Guitar Hero to out-Rock Band Rock Band?
September 18th, 2008I’ve already bought Rock Band 2 and a significant amount of downloadable content for the original (which, of course, also works with Rock Band 2), but I have to say that 1up’s Guitar Hero: World Tour preview, which gives 10 reasons why you should still get it even if you have Rock Band 2, makes it sound pretty damn good.
Once Activision (finally) confirmed cross-instrument compatability with Rock Band instruments I figured I’d be picking up the game anyway, but even the new hardware for the game is sounding pretty impressive. Not only that, there seem to be several gameplay tweaks that actually do a bit more to change up the game than what Rock Band has added. Based on this list and what I know about Rock Band 2, here are what I consider all the significant new additions/features in the games:
Rock Band 2
- Hardware changes include a camera on the wireless guitar that helps calibrate your tv to the game, new velocity-sensitive, quieter wireless drums with expandable (redundant) cymbals.
- A no-fail mode allows you to play a song without the worry of potentially failing… good for parties.
- Single player and multiplayer are now all “World Tour”. You can play with your bands by yourself or with 4 people, with people online or not
- New single-player challenges as well as “Battle of the Bands” challenges, which lets you pit your scores (or other goals) against your friends and other players.
- I’ve noticed that some songs now have drum solos, which act the same as guitar solos. I’m guessing there may also be bass solos in some songs too, but I have not tried this yet.
- Bands have been significantly simplified… there is no Band Leader now, and all characters that you create can use any instrument to my knowledge.
- Drum Trainer, which basically just lets you practice a bunch of different beats and fills.
Guitar Hero: World Tour
- Hardware changes include new (obviously) drums and microphone, but also a new guitar which includes a touchpad that can be used in place of the frets, which is apparently not only easier to use for solos, but actually serves a gameplay function too. The guitar also has a “palm” button which lets you activate star power without having to tilt it. The drums are also wireless, velocity sensitive, and include non-redundant cymbals, and while it doesn’t mention it in the preview, I’ve seen in videos that they’re also pretty quiet. 1up seems to like the cymbals quite a bit, as it makes the game “more 3d” and real to them.
- Character builder I don’t really care too much about, but it’s new for Guitar Hero and this at least brings it on par with Rock Band in this regard.
- A better fail-out implementation in multiplayer. In Rock Band (both 1 and 2), if someone in your band fails out, you can bring them back to life by using overdrive (star power in Guitar Hero). However, if someone fails out 3 times, unless the song ends within the next 20-30 seconds or so, your whole band fails. It looks like Guitar Hero won’t completely fail someone out, but they’ll just be a bigger drag on the whole team. In other words, the rest of the team just have to do even better if someone is having trouble. If they can’t do better, their meters will slowly go down as well until everyone has failed out at the same time. This is a surprisingly good idea from Neversoft, as it lets a person who’s doing poorly continue to fight through their song without punishing the rest of the group with an abrupt end to the song. Rock Band 2 does have the no-fail option now, but that does end up eliminating one of the challenges of the game.
- Bass now has “open strums”, which I guess mean strums without a fret. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s still a new feature that seems like a nice little addition.
- The Music creator and GH Tunes. To be perfectly honest, while I know there are a lot of people excited about these features, I don’t think I’ll care too much about them. I would probably never use the music creator, and I can’t imagine I’d care too much about downloading several amateur songs with no lyrics. I guess it remains to be seen what kind of stuff gets thrown up there, but this is actually something that, as of now, I don’t see being a really big selling point for me.
While I have more changes/additions listed for Rock Band 2, many of the hardware and gameplay changes for Guitar Hero: World Tour sound like they really put some more thought into them than the updates that are in Rock Band 2. While I loathe the idea of having to get even more hardware, the GH hardware is actually sounding pretty good. Not only that, I appreciate the better fail-out method as well as some of the new ideas that they’ve added into the gameplay (some related to the new hardware). And, of course, the music creator and GH tunes, while not something I’m initially interested in, are certainly far beyond what Rock Band offers now (which is nothing in this regard).
While I appreciate the fact that Rock Band was designed as a “platform” and all of the music I downloaded for the original game, as well as all the hardware, are compatible with the second game, the changes they made to the hardware and gameplay seem pretty incremental. There’s nothing really wrong with that, and I’m having a blast with Rock Band 2 and its certainly hard to argue with such a massive list of already available songs (Rock Band 2 songs + Rock Band 1 songs, plus dozens of downloaded songs = lots and lots of songs), and even Guitar Hero: World Tour could probably be considered an incremental update… the only problem is that it seems like it may be incrementing right over Rock Band 2 already.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I’m taking a pass on Rock Band 2 but I’ll be picking up GH on day one.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
cisco-
I’m now seriously considering picking up a full Guitar Hero kit… ugh… this is exactly the opposite what I was going to do, but I’ve been thinking of getting a new drum set anyway (my current one is a little flaky and also… loud, of course), and since everything was going to be compatible in the first place, I figured I’d be picking up the game anyway as well. Well, the game will be $60, and no matter who’s drums I get will cost at least $100 I think… So I’m already in for $160, why not just pay the extra $30 and get the improved guitar as well?
Of course, I already have a massive catalog of songs for Rock Band, so I imagine that it’ll remain my default band game of choice for parties and such, unless someone wants to play some songs off of Guitar Hero.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
This is where DLC really sucks. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could resell your DLC?
September 18th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
cisco-
Heh… Indeed, and this is certainly where not just downloadable addons are going… but all games… something I’ve written about before.
