Several good previews of Guitar Hero World Tour emerged this weekend:

1. IGN Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
2. GameSpy Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
3. GameSpot Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

I highly recommend reading the IGN article as it had the best information, but I’ll summarize so you don’t have to.

The biggest news was probably the first detailed pictures of the new guitar! It’s a fairly substantial upgrade over the Les Paul, which was already excellent.

It’s definitely larger than previous fake plastic guitars — probably a nod to the Rock Band Stratocaster, which more accurately mimics the size of a real guitar.

It also contains a touch-sensitive pad on the neck!

What will this be used for? GameSpy’s Sluggo explains:

The big new addition is what Neversoft is calling the “touch strip.” Essentially, it’s a touch-sensitive section of the guitar neck right next to the standard, multicolored buttons. The touch strip doesn’t stand out from the rest of the neck, so you might not even realize it’s there if you’re not familiar with your new hardware. What this touch strip does is act as a multipurpose tool for several inputs and effects. One use is finger-tapping guitar solos, but you can also swipe your finger along it, side-to-side, to mess with the sustain on your held notes and provide a sound very different from the whammy bar. You can also use it to affect the synth sounds during songs with heavy keyboard usage.

The start/select and star power buttons have been moved to the “bridge” of the guitar along with a new rectangular “star power activation” button. It not only looks more authentic, you can palm the star power button and activate while playing, if you’re not into the whole “tilt the guitar up” thing.

The Xbox button is also reimagined as a knob, again, for a more authentic feel.

The faceplates and detachable neck are clearly preserved, from what I can see of the photo. I am a fan of the detachable neck, even though it can cause button connectivity issues, because it allows us to have custom faceplates. Here’s hoping they’ve redesigned the neck connection to be more reliable.

The microphone is unremarkable. Nothing to report there; your typical USB handheld microphone. It sure would be nice if the microphone was wireless. It’d also be nice if it had built in controller functions, so the vocalist didn’t have to locate a controller every time he or she wants to make a selection. But not this time, unfortunately!

A few new bits of information on the drums:

• The cymbal “pie slices” can be rotated and repositioned to taste.
• To activate star power on drums, hit the yellow and orange cymbal at the same time.
• Drum heads are 8 inches, slightly larger than the 7 inches of Rock Band drums.
• Drums have a silicone surface, so they’re (reasonably) quiet right out of the box; no modifications required.
• Wireless! Yay!
• Speed sensitive; slam and you get a loud note. Tap and you get a soft note. This will make drumming much more expressive.

On to the game itself:

• Brings back all the characters from Guitar Hero II, in addition to the ones featured in Guitar Hero III — hello Clive and Pandora!
• Added sixth bass note on top of the five colored buttons; you can strum with no buttons held for an “open strum”. This should make playing bass more interesting, I hope.
• Five careers: Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Band.
• Boss battles have been restructured as call and response, and their role minimized in the main game. Thank goodness they listened to the criticism on that one. Boss battles in Guitar Hero III were universally hated by most gamers, including me.
• New “Beginner” difficulty that’s even easier than easy, suitable for children or total neophytes. This’ll be a nice option for parties and people who protest they can’t possibly play well enough to join in.
• If you get stuck on a song in the career mode, you can downgrade your skill level without restarting the whole career. Nice.
• Quickplay will now earn you cash and bonuses for your character, as long as you’re logged in. Even more reason to practice!
• You can create song sets as “gigs” of up to seven songs for your band, rather than being kicked back to the song select screen after each song.

There’s also a very complex music studio for creating your own “songs”, minus vocals. I applaud the effort, and it looks impressively complex, but I’m skeptical this will be much more than a fairly involved toy. I doubt it will result in anything musically interesting for the average player. I’m much more interested in a strong collection of DLC.

Based on these previews I’m really looking forward to Guitar Hero World Tour. Many of the features they’ve announced are features people have been clamoring for in the still-unannounced Rock Band 2.

In particular, the hardware looks outstanding, and it exploits the one big weakness of Rock Band — the sub-par, flaky guitar and drum hardware. Somehow, I’m doubting Rock Band 2 will include any new hardware, so the Guitar Hero franchise appears to be solidly extending its lead in this area.

I suppose it was inevitable — someone achieved a perfect score on the most difficult song in Guitar Hero III, Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames”, on Expert difficulty.

It’s an astonishing 3,722 note streak for a final score of 987,786!

I can’t even finish the Expert campaign in Guitar Hero III due to rampant skill level inflation in the series, and I’d have no hope whatsoever of completing “Through the Fire and Flames”, which is absurdly difficult.

Kudos to iamchris4life!

