Guitar Hero: World Tour

More stylophone, less guitar. Guitar Hero World Tour feels like a re-union of The Flying Pickets for Ewan.

The “music and rhythm” genre of game is not a new invention – I can remember playing this type of game back on the Neo-Geo Pocket portable console, but the impact of Guitar Hero (and Rock Band) should not be underestimated. It's providing bands with a new way to sell music to fans, and the brand name is one of the few gaming brands that has broken out of the console and into the public conscious.

And that means that it has been ported to a variety of platforms, including the Nintendo DS, the Sony PSP and now the smartphone, via the Ovi Store. The big difference is that where the home consoles came packaged with a full sized guitar, and the Nintendo got a little plug in fret board, the mobile version has no extra equipment, you'll be left using the little keyboard on your smartphone.

This does dilutes the Guitar Hero experience, although the rest of the application does its best to make up for it.

There are concessions made to the mobile format, so where the console version had five time lines of musical notes you had to hit, the mobile version has only three. You also don't have to hit a note and a strum bar, just a single key press will suffice. Even with these changes, the mobile phone keypad is not the most ergonomic of devices to play a game like this, and I found myself getting muscle cramps after just two or three songs when playing on my Nokia N95.

The other element of Guitar Hero is the music, and the chance to play along with some great tunes. While the track listing on this version of Guitar Hero is just as rockin' as any other (Emerson Lake and Palmer, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blondie and Oasis, to name but four), because this is a java-based version of the game (why, why? 8-( - Ed) the expected crisp representations of the music are replaced with a horrible MIDI file version.

This makes it much less Guitar Hero, and more Stylophone Hero.

It's just painful to listen to, and made even worse because everything is instrumental, there are no vocals here apart from those you sing yourself – although with the musical ability of MIDI files, I doubt many of you will be doing a bit of falsetto to the chords.

As with Guitar Hero, you get to choose your avatar and their guitar, and see them perform while playing along with the song in the top of the screen, but this is nowhere near a strong point, with just a few frames of animation.

There is longevity here, with more songs opening up the longer you play the game, and the option to play the drums instead of a guitar to each song, essentially giving you a different rhythym to play along with. Couple this with the three skill levels and you have six ways to play each track, so you won't be burning through this game in the standard three minutes of a rock song.

But will you want to? I'm not so sure. The keys are cramped for the style of gameplay, the MIDI tunes aren't especially representative, and it all feels like a cheap clone to cash in on a powerful brand name. Which means it will probably sell quickly no matter what the reviews say. Sigh.

But it is playable, and the basis of the Guitar Hero games are here, just not in abundance. Might be worth a spin for a long journey but as a purchase of the week... fail.

-- Ewan Spence

Published by Ewan Spence at 7:49 UTC, August 20th 2009

Categories: Games
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition

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