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Went and got the complete Xbox 360 set for Guitar Hero: World Tour on the day of release (technically) yesterday - lucked out, it was FutureShop’s last one in stock. They apparently started with 50. I actually went with Sam and he got the 2nd last one. FutureShop’s deal was that you get a free mic stand with the set, worth $20. Coo.

We got back to Sam’s place and set up the instruments (guitar’s easy enough, just snap the neck to the body) - drums and guitar are wireless while the microphone is USB and requires a 360 controller (just like Rock Band). Both instruments came with Duracell batteries, and they require 2 AA’s each. As a side note, I also bought Rock Band 2’s wireless guitar the same day - it requires 3 AA batteries, which are supplied but they’re no name brand so that’s lame.

The GH:WT drum set immediately gave the impression of being much more sturdier than Rock Band’s (RB1, I haven’t tried RB2’s drum set yet), and the kick pedal is much much better, less vertical movement required and the spring is metal. The kick pedal also has grips and a velcro patch on the bottom to stick to whatever surface you place it on, which I found to be a nice touch.

I noticed that the cymbals were 2 different colours - yellow and orange. The pads were red, blue and green, so obviously only 3 and they’re slightly larger than RB1’s drum set. The kick pedal was purple. 6 colours? Indeed. I had always assumed that GH:WT drums would have the same 5 colours as RB’s drums - that the cymbals would be the same colour, you’d just have the option of which one you’d prefer to hit. So I was pleasantly surprised with the increased difficulty of an additional colour.

So we start playing, as per RB the most used colours on drums are red and yellow. Since yellow is the left cymbal (on the bottom of the cymbal it indicates whether it’s left or right), you’re most often hitting the left-most pad and the left-most cymbal above it. So that’s easy enough. Throw in the odd red pad + orange cymbal combo, that’s fine… kicking is as I’m used to, nothing different there, but blue notes seem pretty rare (making 6 colours frivolous and gimmicky? I can’t say without playing more on Hard and Expert) so coming across them usually caused me to screw up. =P

I didn’t know how to activate star power, or notice my streak count anywhere. None of us did really (4 of us playing), at least for the first song, then Sam noticed your streak count is on the right side of your “highway” (stupid term in my opinion).

It took me a couple songs to remember that I read somewhere that to activate star power on drums you hit both cymbals at the same time, and it worked. It’s sometimes difficult to time that extra hit in with your required notes, but I like it - it’s different than Rock Band of which the drum fills can break up a song, and you can activate star power almost anytime you want (either when you have no notes, or when you have a singular cymbal note already).

Our band meter was at the top-left, that was easily identifiable as per previous Guitar Hero games, and it had a star power indicator, but it seemed to be the only one. So we gradually just came to realize we all shared the star power.

I still don’t know if there’s a band multiplier — ie, if more than one person activates star power does the band get a multiplier (a la Rock Band), but I don’t think so. There is, however, a bonus if at least 2 band members have a 4x multiplier at the same time - the sides of your “highway” glow yellow. I don’t know how much that bonus is, if it’s just for the players with the glowing sides or applied to the entire band or if they display it anywhere graphically. I suppose I could have answered these damn questions if I had just sat out a song.

We did reference the manual a couple times though - to confirm how to activate the singer’s star power (tap the microphone or hit X, Y, A or B on the controller) and what purple notes for a bassist were.

Apparently bassists get purple notes exactly like the drummer, spanning the entire width of your “highway”, and for those you just strum without holding down any coloured fret buttons. It’s called an “open note”. Later when I played bass on Expert, I also seemed to have spanning white notes and I have no idea what they are still. I just ignored them, and “missing” them didn’t remove my streak, so I dunno, guess I’ll have to look it up. I think it’s cool that each instrument can have it’s own specific feature.

