Upon attending this year’s PAX, I was given the chance to play both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour. The interface for Rock Band 2 remains largely unchanged, which in this case is probably a good thing. Visually, Rock Band already had a very good set-up by drawing from past Harmonix games with the progress bar (Amplitude and Frequency) and successfully adding in a vocal track (Karaoke Revolution).
The new Guitar Hero is not so blessed. While the multiplayer tracks for guitar, bass, and drums work smoothly, the vocals are not as lucky. Seeing as I am thoroughly convinced that I could outsing Haley Williams, my first hands-on experience was with the mic. Singing on Guitar Hero: WT was unbelievably confusing. Your pitch is tracked by this small glowing ball that leave a kind of slimy pinkish trail in its wake. This all glows golden if you’re hitting the notes correctly on the pitch line.
In theory this was probably a wonderful idea, but what I played of the game it seemed a bit off. The cursor would be glowing gold and saying that I was hitting the correct pitch while hovering over the actual pitch line for the song. This might have been a result of me singing in a higher octave, but it was still pretty bizarre to watch; especially since the cursor would bounce back to the middle of he track when I took a breath. Most gamers out there might not really care for the singing aspect of the game, but it’s disappointing for those who are. Singing and drumming are the two parts of the game that take actual musical talent to perform, and when the visuals are off for either it can result in a horrible, embarrassing failure.
The more pressing problem the the screen arrangement is the new group power meter. As shown above, it should be pretty obvious as to why this is a huge failure. The meter is too small, more like an icon than a way of checking your rock status. In the time you spend searching for it on the screen and trying to discern which one of the tiny icons is yours, you may have missed enough notes to fail. Even if you do figure out which small line belongs to you, the meter itself is so small that there is no decent way of judging how well you are doing. You really have to look at the color of the bar as opposed to the actual size, which is pretty annoying.
This is such a glaringly obvious design flaw that I’m a bit put off that it’s even in the game. While some crazy gamers might be able to play blindfolded, the rest of us would very much appreciate a power meter that doesn’t cause us to fail.
Tags: design flaws, fail, guitar hero, power meter Posted in: Editorial, Rant
The thing is, I can ignore all of this is GH has better tracks than RB2, and especially if it’s cheaper.
The GH tracklist hasn’t been revealed, but the RB2 tracklist is the best I’ve seen in any game of this kind. As for the price… the <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Hero-World-Tour-Nintendo-Wii/dp/B001ABP8BO/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1220818414&sr=8-1″<Wii version of GH:WT is the same price as the 360 and PS3 versions of Rock Band 2 — never a good sign.
Don’t worry about it Chelsea. These are just minor things. And these minor things i do not care about.I thought you ment that the graphics suck, I was like what? But you were just complaining about the unpolished Vocal track system and the Rock meter. Well thats easy fixable, dont worry about it. The game you saw was only the demo half of the game. The real full product should be much more polished. Im just glad the guitar, bass, drums, and the whole visuals were good. Alteast just as good as GH3 or slightly better. My money is defenetly going for GH4 and RB2.
kind of a dumb thing to whine about dont ya think? i mean honestly you probably just suck at singing as well as the other instruments so you couldnt hang…and any player worth his/her salt doesnt need some little rock meter telling them how good they are doing when u can see what ur playing for yourself….rockband is not better looking its dark and boring and the songlist is crap as well as their trashy instruments id rather sit at home playing the butt trumpet…
@justin
I play on Expert vocals in Rock Band, and I’ve never had a problem.
Have you ever actually played the vocals in Guitar Hero?
RB2 has over a 100 songs all mastertracks on disc and i literally own like a quarter of the songs in the game im sorry but you cant beat it. i might buy the disc of this… eye of the tiger, give it all, chop suey ,master exploder,battery ftw
@justin your a noob. id rather sit at home playing your mom then read another one of your comments causing me to lose 20 iq points
personally I’m really only interested in GH:WT for the custom setup up, I’m the type of gamer that will spend hours on customizing my character, guitar, drums, and that’s not even counting the incredibly deep custom song creator, I love that kind of software on the PC if it’s easy to use, I’ll easily spend more time messing with that, and downloading other custom tracks then playing the actual game. Not too mention the decal creator for your band logo, tatoos, cover art, drum/guitar decals, there is just alot more to do in GH this time around.
@Gsdxcv, I think that’s possibly the best comment on this entire website. You win one whole internet :)
I preferr the look of this to rockbands look, and i also preferr the gameplay options and online mode options, as well as the overall setlist.
The only problems I have is the timing windows. From what i hear the drum timing window for world tour is suprisingly large, but then again what was demoed wasnt the finished game, so im still hopefull. Also no AC/DC in WT :(
can u say backwards compadability with rock band? all songs from rock band 1 & 2 plus all the downloadable content. u have to buy more than one GH to just get the bands/songs u like. plus how is GH still GH if it has a full band?
STFU bitch you don’t even know wtf your talking about your so biased against GH I bet your stupid ass can’t even sing go kill yourself
@Fuck RB2
I don’t think the game is going to be bad. On the contrary, it looks like it will give RB2 a good run for it’s money. My point here is to point out the imperfections in the game in the hope that they will not go unnoticed, by both the consumers and the game devs. Seeing as this was merely a demo, many of the problems I had may well be fixed by the time the game is released.
Well, I think that the main problem might be that you can’t sing… LOLCOPTER, kiddingsauce. Pretty tight article Chelsea. I was on the fence with this game, but I think I’m going to pass on it all together now. Although I was thinking… while its true what you said about the power meter being deceptive and phailing you without notice, a very wise man once told the secret to not losing songs. “Hit more notes, LOL.”