GameSpy Preview of Guitar Hero World Tour

Over the last few weeks, I've sat by helplessly as my fellow editors have attended Leipzig and PAX and gotten to do something I'd yet to: play Guitar Hero World Tour. Activision's answer to Rock Band is shipping with a more elaborate drum kit and a revamped guitar with a new slide bar, and this week marked the first time I -- and many other people in attendance at an Activision press event -- would actually get my hands on the new gear or take a good look at the game's setlist. Over the next week, we'll be revealing a great deal of info on the game, and that coverage kicks off today with some basic impressions.





The first big decision of the night, obviously, was what to play first. Drums? Guitar? Which songs? I eventually opted to try out guitar on Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" While the guitar's shape has changed (the series' licensing deal with Gibson has ended), the wireless controller still feels very similar to GH3's Les Paul, with some interesting tweaks. The strum bar is longer, and the "bridge" area is actually a large button you can rest your palm on and press to activate Star Power.





The most interesting addition to the guitar is a new touch-sensitive strip in the middle of the neck. This strip will actually perform several functions, but the most prominent is the ability to slide your finger across it during certain solos, as opposed to playing all the notes in the traditional manner. The touch strip will definitely take some getting used to, but as we found out over the course of the night, there are some songs where you'll want to take advantage of the strip to help play harder solos. And on certain songs, like Steve Miller's "The Joker," we imagine players will enjoy using the strip for fun slide effects at the appropriate times.










From here, it was on to drums for Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." Although I play real drums and have completed Rock Band's Expert drum campaign, common sense prevailed and I decided that my first playtest of the drums -- especially on one of the game's hardest drum tracks -- should be on Hard. As it turned out, it was the right call, as we'd later see the Expert track defeat some of the best drummers on hand.





The drum layout is quite different than what players might be used to with Rock Band. Instead of four pads straight across, the kit features three tom-style pads and two cymbals raised above them. The cymbals really change the experience: you spend most of "Hot For Teacher" riding the orange (right) cymbal, which has a lot of give to it, and feels extremely natural. The same can be said for songs with straight 4/4 beats, where you reach over to play the left cymbal (as the hi-hat) with your right hand, and the snare with your left. Things are a little more awkward on songs with faster hi-hat, like "Everlong" -- playing 16th notes on the yellow cymbal and then reaching underneath to the left to hit the snare proved more challenging that in its Rock Band 2 counterpart.





Overall, the drums have a nice bouncy feel, and don't make a ton of noise. It's worth noting that the kick pedal isn't actually attached to the kit, and a few players had issues with the pedal sliding away during away during harder songs. Several of the Neversoft people on hand mentioned this wasn't uncommon for new players, but that eventually people got a feel for keeping a heel on the pedal and keeping it under control.











Having just completed an extensive analysis of Rock Band 2's Expert vocal campaign, I was eager to test out Guitar Hero World Tour's vocal capabilities. It'll be easy to grasp for anyone who's played Rock Band or Karaoke Revolution: Lyrics scroll across the screen, and you try to match your voice up with a line reflecting the pitch of the melody. Lyrics are divided up into phrases, and if you sing well enough, you get a perfect rating and your score multiplier goes up.





The biggest difference between GHWT's vocals and other recent games is that there's no immediate feedback on how you're doing within a phrase, no little pie or meter to fill up. You can see if your vocals are matching up with the song's pitch, but it can sometimes be hard to tell where you're missing if you're only off by a little. There are some other tweaks with regard to Star Power and freestyle sections: if you have Star Power built up, you can activate at any time using the controller (instead of waiting for a special trigger sections), and you can also just mumble and scat during empty sections to rack up some extra points (we've not seen anything resembling Rock Band's percussions sections).





We also found that the game grades vocals pretty harshly. Even on songs where we only missed three or four phrases, we'd end up with scores in the 80% range, leaving us to believe the game grades on words or even pieces of words, regardless of whether you get a full rating for a phrase. On the plus side, there are plenty of stats in GHWT. After every song, there's a full stats breakdown for every instrument and phrase, something we've missed in Rock Band.










The last instrument we tested out, of course, was bass. For our first attempt, we picked one of the more challenging bass songs, Muse's "Assassin." On Expert, we were quickly introduced to GHWT's biggest bass tweak, open notes. Represented by a solid purple bar across the entire note chart (similar to the drum's bass pedal note), this is effectively a sixth note played by strumming without holding down any fret buttons. It turned out to be a lot harder to get the hang of that we'd initially thought. You're so used to closing your hand to hold down a fret button while strumming that it's a little awkward strumming while not pressing anything.





This really only scratched the surface of all the gameplay in Guitar Hero World Tour. There's the band interface, the setlist, the progression through all the different songs, and a lot more. Over the next week, we'll be presenting a great deal more info on these aspects of the game as well as further impressions of the new instruments, so check back regularly as we sink ever deeper into this entertaining world of plastic guitars.

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