Those of you who have followed the Guitar Hero series from day one will remember that Guitar Hero 3 took a fair bit of flak from the fans, largely due to its confusing and sometimes inconsistent note-charts – musically identical sections of songs would have slightly different note patterns in the game, for example, which frustrated a lot of people. It’s also worth noting that both the guitar and drum peripherals are completely wireless, which is a welcome feature when attempting to fit four grown men into a room the size of a garden shed. It works, but feels a little redundant – not many of the songs have sliding sections (marked with darker notes, with purple lines running between them) long enough to warrant switching to the touch-panel, and you can quite happily just keep using the standard fret buttons for these sections – you just don’t need to hit the strum bar. The touch-sensitive panel below the five face buttons has been included for sliding notes on solos. The new, larger guitars with their elongated whammy and strum bars are as responsive as ever, and with a little more weight to them feel far more ‘grown up’ – imagine the Rock Band guitar, but with a strum bar that clicks properly, but not too noisily. Rock Band veterans will certainly find themselves getting confused to begin with (well, assuming they’re not just playing with the Rock Band kit, of course), but with a bit of practice it soon starts to make sense. The choice to include raised cymbal pads, which initally feel like they were shoved on just to avoid a lawsuit from Harmonix, have actually turned out to be a really nice addition. The drums, with their velocity-sensitive pads, feel more like an entry-level electric kit than a video game peripheral. What’s important to know is that World Tour still has what it takes to get you on your feet and shaking your head like a crack addict with palsy. It feels somehow wrong and unfair, but it’s the only frame of reference you’ve got, and you keep doing it even though the first girlfriend has put on a load of weight and had her first child at the age of 21 since she left you. It’s kind of like when you’re in a relationship with someone who you love dearly, but you keep comparing her to your previous girlfriend. With World Tour‘s addition of a drum-kit and microphone, it and Rock Band are in a league of their own. Having spent the last 6 months or so playing the excellent Rock Band, however, it’s incredibly difficult not to spend every moment with the game analysing the similarities and differences between the two – something we’ll do an awful lot of during this review. The changes made to the fourth installment (fifth if you count Aerosmith – we don’t) in the series are pretty epic when compared to the transition between Guitar Hero 2 and 3, but that’s not to say that the general character and feel of the game aren’t still very much rooted in what made Guitar Hero great. However, finally coming into contact with World Tour, the latest in the series, has given us ample reason to breathe a sigh of relief. Approaching Guitar Hero yet again brings about a multitude of feelings – once a revolutionary step for rhythm action games, now a fully-fledged gaming institution with new instalments arriving often more than once a year, it’s difficult not to see it as a total cash cow.
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