Update! More on the new Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades has been revealed!
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At E3 last month, one of the big announcements for DS was a sequel to DS game Guitar Hero: On Tour (pictured). Perhaps not surprising seeing as the game has sold massively well and publisher Activision has developed the guitar fret peripheral so might as well get full use out of it, but we weren't expecting the sequel so soon.
Now, IGN has been talking to Karthik Bala - Vicarious Visions' CEO - and extracted some new information on Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades, which is due out some time in the autumn.
On the subject of the new features that will be implemented in the game, Bala says the deveopment team's primary focus was to perfect some of the ideas and elements created in Guitar Hero, polish its presentation and deliver even more songs. Improvements in the compression technology used means 28 songs will be packed into the new game (that's two more than in the original).
The big news announced at E3 however is that Decades introduces a new song streaming and sharing feature, so if two players each have a different copy of Guitar Hero, they'll have the full track listing from both versions to choose from in multiplayer. Bala tells IGN the feature allows the game to not only be backward compatible but forward compatible with future versions of Guitar Hero: On Tour too.
It was an idea the development team came up with during the making of the original game, but was too technically complex to pull off. Now Bala says they're able to stream entire songs between two DS units with no loss of data or quality. The game won't be compatible online, but the feature is apparently on the wishlist for future games.
Finally, a partial list of songs that will be included in Decades has been named. The full track list will feature songs from the '70s up to the '00s and they're all original songs with no covers. The songs revealed so far are listed below. Our fingers are already cramping at the thought of playing "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" by faux rockers The Darkness...
Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Can't Stop"
Paramore - "crushcrushcrush"
All-American Rejects - "Dirty Little Secret"
The Darkness - "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"
Jimmy Eat World - "The Middle"
Linkin Park - "One Step Closer"
Foo Fighters - "The Pretender"
Seether - "Remedy"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Tarantula"
Fall Out Boy - "The Take Over, The Break's Over"
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I'll wait for Decades purely because I despise pop music.
Also the Foo's are on it. YAY!!!
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I got this game yesterday after trading in three games which were worth £19
It's really good actually.. didn't quite understand it at first but yeah im getting there haha
Thinking about getting it for thee Wii too!!
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Just one question, can you still enjoy the game if you don't like the songs so much? I don't know for sure that I won't like the music, but most of the songs are songs I've never heard of.
EDIT: I lied! I do know some of the songs, just don't recognise the name's.
Check out these new shots for Activision's Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades, headed for DS later this year.
On Tour Decades is the second GH game for the DS, and takes you through classics of the 70's, 80's, 90's and up to the present. It's also backwards compatible with the previous game, so you'll be able to jam and share songs with those who have that, too.
I really love this game hence getting the GH DS but can someone please tell me how to get the notes that are the same and really close together, the Ozzy Osbourne song is a killer for me.
It's only been about four months since Red Octane, Activision, and Vicarious Visions released the excellent Guitar Hero On Tour for the Nintendo DS. There's not a whole lot a team can do on the handheld in that short amount of time, so it's pretty obvious that Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades isn't going to be much more than a new track list of songs within the same rhythm engine. And beyond a few tweaks and a handful of changes like new characters and background venues, that's exactly what Decades is. If you didn't get into it the first time this update isn't going to change your mind, but for those who loved rocking out on the handheld in the original game, here are more than two dozen new full-length songs spanning four decades of rock music.
Everything I said about Guitar Hero On Tour last July can apply to Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades: the console guitar rhythm game works extremely well on the handheld thanks to the ingenious Guitar Grip peripheral, a device that plugs into the Game Boy slot of the Nintendo DS and replicates the fret bar of the full-size console Guitar Hero guitar peripheral. As the song plays, notes stream down the screen to indicate which buttons to press while strumming the touch-screen at the same time. While it doesn't feel like you're playing a guitar on the Nintendo DS, it definitely feels like you're playing Guitar Hero, and that's the point of the product: to give players a way to play Guitar Hero on the go.
Admittedly, Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades was pushed out the door as quickly as possible to ride the Guitar Hero popularity wave -- the original Nintendo DS title has turned into one of the top third-party games released on the handheld, so obviously Activision wants to keep that gravy train chugging along. To get the game out in a speedy development cycle the original engine's been recycled, so you get the same good sound quality and excellent touch-screen response. But you also still get the awkwardness of the band members not really moving to the beat of the song they're playing. It's a small gripe considering your eyes are pretty much focused on the note highway streaming down on top of the visuals.
The majority of the change is in the song list and the venues that surround them. Decades is segmented into four decades of music: 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s; Activision wanted to get in some contemporary music so it opens with a "Modern" venue but it's stupid to consider that its own "decade." Each venue has four songs and an unlockable fifth "encore" track, just like the original Guitar Hero On Tour game. The song line-up in a rhythm/music game is a completely subjective thing: one man's trash is another man's treasure, right? In my opinion, the game's tracklist starts out bad but starts getting more enjoyable as you unlock the earlier decades, but that might just be my tastes in classic rock sneaking in there.
The focus on era of music plays against the Guitar Hero difficulty design, and it's probably my biggest complaint of Guitar Hero On Tour Decades: in previous Guitar Hero games, the setlist gets harder the deeper you get. But because the game focuses on dishing out songs from a specific era five at a time, it's almost impossible to stick to that rising difficulty curve of past Guitar Hero games. The songs get progressively difficult within their decades, but once you move on to the next you'll find the first song of the next decade to be significantly less difficult than the final song of the just completed one.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades does tweak the previous game with obvious improvements: if you play through a song on the Hard difficulty, you earn credit for the Easy and Medium difficulties, too -- no need to play through each song on the simpler settings. There are also three unlockable songs this time, available when you beat the three different modes in Decades: Lead Guitar, Bass/Rhythm Guitar, and Guitar Duel.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades "unlocks" a dormant feature within the original Guitar Hero On Tour DS game: both versions (and, ultimately, future versions) of the DS Guitar Hero On Tour will seamlessly link in wireless play and stream each other's track list in cooperative and competitive two player mode. It's an awesome feature that makes it well worth purchasing the full version of Decades with a Guitar Grip peripheral. You can simply keep the second one handy for on-the-fly multiplayer with a DS owner who might not own a copy of the game.
Closing Comments
If you've already made up your mind about the DS version of Guitar Hero, Decades isn't going to change your mind since it's essentially the same design with new content. If you loved the first one, you're probably going to dig the follow-up. If you *****ed and complained about the game giving you hand cramps and carpel tunnel, that'll probably continue for this sequel. I personally think the original Guitar Hero On Tour was an outstanding addition to the Nintendo DS library, and while Guitar Hero On Tour Decades loses a bit of the novelty that influenced the first score, the sequel is still a very appealing portable product.
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