New for guitarists, other than the touch strip (or whatever it’s actually called), is extra sustained notes (I think they’re called). A sustained note is when you hold in a fret button and the note is carried. You can have singular sustained notes, ie one colour, or sustained chords, ie multiple colours at once, but this new type has one colour starting a sustained note, then shortly after another sustained note joining it. So you strum green, hold in green, then strum red while still holding in green, then strum yellow while still holding green and red and you end up holding all three. I haven’t come across very many yet, but they’re nifty if only for being new. The first one I came across I was like “what the hell” and of course screwed it up. Got the rest except when I had ‘duh’ moments.

The touch strip for the GH:WT guitar is interesting, but I’m not that keen on it. It’s used for three purposes:

• There are ‘clear’ notes which means you can use just the touch strip pad to play them and don’t even have to strum, pretty much like Rock Band’s guitar with the small fret buttons that don’t require strumming during solos. If I’m not mistaken, on a non-Guitar Hero:WT guitar you can just hit the coloured fret buttons and don’t have to strum either for these clear notes.
  • The problem is that it’s not like you get much time to notice you have clear notes coming up, so switching to the touch strip is hard and almost guaranteed to screw up, but even if you do move your hand in time, you can’t feel your way to the correct placement. Just touching the strip means you’re hitting a note, so there’s a massive chance you will screw up just trying to use this innovative feature. Say you even manage to make the switch to the touch strip and not screw up - switching back to the strum bar is another chance to screw up.Development team member: “*lightbulb* let’s make a TOUCH STRIP!”
    Development team: “OOH that sounds awesome, let’s test it!”
    Testers: “Know what, it’s kinda really hard to use with all that movement that requires speed and not being able to tell where you’re putting your fingers for sure… it was a great idea but perhaps it should be scrapped unless we can somehow improve it.”
    Top Brass: “Thanks for your feedback but this touch strip will make everyone ooh and ahh and set us apart from the competition, so we’re going ahead with it!”

    Thanks for the feature I will rarely use, Neversoft.

  • The other issue, also experienced with RB’s guitar solos, is that if you opt to not strum for these clear notes, you can easily forget to resume strumming once you get back to regular notes. It’s also awkward to keep tapping your finger for a specific fret colour repeatedly if there’s a string of them - your fingers aren’t used to this action since normally you just hold down that fret colour while strumming repeatedly.
• You can tap the touch strip in lieu of using the strum bar. So you could play an entire song without strumming, tapping anywhere on the strip, but obviously you still have to use the fret buttons.
  • I tried this for a length of time, it’s like playing the tambourine or cowbell in Rock Band when you’re the singer, but I didn’t really get into it. I just don’t think I’m good at keeping time/rhythm without the physical feedback of strumming. I’m wondering though if it’d be easier to do fast strumming songs by tapping instead of killing your hand/arm strumming?
• For sustained notes you can drag along the touch strip for “wah” affects. Different than the sounds generated by whammying.
  • Same problem with the clear notes - you’re much in danger of screwing up just due to moving your hand from the strum bar to the touch strip, so I only attempt for very long sustained notes. Then if the next note is sustained as well, I just tap the strip to hit the next note, and run my finger across the strip to do the effect. Annoyingly, every now and then the game thinks I’ve tapped even though I never took my finger off the strip, causing me to lose my note streak. Just another reason to avoid the touch strip.

One of the tips in the game states that doing “wah” effects will increase your points - however in the breakdown of the money I earned for a song it doesn’t list a section for these, so it would take boring testing to prove that claim. And again, just in attempting to use the strip I’m likely to screw up, so I’d rather keep my note streak than try to earn more points for using the strip period.

Another thing that the GH:WT guitar has is a “palm” button - this is beside the strum bar and vertical. The Start and Back buttons are on the ends of it. The palm button can activate star power (you can still activate star power by lifting your guitar head vertically).

Upon first seeing the palm button I was like, “cool, that should make it a lot easier to turn on star power”, however once I actually started using the guitar, it’s something I have to be careful about using… because again it causes me to move my hand - this time from the whammy bar to on top of the palm button. So I don’t move it from the whammy bar until I have enough star power to actually use, and only when I have a bit of time inbetween notes. Then once I activate star power I keep my hand in the same position until I see star power sustained notes coming as that’s the only time I whammy. Since it’s a sustained note, after I strum the note I have time to move my hand to the whammy bar since it’ll be awhile til the next note. I still screw up more by using the palm button instead of tilting my guitar since I’m so used to tilting my guitar (GH2, GH3, RB, RB2…) and I’m not used to moving my hand placement at all.

