loopychew | Band Hero--er, Guitar Hero World Tour basic impressions (Reply)

Still slogging my way through it for the moment. Started a tour for vox, guitar, and bass, am still in the process of unlocking tracks, but I think for the most part, I think I can set the tone for any future related GHWT posts I may have. To be short: Not too positive.

Full disclosure: If you haven't noticed, I haven't started a tour on the drums yet--I haven't played drums in a couple of weeks, pending new drum covers--and I'm a long way from finishing the game. I'm playing this on my 360, as I do all band games, and I've used the RB Strat, the GHIII Les Paul, and the Mad Catz P-Bass to play. I don't plan on testing out the GHWT drums unless I go to someone else's place to do so.

Things I liked about GHWT

The set list is quite good. There are a lot of songs on here I've been wanting to play since I was first introduced to the concept of Guitar Hero/Rock Band (Are You Gonna Go My Way, Santeria, Spiderwebs, Crazy Train) and a lot I didn't realize I wanted (The Joker, Heartbreaker).
For bassists, the open fret is actually really awesome. It makes things a bit tricker, but in just the right way.
They get females to sing female parts and males to sing male parts, even in the same setlist. It doesn't bother me all that much in Rock Band, actually, but it's a nice touch and I hope HMX will do something about that.
Countdown timer when returning from pause. I want HMX to try and work that out. Why they didn't integrate the timer into the very fact that the pause screen is a hand (have the hand signal 3-2-1-go!) it a bit of a mystery, but whatever.
Clive Winston and Eddie Knox return! Which would be cooler if I actually played them, but oh well.
Being able to deploy vocal Star Power whenever I want.
Quickplay setlists by default; no extra buttons need to be pressed to add songs.
For the drums, note accents. I haven't played on the drums yet, but conceptually I like getting bonuses for hitting some notes harder than others, and it looks like it's portrayed pretty well in-game.

Things I'm neutral/mixed about

There are some mo-capped moves for specific songs (at least, I think they're for specific songs), like some random footwork and shimmies for Beat It. Interesting to note, but doesn't really add or take away from the whole experience.
Pauses and summaries in between songs in the same setlist. Personally, I'd prefer a breakdown at the end of the setlist for each and every song, in both RB and GHWT. Neither has managed this very well so far.
Picking notes in the middle of sustains. This is their interpretation of picking at individual strings while holding down a chord, and I could take it or leave it, unless it was during a star power section, in which case it was ANNOYING AS FUCK.
Lack of Bass Groove-style option. Open frets are nice and everything, but they don't change the fact that you're going to be playing a lot of the same note in a row for a lot of songs.
The six-song limit to setlists. I can see people wanting more, particularly if they want to play albums front-to-back, but for the most part it's a pretty solid number.

