Guitar Hero: World Tour!

Several years have passed since Guitar Hero first made expensive music peripherals ridiculously popular. Every iteration of the game brought better controllers, more realistic note tracking, and progressively impressive setlists (with the exception of Rocks the 80s). But the music genre's gotten crowded in recent years, and to keep up with the growing popularity and multiplayer appeal of Rock Band 2, World Tour is a necessary evolution of the Guitar Hero franchise. While World Tour delivers a "rock experience" that's similar to Rock Band, it does have some issues that keep it from trouncing its competition completely.

The core game delivers on the same "feels like you're making real music while pushing buttons on a plastic guitar" experience that you expect from Guitar Hero. World Tour finally fixes Guitar Hero III's punishingly steep difficulty curve, which went from middlingly easy to roundhouse groin-kick difficulty in the space of a couple of songs. The venues, as always, are superpolished and full of tiny details that make them interesting to watch. Whether it's a massive stadium or a college frat house, I was consistently impressed.

Guitar Hero definitively one-ups Rock Band in one respect -- avatar customization. Going beyond just hairstyles and costume changes, you can alter everything from the size of your skull to the angle of your chin. It's hard, at first, to make a character that doesn't look hideously deformed, but with a little tweaking, you can make impressive semblances of almost anyone. You can even choose the dances your character does at the beginning and end of a song, though you can't make your own choreography. All of this strengthens the connection to your avatar, but my favorite part is the instrument customization. Body, colors, strings, heads -- you can alter every minute layer of your instrument, making the entire presentation that much more personal.

But I can't talk about the game without discussing the peripherals. Provided you pick up the full instrument bundle, you'll notice immediately that the drums are awesome: They're easy to set up and adjust, the drumheads give easy bounce and excellent rolls, and the raised "cymbals" give you plenty of room to maneuver. It's nowhere near as nice as a real electric drum kit, but for a videogame peripheral, it's damn impressive. But Guitar Hero isn't prejudiced against Rock Band converts -- the game automatically detects whether you're using a four- or five-pad kit (if you're sticking with the Rock Band drums) and adjusts accordingly.

The guitar is basically the same as previous iterations, with a loud, clicky strum bar and large, raised buttons. The touch-sensitive pad on the neck, however, is new. It's a gimmicky addition that always throws my playing off when I try to use it, especially on expert. That said, tapping on the touch pad instead of strumming can give your hand a much needed rest during long play sessions. The best addition is a separate button for activating star power, which is under the heel of your strumming hand (though it's a little too close to the start button, making it too easy to inadvertently pause the action).

Bass, while not a separate peripheral, does spice up the gameplay a little. Fans of Rock Band will still face the same uneven difficulty levels (either intensely difficult or lull-inducing), but an extra "open" note has been added. A vertical line, just like the drum foot-pedal indicator, instructs you to hit the strum bar without holding any buttons. While it doesn't really make the parts any harder, it's an intelligent addition. And anything that makes bass a little more fun is a plus.

"Guitar Hero" is in the title for a reason, though. The majority of the songs are definitely geared toward hardcore guitar players and people who love extended ax solos. But that's not to say there aren't plenty of great popular tunes. From Michael Jackson to Modest Mouse to Willie Nelson, World Tour brings in a little something from a wide range of genres. I would prefer a little less metal, but there are plenty of songs -- like Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" -- that I could listen to every day without getting burnt out.

Guitar duels from GH3 return, but only in the solo guitar career mode. This time, instead of throwing obstacles at your enemy until someone fails, you just have to hold your own in a tug-of-war. It feels much fairer, since you'll win as long as you can play the song decently...even if it doesn't make the meandering solos any more enjoyable to listen to.

With the wildly eclectic mix of music, most players probably won't take advantage of the game's solo singing career mode. The karaoke is just something to let your rhythmically challenged friends join in with while you jam, anyway. But when playing with friends, GH's not quite the party game that Rock Band 2 is. If you're doing poorly, you can pull from a shared star power/overdrive meter, but it doesn't allow you to bring your friends back into the fold if they can't keep up -- if one person fails, the whole band goes under. It gives the game more of an arcade feel, where you're just struggling not to fail. Like the first Rock Band, the band is completely divorced from each instrument's solo career. To really "complete" the game, you're forced to play through all of the same songs over and over again with each individual instrument -- and then all over again in full-band mode. If they didn't want to copy Rock Band 2's superior model (where all career paths and instruments are grouped into one overarching progression), couldn't Neversoft at least have made separate songs available in each career track?