In regards to whammying for extra star power, I think that if you start from zero star power, whammy enough to get 2 full amp bulbs (minimum needed to activate star power) after completing your star power notes, you still can’t activate star power. It seems that regardless of how much star power you earn with your first star power section, you need to complete a second star power section before you can actually activate your star power. I’m not positive on this, but it’s happened a few times so I’m pretty sure that’s the case. So if I’m not on crack, I think this is pretty lame - if you earn the minimum star power, you should be able to use it. I’d be royally pissed if this happened with my last star power section in a song - all that star power wasted.

Back to the drums, it wasn’t until about our 3rd song that was heavy into red-and-orange notes that I noticed a problem with the orange cymbal. It was barely picking up at all and I quickly went into the red and then promptly died.

I took the drums into practice mode and, sure enough, it was rarely ever registering the orange - it seemed to only pick up a hit if I hit at the top middle of the cymbal, basically where it connects. The bottom or sides didn’t register at all. What a pain in the ass. We unplugged and plugged it back in a few times, tried loosening the screw top, took it off entirely, put it back on, nothing helped.

Slower songs were okay to hit the orange most of the time in the right spot, but for fast songs with lots of orange notes I’m too busy to concentrate on hitting a specific part of the damn cymbal.

BIG NOTE: I’m 99% sure that only your own activated star power will help you if you’re in danger of dying - since there’s no band multiplier for star power, your bandmates using star power won’t help you at all if you’re in the red. This is a huge pain in the ass while playing drums and having difficulty because just to get that extra hit of yellow and orange cymbals together can make you miss your required notes. So imagine me on a fast song trying to activate star power to save myself with an orange cymbal that is f’in finicky on where I hit it. So just a word of advice that if your bandmate has difficulty with a song, don’t use any star power so that they can continually use it for themselves.

Shamefully, I switched to Medium difficulty to make sure I wouldn’t die since I couldn’t rely on others to keep me alive.

Get to my place, setup my own GH:WT drum set… and it’s like, wobbly, as in, not flush to the ground. And I’m pretty sure it’s not how it was put together… I mean, you stick poles into other poles that LOCK into place, how can one screw that up… and now that they’re locked in, I don’t think I can get them out to try again… so that didn’t make me happy.

Also while putting together my drum set I noticed that the packing was slightly different than Sam’s drum set. This was kind of interesting. Also my cymbals had a different texture than Sam’s, very slightly rough/bumpy, as opposed to the smooth surface of Sam’s.

Before playing, I first went into practice mode to see if I’d have a similar cymbal problem as Sam’s set. I unfortunately discovered that I did have the same issue, except with the yellow (left) cymbal instead of the orange (right) cymbal. And not only that, 2 of my 3 pads had the same issue of barely ever registering a hit. Fucking piss me off. I basically can’t even play with my brand new drum set, and who knows how long it’ll take to get a replacement because they’re in such high demand.

So I start a solo career with my own new GH:WT guitar (since at Sam’s we played with Sam’s, and my new RB2 guitar), and literally after an hour of playing, my strum bar starts squeaking. And continued to squeak about 98% of the time for the next hour until I quit. Wonderful.

I haven’t really gotten to the gameplay aspects yet, but this is lengthy and I’m tired because it’s after 3am.

I am not happy with Neversoft’s crappy instruments (really just the drums… the squeaking of the guitar’s strum bar doesn’t affect playing ability [yet] but it is annoying). At least I was able to give my working right orange cymbal to Sam, and he confirmed it works on his set, so he has a 100% functioning drum set (with mismatched cymbals - he said even the orange colour on the cymbals are different), while mine is wobbly and only has TWO working colours (red and purple) out of SIX. Tomorrow (being later today when I wake up) I’ll have to test how or if my RB1 drum set will work with GH:WT.