I hope this doesn’t result in even more skill inflation in future installments of Guitar Hero. I sort of wish they’d add a new skill level beyond Expert for the ScoreHero crowd, something like “Insane” or “Professional” skill level, rather than constantly moving the Expert goalposts.

After writing about The Fake Plastic Rock Stage Experience, I immersed myself in the strange, fascinating world of stage lighting effects.

I found out two things that drove me to buy my own stage lights:

1. Many stage lights are sound activated and include their own embedded microphones, so they “just work” out of the box.
2. There’s an emerging set of DJ lights that use low-power LEDs instead of hot, dangerous 100 or 200 watt bulbs.

That’s a perfect combination for our rock band room! No messy cables (other than the power cable), no extra heat, and it will automatically sync up to whatever music we’re playing. I couldn’t resist!

I finally settled on the American DJ LED Color Changing Light Bar. Here’s a short video clip I recorded of it in action to some music:

There are two sound activated modes:

1. Mode 1 switches between all the available colors
2. Mode 2 has 40 different “programs”, with lots of variety. You’re seeing one of those programs in the above video.

As you can see it’s plenty bright — almost too bright for our smallish room with the projector! Fortunately, I can select some of the less bright sound activated modes so it doesn’t overwhelm the video screen. It’s also programmable via the DMX-512 programming standard, though I’m not sure I’ll ever bother because the sound activated modes work so well.

It includes convenient wall mounts, but it also has large hand screws on each side so you can quickly unscrew it and take it to your next fake plastic rock “gig” as well. I grabbed it and took it with me to a recent remote Rock Band jam session, and it went over great!

The American DJ LED bar wasn’t exactly a cheap accessory — I shopped around and found it for $180 shipped — but it sure feels about ten times more freakin’ rock in that room now with the awesome extra lighting effects!

It was long rumored that Guitar Hero IV would include vocals and drums to compete with Rock Band. Well, now it’s official: we have Guitar Hero World Tour. The game was demonstrated for the first time at the All Things Digital 6 conference, with this unintenionally hilarious introduction from Kara Swisher:

Kotick: We have a new product coming out in the fall called Guitar Hero World Tour, which is the first time you’ll have multiple instruments — drums, mic, bass, a different guitar …

Swisher: It’s called Rock Band, I think.

Kotick: (pauses) We’re calling it Guitar Hero World Tour.

Heh. On to the demonstration. And yes, that is Tony Hawk on guitar!

It’s a little scary how exactly Guitar Hero World Tour copies Rock Band. Take a look at a still of the user interface captured from the video.

I’m actually fine with the blatant plagiarism, because I adore Rock Band (and its weekly downloadable content schedule). I can hardly bear to go back to just guitar these days when Rock Band offers so much: more instruments, far more songs, better presentation, smoother difficulty progression. The more Guitar Hero remolds itself to resemble Rock Band, the better, as far as I’m concerned!

But there is one problem — the drums.

The Guitar Hero drum arrangement, while cool, will almost certainly be incompatible with the current Rock Band drums. Which means fans of the genre are stuck with two different and incompatible drum sets cluttering up our houses! That sucks. Still, there are some cool features here, as documented in the promotional Guitar Hero World Tour drum video:

1. The drums are pressure sensitive, so the harder you hit them, the louder the drum sound in the game. (likely a software issue, as the piezo sensors in all electric drums are 99% the same.)
2. More realistic arrangement of the drums, with two cymbal pie slices mounted above.
3. It’s wireless!

I’m reasonably sure that existing Rock Band microphones and Rock Band / Guitar Hero guitars (at least on the Xbox 360) will be compatible. But it also looks like there will be a new fake plastic guitar design — probably as a result of the Gibson lawsuit against Activision. These will be “generic” unbranded guitars, no longer the Gibson Les Paul, Xplorer, or SG models of previous releases. They’ve been coy about releasing any details, but images captured from the Guitar Hero World Tour website and the Guitar Hero World Tour promotional trailer provide some clues:

1. These guitars are significantly larger, perhaps to mirror the the more realistic size of the Rock Band stratocasters.
2. Based on the white outline, I’m hoping these guitars will continue the Les Paul tradition of removable, customizable faceplates.
3. The first image also implies that there will be “solo” fret buttons, again aping the Rock Band stratocasters.

It’s no secret that I greatly prefer the Guitar Hero guitars; the Rock Band stratocasters have what I consider to be crippling flaws. I’m willing to give Activision the benefit of the doubt on the new hardware, even as I’ve resigned myself to the drum incompatibility.

Pricing information for Guitar Hero World Tour is as follows.

