We have a lot to talk about. In an eerie case of timing, two of the ultimate party games have hit (or are in the process of hitting) the shelves. Guitar Hero: World Tour is set to challenge EA’s Rock Band, which would have been here sooner had it not been for EA’s disdain for Australia.
They both have the potential to be hugely expensive and hugely fun.
So, what to make of Guitar Hero: World Tour?
Our executive summary is that it’s fun, but not as fun as it should be.
There are some great points in its favour, but it still feels like it’s scrambling to compete with Rock Band by including more unnecessary garnish that doesn’t enhance the core gameplay. It’s got a fundamental problem, and it’s the set list.
The Music
There are 86 songs in the game, all of which are studio masters. This would have been great, but there are too few good songs and far too many California Indie rock tracks that you've never heard of that feel like they were included as part of a deal with the recording studios to get the handful of legitimately memorable and fun songs into the game. And there's enough bland southern rock in there that you'll wonder why the game didn’t come with a jug controller.
There are quite a few memorable tracks which are great fun to play. Our favourites are Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher, Lenny Kravitz's Are you Gonna Go my Way, the Foo Fighters' Everlong, Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer, The Living End’s Prisoner of Society, Muse’s Assassin, Tool’s Schism and Korn’s Freak on a Leash.
Most other songs failed the balancing act of being memorable and fun to play, such Michael Jackson's Beat It and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger (which gets bonus points if your singer starts skipping and punching the air during the guitar solo). And worse than these boring-to-play classics is the deluge of forgettable crap that’s been shoehorned in and serves only to dilute the handful of awesome tracks.
We have a feeling that the game’s set list will end up being propped up with downloadable content to make it fun. Like Metallica's Death Magnetic album, which can be yours for 1440 Microsoft points (that’s AUD$23.76 in real, quantifiable money).
The Gameplay
GH:WT is much more cartooney and forgiving than Rock Band. The backgrounds, animations and even the text in GH:WT are nowhere near as polished as Rock Band, which incidentally also trumps GH:WT by letting you sort songs by title, band, genre, difficulty and release date.
Rock Band is harder and has better band play mechanics. For example, if one player fails during the song, another can star power them back into the game up to three times. This makes for tricker gameplay and adds an element of teambuilding.
During GH:WT, if one player fails a song, so does everyone else -- but it’s a lot harder to fail. There’s also very little for the singer to do during instrumentals. Rock Band solves this by getting the singer to tap the microphone in time with the beat. There were several times in GH:WT when the vocals kicked back in after a long silent spell midway through a track that nobody had heard before. The singer had zoned out, didn’t realise he should have been singing, missed several bars and failed the song.
GH:WT also needs a big screen before you can comprehend what’s going on. The individual point meters are confusingly blended together, and it’s very hard to know each player is doing before you see red outlines on their display.
The Frills
There's an absurdly detailed ‘make your own character’ feature. You can specify everything, even down to the position and features of your characters nose and tattoos.
This pales in comparison to the ludicrously detailed notation creator that lets you score (and later, play and share on Xbox Live) your own songs through a very complex MIDI interface. In practice, this is far more time consuming and complex than it sounds and should really have been done on a PC. Creating music in MIDI is hard enough in Logic or Reason or other PC based sequencers, let alone trying to do it using a plastic guitar on a TV where every aspect of music theory (including key, scale, time signature etc...) is made available through sub-menus.
Most annoyingly, we couldn’t find a way to import an MP3 into the interface and place notes along it. But for people with CDO (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but arranged alphabetically), the sequencer has the potential to create masterpieces.
The Controllers
The new guitars are fantastic. They feel more solid, and have a capacitive touch pad further down the neck for thrashey sections of songs that you run your finger over to play. There’s also an open string note mechanic that’s been added to the Bass, which you play by strumming and not pressing any buttons.
The drum kit, bar a slightly dodgy kick pedal, is absolutely fantastic. It feels like a cheap set of V-drums, with the right bounce and properly weighted sticks that make you feel properly involved with the music. It’s deceptively solid, all the pads are touch responsive (the harder you play, the louder you play) and its two raised cymbals make playing feel closer to right than anything you’d expect from something this cheap.
There's even a MIDI input, into which you can plug a set of V-drums -- we tried it with a Roland kit. Sadly, the software doesn't let you assign the outputs of your V-drum set to the World Tour notes, so you'll have to patch your pads into odd inputs on your kit's head with a bit of trial and error. We had to unplug the high hat’s control pedal because leaving your foot on it (like you do during 95% of the time while playing drums) killed the signal from the high hat. The bloody thing only registers one input per device, which is a problem because V-drum cymbals register hits on both the rim as well as the cymbal itself, so you’ll miss notes if your aim isn’t perfect.
The Verdict
Rock Band's set list leaves World Tour in the dust. There are so many more “oh, that song’s awesome!” moments when trying to decide what to play, compared to World Tour’s “Huh?” moments. But when it comes to peripherals, the reverse is true.
Our bitter side would be tempted to buy World Tour just to stick it to EA and its unforgivable delay in getting Rock Band shipped to Australia. But neither GH:WT’s songs nor its gameplay are strong enough to warrant doing that.
If you take your DDR-music games seriously, the ideal scenario is to Frankenstein both the franchises together and play Rock Band with the GH:WT peripherals. That’ll set you back $330 for the GH:WT kit bundle that contains the drum kit (you’ll also get the GH:WT game, a wired mic and a guitar) and then however much a standalone Rock Band costs.
Yeah, Guitar Hero: World Tour’s alright. But it’s saved by the peripherals, not the gameplay. And because of that it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s rushed and flawed and its core is done better by its competitor.