you want.

Does the touch strip allow you to play the guitar like a slide guitar in the song creator? Or at least allow you to bend notes (i.e. play using the touchstrip, and slide your fingers up and down to ‘bend’ the strings)? If so, I’ll buy it just to use the song creator to make some music.

Ugh…just a few hours of play and my guitar is busted…downstrums don’t always register. Hopefully they’re quick to replace; I still have my trusty GH3 Les Paul.

I was all set to do that myself. But then I heard of a few limitations on the GHMix: you can’t make a song that has either more than 1,200 notes or is 3 minutes long. Who the @#%* came up with that? :mad:

Well the game is pissing me off. Not only do they treat the Ion kit as a RB1 kit, but their cymbal mapping is annoying - ride, open hi hat, and crash are all mapped to the blue pad. And the game refuses to detect the cymbals and pads as seperate instruments so that during free play and stuff hitting your crash cymbal just triggers the floor tom. My friend tells me (who’s sort of in the know) that there are no plans to change this. I guess that also means RB1 users who buy the cymbal upgrade kit won’t be able to get full functionality either. Overall it’s just a much more boring drumming experience than RB2 even though if they did it right it could be more interesting by virtue of the extra instrument.

I’m wondering now if I could take the game back for the price of the restocking fee. I have no idea if you can do returns on video games.

You can? I thought they don’t let you since it’s software.

Yeah, I’d imagine you can’t. I was just ranting due to irritation. I probably wouldn’t anyway. I’m just pissed because part of the reason I bought the Ion set was so that I could get full functionality out of both games.

Lol ya you can’t. I thought you actually said you can though I know there are ways to get around it.

By the way, is the ion set like actual drums? or electric drums?

It’s essentially a real electronic drumset (made by Alesis I think, a reputable manufacturer) but instead of having a normal drum brain it has an xbox interface. You can plug other drums/cymbals/etc. into the kit if they use the same connectors and signal types. You can also replace the xbox interface with a drum brain and use the kit as an independent e-kit.

So far I’m really happy with it. It feels way better than the sets that come with the games.

edit: Except the pedal kind of sucks. Better than a rock band pedal, but not by much. You can use something like rockpedal.com as a repalacement though.

I see… Electric drums make no “real” noise unless it’s plugged in though right?

Right, aside from the actual physical impact (which is quieter and lower pitched than the rock band kit). The drum brain will have audio outputs that you’d output to a stereo, headphones, soundcard, etc.

Mine came out of the box with upstrum that never registers. I’m trying to decide if I should try to exchange it where I bought it (Target) or call the support number.

I would try the support # first, they helped me out with a problem with the one I got from Target.

I just picked up the game by itself tonight. I much prefer the Guitar aspects of GH to those in RB so I got this only to play the GH parts. The unfortunate thing is that the song selection is for band play, so all of the early songs are INCREDIBLY boring because they are long and have no solos to speak of.

I know there are some badass guitar tunes in here. I just want to cut through to them.

I really don’t like how they have structured the unlocking of the songs in here. You play 2-3 songs and then an encore, but you don’t know what the encore will be so you have to play through songs you don’t like just to see what they are.

I’m using the GH3 guitar and it works fine. I don’t feel like im missing anything with the slider pad, though I dont really like the slider notes in the game. To squishy IMHO.

I just tried the RB drums with this. They work fine, though activating star power is painful (you have to hit yellow and blue pads at once, but it’s at will so you will likely flub the following note and break your streak when you do, meaning there is no break point to activate star power and I don’t think there are any real fills to speak of.)

All in all there is something about this game that feels off compared to RB. The songs are good but they are mixed kind of funny so stuff sounds a little out of whack.

I just want to unlock Hot for Teacher.