The big new feature is the ability to create and share songs with other users. Spore and LittleBigPlanet have shown that, given the tools, players will create content that not even the developers could have envisioned. (They've also proven that, given the freedom, people will make vulgar shapes -- look forward to scrolling penis marquees aplenty.) But unlike those games, GH's music creator is unwieldy and difficult to use. It's easy enough to record a freestyle track, but editing it and creating something really high quality is very challenging. The tutorials aren't deep enough, and even worse is the inability to use the controller as a master input device -- you're stuck using the guitar or drums, which are serviceable but not comfortable. For our review purposes, Neversoft uploaded a few custom tracks to test uploading and downloading on the system, but no user-created songs were available. However, I have faith that some players will put in the time and suffer through the interface to create some really good music, eventually.

Maybe if I squeeze my Rock Band and Guitar Hero together and leave them overnight in the same case, I can come back the next morning to find that they made an über-game that combines the best of both. But until then, Guitar Hero delivers exactly the things I want out of a rhythm game: great peripherals and fun-to-play music. It's not perfect, but I have a great time whenever I turn it on -- and that's what's most important.

Tonight...We shall rock!

When pimping his studio's ubiquitous band simulator in the press, Harmonix cofounder Alex Rigopulos is fond of calling Rock Band a "platform for music," like Apple's iPod and iTunes. In that sense, Rock Band 2 is more like a system update than a sequel. It's a collection of interface tweaks and non-earth-shattering new features designed to make the Rock Band experience more enjoyable and less frustrating. You get backward compatibility for all your downloaded material and 55 of the original game's 58 songs (after ponying up $5), an easier-to-navigate library, game-changing rule sets (the No Fail mode definitely makes drunken-party play less stressful for beginners), daily updated online challenges (Battle of the Bands), tougher, quieter, wireless hardware (if you're made of money), and, most notably, a couple of drum-training modes that teach aspiring pizza-delivery boys real-life drum beats and fills.

The real attraction here is the game's Sticky Fingers-like bulge of music. With 84 tunes on the disc (all are original recordings) and 20 free downloads form the online store, Rock Band 2 is simply the cheapest way to beef up your library. Not to belittle the selections here -- music taste is extremely personal, of course, and no matter what your preferences are, you'll likely end up despising 10 or 15 songs. But Rock Band 2's offerings are ambitious compared to the original game's lineup, with several major gets that would have seemed impossible just a year ago. Who ever thought they'd be able to play a classic Bob Dylan song in a videogame? Or "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads?

Unfortunately, both songs are a bit of a failure as rhythm-game material, holding true to the strange truism that music you like in real life often doesn't make the cut in game form. But that's part of Harmonix's approach to the genre, often forgoing a great game experience in favor of a great music experience. So, just like the first game, you'll find songs here that entertain on one instrument and bore on another. And like the first game, at higher levels of play, you'll experience the sensation of real musicianship, plastic instruments be damned. Who cares how many gems are on the screen when, for a few minutes in the company of good friends, you can have a taste of what it feels like to be Dave Grohl, pounding his way through the monstrous, spiraling tom fills of "Everlong" -- albeit with lightweight sticks and drums that sit about an inch away from each other.

Along with the positive tweaks, Rock Band 2 has its share of negatives. I'm no fan of unlockable content, and I don't think anyone should have to jump through hoops to access material that they've already spent good money for. The forcible song unlocks of the original game were bad enough, but Rock Band 2 has taken it to an extreme. Gone is the straightforward, linear trip through the game's setlist, replaced here with the familiar tour mode and a new challenge mode. Both force you to play though the same songs again and again in order to make new songs available in your library. I don't know about you, but the first thing I wanted to do with Rock Band 2 was invite a bunch of people over for cocktails and rock, and it was such a bummer to be limited to the songs I could unlock in four or five hours of solo play. Gamers are used to these unlocking regimes, but the whole thing was baffling to my nongamer friends, especially considering that songs you buy online are immediately available (of course!). Next time around, this unyielding structure needs to go. And with the increasing number of songs available, I was desperate for a way to hide songs I didn't like from the library menu. They just take up space and party time, and if one more person comes to my apartment and demands to sing "Say It Ain't So," I'm going break the disc in half.

We still need more songs that girls like to sing (though that is pretty much a problem with rock music, not Rock Band), and the game's music selection is approaching a nearly unbearable level of suburban whiteness (surely, if Duran Duran are a "rock band," then Al Green, Funkadelic, Booker T. and the MG's, Prince, and any number of soul and funk groups backed by traditional rock rhythm sections qualify), but Rock Band remains the ultimate party game and a karaoke killer. I just wonder what Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, Harmonix cofounders and M.I.T. Media Lab graduates who spent their time creating musical instruments for nonmusicians before turning their focus to videogames, are really up to. Surely, the people who revolutionized the music genre and popularized it in the West are working on something more ambitious than a system update. I'm dying to play it.