GH: World Tour Super Bundle (game, guitar, drums, mic)
Xbox360 / PS3 / Wii - $189.99
PS2 – $179.99

GH: World Tour Guitar Bundle (game, guitar)
Xbox360 / PS3 / Wii $99.99
PS2 – $89.99

GH: World Tour (game only)
Xbox360 / PS3 $59.99
Wii / PS2 $49.99

A bit more expensive than Rock Band at $169 and $159 respectively, particularly since the prices for the Rock Band bundles have dipped significantly since launch. But the drums and microphone are both wireless, which is a nice touch arguably worthy of the extra $20. Do note that the Wii version of Guitar Hero World Tour is confirmed to have downloadable content support, unlike the current Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band ports for that platform. As usual, I’d recommend avoiding the Playstation 2 version like the plague, unless you have absolutely no other way to play the game.

I will definitely be buying the Guitar Hero World Tour Super Bundle on the day of release. What can I say? If loving fake plastic rock is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

The introduction of drums and mic to the Guitar Hero franchise isn’t terribly surprising. But Konami — the great-granddaddy of the music rhythm genre — announcing Rock Revolution certainly was! Konami kicked off the entire genre outside the US with Drum Mania and Guitar Freaks. Those games never got any traction in the US, but are clear spiritual influences on Guitar Hero. So perhaps they’re entitled.

But Rock Revolution is sort of.. weird. It’s playable by a maximum of three players: bass, guitar, and drums. Don’t pass the mic, leave it on the table. And take a look at the oddball Rock Revolution drum set:

Just what the world needed — a third extra-freaky fake plastic drum set.

It doesn’t help that the game looks incredibly.. generic next to Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

I strongly doubt that vertical 2D fretboard UI is going to scale to even two players, much less three.

Unfortunately, all the songs in Rock Revolution are covers — and a good percentage of them have been previously featured in Guitar Hero or Rock Band anyway. This is a huge disappointment as the general trend in the genre has been toward more and more original masters. It feels like a giant step backwards.

On the whole, it’s difficult to get excited about Rock Revolution. The prospect of a third player in the “band” genre isn’t all that appealing. Here’s what I know about it so far that could set it apart from the competition:

1. Will have its own unique guitar controller. The five buttons have different colors than the ones we’re used to. Compatibility is unknown, but highly likely.
2. Drums have six oddly shaped, irregular surfaces (as seen above) plus the kick pedal.
3. The Wii version will allow using the Wii controls for “air drum” and “air guitar” play.
4. Like Guitar Hero World Tour, includes freeform modes that allow creating original tracks.
5. During drum play, there is no penalty for improvisation (aka extra notes) throughout the entire song.
6. Does not introduce the drum kick pedal until medium difficulty level.

I might pick up Rock Revolution cheaply at some later date after its release, and play it as a standalone guitar game; a few of the covers do appeal to me. But there’s no way I can deal with three fake plastic drum sets.

At this point, Harmonix silence on Rock Band 2 is positively deafening. I’m anxious to see what they have in store for us now that everyone else has played their cards. Remember, kids, competition is good!

Well, except for the three incompatible drum sets.

In Equipping Your First Fake Plastic Rock Band I described the essential accessories for a first class Rock Band experience. Seriously, read it. You will want a lot of that stuff if you’re serious about Rock Band.

But what about the non-essentials? Like, say… a killer fake plastic rock stage experience?

That’s what I’m talking about.

The above picture was taken at Microsoft’s MIX 08 conference, where there was a small Rock Band tournament. The people playing are my ex-coworkers from Vertigo Software, including our esteemed CEO on lead guitar.

I’m not sure if you can make it out from the picture, but there are four screens:

• Two displays at the foot of the stage for the guitarists and vocalist
• One dedicated display for the drummer
• One dedicated display for the audience

Let’s inventory the rest of the items we’ve got going on here:

• Elevated stage
• Tinsel curtain in the rear
• Scaffolding and lights above the band (I assume synchronized to the music in some way)
• At least five rotating ground lights

But there are a few notable items missing from the fake plastic rock stage experience, too — where are the strobe lights? Where’s the smoke machine? Well, we’re in luck. The Xbox 360 Rock Band Stage Kit from PDP includes exactly those items.

It’s not exactly clear how this stuff will work yet, but it’s intriguing that the strobe light looks like an Xbox controller. That means it’ll plug into the console just like a controller, too. Will the strobe somehow be synced to the music through the controller? Who knows? There’s been a lot of criticism of this kit because it’s 99 bucks, and so obviously over the top. But that’s exactly why it’s so awesome!

Of course, there’s an entire category of Lighting & Stage Effects at Guitar Center if you want to create a truly rocktacular stage presence:

The above scene is from the awesome but unfortunately short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. Highly recommended.

I’m still debating how much of this I want to try in our “boom boom” room. I’m looking for advice. If you’ve created anything like this at your place, or have any links to images of great fake plastic rock stage experiences, definitely add a comment!