Still, I’m not too bummed about it. The DLC pricing for Rock Band is a little better than Guitar Hero, and if there’s something I really want on the Guitar Hero side, it doesn’t stop me from getting it… I think the bigger problem you touch on here is simply that these games aren’t completely compatible in all ways… DLC included. =) Obviously, something like that couldn’t really happen, but it’s a nice thought.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
This is why I’m glad that Rock Band came into being. Some competition seems to have shaken up Activision enough to result in some real changes.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I was planning to boycott Guitar Hero after GH3 because of the shilling for Axe… must stay strong.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Rob-
That is true… one thing that Rock Band hasn’t seemed to succumb to as much is rampant advertising. Though they did just announce a deal to have licensed stuff in their game… Of course, it’s music-related stuff (like guitars and whatnot), so actually has a reasonable place in the game.
September 19th, 2008 at 7:37 am
@Rob,
It’s all about your point of view. I get party games like this for Wii. So I have GH3 on Wii. There are no AXE adverts on the Wii version. Likewise, Rock Band is a joke on the Wii. They did a shoddy PS2 port with no online and massively stripped features. From the eye of a Wii gamer, Rock Band is the sellout. GH3 had great, free online and no adverts. With DLC support on Wii in GHWT (not sure about RB2) and free online (not sure about RB2) music swap, it’s a no brainer for Wii fans. I totally understand the Rock Band love, but it’s interesting to note that it’s platform specific.
Either way, Geoff is totally right. The competition Rock Band brings it great for gamers.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Cisco-
Has Activision or Neversoft explained how they’re doing DLC support on the Wii yet? I know they said they’re going to do it, but I haven’t seen anyone mention whether you’ll be able to store stuff on an SD card, for instance. From my understanding, the lack of ability to store (and load) songs from an SD card is what prevented Rock Band from supporting it on the Wii. If this is still the case for Guitar Hero, the DLC is going to be extremely crippled. Even if it does support SD cards, it could still be argued that the DLC is somewhat crippled, as most SD cards are probably in the 1-2GB range, and I’m not even sure if the Wii supports the larger ones. A single album can be a few hundred megabytes.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
In statements they’ve made, they say you can save DLC to your system memory or an SD card. DLC songs can be loaded into setlists from the SD card. They also say that DLC on an SD card can be played in any Wii with the game. I’m not sure how that’s going to work but it sounds great to me. I’d love to be able to bring my DLC songs to a friends party.
This is from an interview on Kotaku with one of the guys at Vicarious Visions.
“In addition to that everyone-can-play attitude, the in-game music store features accessibility like nobody’s business. Anything you buy from the store (or download from the Guitar Hero site’s Music Studio section) can be put on an SD card, and carried anywhere and put in any set list on any system running the game.”
September 19th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
That’s a nice feature. I wonder why Rock Band wasn’t able to do it… or maybe it was just a matter of what was easiest to port, and the PS2 game was already there.
September 19th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Bingo.
Rock Band tossed the Wii a gimped port with no functionality beyond what was there on the PS2. I appreciate they made the game, but c’mon. At least get the online working. GH3 had no problems there. The online was great. The only thing missing was DLC but honestly, that’s never been Guitar Heros strong point.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Harmonix said that the state of the Wii at the time made DLC infeasible. Perhaps that’s changed — there have been firmware updates since then. It’s also possible that Harmonix is full of it, but they never have been before. Remember that the “pay to play” thing on the Wii is very new and Wii DLC was unheard of when Rock Band came out.
Frankly, I think that even if it’s possible now, it’ll be gimped. You wouldn’t be able to store the number of tracks you’d want to with Rock Band — you’d be switching SD cards constantly, if you could even do that. It might work for GH because they are really shitty at doing DLC — compared to Rock Band’s weekly releases, GH3’s are pathetic.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I thought I’d heard of some discussion that Guitar Hero: WT is going to do better with DLC… there’s even talk about a subscription, which wouldn’t really make much sense if they’re not going to offer it at a regular interval.
That being said, it’s still more expensive than Rock Bands and, of course, I already have such an extensive catalog of music for Rock Band. I imagine I’ll continue to buy DLC for Rock Band over similar DLC for Guitar Hero.
September 19th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Agreed — not being the first with this will hurt Activision.
That said, Neversoft is far less talented than Harmonix at making notecharts, so even if that weren’t true, if the DLC were identical I’d go with Rock Band’s anyway.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
“Remember that the “pay to play” thing on the Wii is very new and Wii DLC was unheard of when Rock Band came out.”
Square Enix went live with DLC and “Pay to Play” in March. Rock Band released on the Wii in June. If they can get pay to play working in a Wiiware title, surely Harmonix could have done it had they given a shit about it.
“It’s also possible that Harmonix is full of it”
I think you’re on to something here.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Harmonix did a super lazy rush job on Rock Band Wii. You might not care, and that’s fine, but it’s true and Wii owners care. The game had ZERO online functionality and it came out almost a year after GH3 which had fantastic online working on day one. It came out like NINE months later than Rock Band on the other platforms. Surely they had time to add some special features for the Wii crowd? Nope.
Like I said, I understand the Rock Band love, but lets be careful not to toss their salad too hard.
Also, aside from a couple of random songs, I found GH3 note charts absolutely competent. I think we went over this before though so I’ll leave it at that.
September 20th, 2008 at 7:08 am
I stand corrected. I’m not sure what happened here. You might be right. It doesn’t square with my experiences with Harmonix, though, and I’m having trouble reconciling them.