Things I don't like about GHWT

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, loves saying that they have 2000 people dedicated to tracking notes in the Guitar Hero franchise. Maybe they could have more than a trained monkey part-timing in the interface design department:
- This monkey apparently decided that they had to keep the rock-o-meter in the game, which works fine for solo ventures. However, in band mode? Keeping the band's individual life meters in a single zone so far away from the playing field, and so small as to not be able to see it without having to actively take your eyes off the note track for a few seconds, is ridiculous. It wouldn't be so bad if the failout conditions were based on band health (which is a little more at-a-glance) and not on individual health (which are minute even on a large screen).
- The set list, where you can sort by artists/song title/etc. but can't jump from one section to another (downloaded songs excepted) was cumbersome with 58 songs in it; how is it going to be when I unlock all 84 songs? (Not counting the two guitar duels.)
- While the band gig concept works in some ways (it reminds me a lot of Tour Challenges in RB2), selecting them feels kind of off. There's no specific way of determining the difficulty of setlists aside from when you unlock them (or if you have the difficulty memorized). As a matter of fact, there's actually no difficulty tiering AT ALL, from what I can tell.
- How can you tell when you're building up vocal star power? I love deploying it any time I want to, but how do you gather it?
- Putting in band names is insanely difficult because they've decided that you need to do it in their interface. Sure, Rock Band's name-entry interface is a little dopey because it uses the XBox interface to do so (I'm assuming PS3 users in Rock Band have something similar with the Playstation input), but having to scroll up and down for each individual letter, hit enter, then scroll up and down for each individual letter again (that's right, as with GHIII, every time you start a new letter, it starts with "A," which works really well if you want to call your band "Bazazay" or something like that, but pretty damned annoying if you ever use letters in the J-S range).
That monkey apparently also part-times as the visual design department.
- Speaking of naming your band/character: flaming letters? REALLY? FLAMING LETTERS? What the hell am I, sixteen?
- The problem with the colorful aesthetic of the GH world is that it's difficult to see the purple bars (open frets) in game unless you're paying full attention. Hammer-ons and Star Power purple bars are easy enough, but the plain note ones are poorly done. This was bound to happen, because they ran out of other colors they could reasonably use. Personally, I would've gone with five unicolor note gems (or a single bar as thick as a note gem) all coming down at once.
- I'm pretty sure the venues that are supposed to be actual locations are reasonably authentic in terms of layout. I've been to the Amoeba Music store they've modeled--it's by the Arclight, if I remember correctly--and they've taken the inner room and turned it into a venue, which is kind of nice, and I'm sure that the House of Blues looks about right, as well. While those suffer a bit from cartooniness that is inherent to the Neversoft GH aesthetic, I don't have a problem with those. The original locations, however, are annoying as CRAP. "Pang Tang Bay," supposedly in Hong Kong, looks cheap and thrown together, with Hong Kong being represented by what appears to be three walls that happen to have the Hong Kong skyline textured onto them. (Compare this to Sheng Li stadium in RB2, which I can't tell if that's actually Shanghai in the background, but it looks BEAUTFIUL.) The Wilted Orchard in Sweden looks okay, until you get to the encore. I understand that Guitar Hero is designed to play to the fantasy of being a rock star, but I don't think my fantasy includes the spawning of a demon portal with giant eyeballs and a tentacle tongue. If it is your fantasy, kindly let me know so I can get Miko Mido to exorcise you and make millions off the taping.
- Travis Barker and Zakk Wylde survive the GHification of themselves, but Hayley Williams does not. God, does that model look ugly. Your tastes may vary. Billy Corgan also looks creepy, but I'm pretty sure that was deliberate.
- The product placement isn't quite as outrageous as it was in GHIII, what with no venues specifically designed around advertising (Yes, I'm aware that there's an AT&T Park I have yet to reach, but that's real life for you now, and unless the venue contains people talking on their cell phones happily throughout the venue, I'll be fine with it), but it's still noticeable. I mean, there's a bucket of KFC placed right in front of the stage in the frat house. Strangely, I would've been fine if it had been littered on tables placed throughout the frat house, but its location is not conducive to anything but convenient advertising. One table for a whole frat party, and close by the hypothetical mosh pit?
- The crowds. My GOD. I know both franchises reuse duplicate audience members for each venue, but would Neversoft please at least make SOME sort of effort to not have duplicates with the same, synchronized animations standing right next to each other? I've noticed multiple instances of this in some of the venues I've played, and the one person I've had over and observing has managed to tag a few more. It's like Doublemint decided to do the only subliminal advertising in the game.
- Thus far, the band name implementation has been subpar, as if they realized that Rock Band managed to put up your band name at venues and decided, at the last minute, that they had to do something similar. The logo and band name are always textured, in a standardized font, as an afterthought on an occasoinal banner or screen somewhere. Compared to the RB venues in (for example) Los Angeles, where your names are completely up in what appears to be modeled light fixtures, or written in a hand-printed font on a cardboard banner, GH fails pretty spectacularly.
- So am I to understand that people get electrocuted when they use Star Power now?
I don't know if you caught it above, but: "Pang Tang Bay." PANG. TANG. BAY. I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but I know from GHIII and the Tony Hawk games that Neversoft can be just as immature if not more so than I am. But seriously? PANG TANG BAY.
PANG. TANG. BAY.
The motion-capture just doesn't feel right. I can't explain it beyond that, but basically it feels as awkward as it did in GHIII. Which is pretty awkward.
The sounds are still guitar-centric (note tracks coming up, regardless of whether they're drums or guitar, are still the guitar fretting up; the sound after each lesson tutorial are created is an open strum of the guitar).
After finishing a song in solo tour, all the other band members KOWTOW TO YOU. I don't know if they do that if you don't finish in the green, but they do. Something about that irritates me greatly. Maybe it'd be less irritating if it weren't the same kowtow animation after every single song.
This continued wankfest appears to happen after every single celebrity feature in the game. When was the last time you saw a cover article in ANY music magazine about one band proclaiming their love for another band? (I'm not above making a creepy "I don't want Hayley Williams screaming my name on a magazine cover" statement.)
Between "So What'cha Want" in RB2 and "No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn" in GHWT, I think putting Beastie Boys content on-disc should be strictly forbidden from here on out. It's great for vocals, but crap for everybody else.
PANG.
TANG.
BAY.

I'm sure there's more for every section of this list that I haven't thought of, but that's more than enough for the time being.

Rock Band and GHWT are taking two completely different philosophies to the same subject matter, and clearly my interests align more with the Rock Band school of thinking. Neversoft's "YOU ARE THE ROCK STAR," sophomoric, frat-boy approach loses out significantly to Rock Band's "You're part of a bigger picture" feel in my eyes. Still, in this day and age where DLC is becoming more relevant (a lot of overlap is happening thanks to DLC, including songs like "Love Spreads" and "Dammit") to song selection, I feel that not even finding my "Cliffs of Dover" for GHWT will be enough for me to support the franchise. GHWT's setlist is happening, yes, but I firmly believe that the focus for both developers, in terms of actual releases, should focus more on features and design rather than a song list.

GHWT's interface is clumsy, and for a game that's trying so hard to be accessible to casual players (the concept of an easier-than-easy difficulty, which I think is really cool but I haven't tried out yet), is pretty confusing for a seasoned plastic instrument player to get around. The GH franchise is clearly focusing on the song list (advertising that they have one more on-disc song than RB2, when two of the songs are actually guitar duels). Rock Band's setlist, while not as full of karaoke hits, is strong (and supported by a DLC collection which I'm sure GHWT will eventually match in pace), and matches it with an ambiance that feels, and people know that I don't use this word frequently (unlike the rest of the internet), epic.

Maybe I'll change my mind when I get a four-piece band set going, but I'm more pessimistic about exploring this game further than I was when watching previews of it. I'm straining to keep from doing a complete point-by-point comparison to every single part where RB2 is clearly better (partly because it's totally subjective, partly because I don't like indulging the fanboy side of me, or even acknowledging that it's there) but I'm failing pretty miserably, and it's taking a lot of effort to not just pop RB2 back in and continue tapping away at that instead. I'm going to continue pecking away at GHWT until I've unlocked all the songs, and then we'll see whether or not I've managed to have proper fun by then.

Your mileage may vary; a lot of the people at Dancing Gamers seem to worship the ground GHWT walks on, possibly having been burned by the six-month release delay between RB US and RB EU. Personally, I just don't see it.