Guitar Hero World Tour vs. Rock Band 2 - an Unfair Comparison

So let's begin by rehashing my initial experience with rhythm games. My very first was Donkey Konga for the Gamecube. Cute little game with drums. It was a lot of fun, though limited in challenge. A great way to have non-gamers enjoy a video game. But it didn't stick. It was fun in small doses...after a while your hands hurt and you got tired of playing cutesie old school Nintendo music and Mighty Might Bosstones "The Impression That I Get" which was by far the best song.

So several years later, Guitar Hero comes out, and I remained blissfully in the world of Azeroth through Guitar Hero One and Two, only leaving Cenarion Circle for an occasional sleep session and 8 hour work day. Needless to say, I didn't play many other games.

So when Bootstrap Bill brought over Guitar Hero III for the Wii, I was excited. We started playing the set list, and I started out on medium difficulty. I liked it. A lot. I bought the game, even though I didn't own a Wii (though there is one in our house). Unfortunately, the game was limited in the Wii version, but I didn't care. I was jamming out to Scorpions, Aerosmith, ZZ Top, and Metallica. I loved the way that it brought the authenticity of playing the guitar, but removed the large challenge of learning how to strum and play chords correctly. Now it was fun AND easy. As South Park said, real guitars are for old people.

So I got up to expert on guitars with Guitar Hero III, and got sluck on the &@#*ing Slayer song. But it was a ton of fun to play. Then, Rock Band came out. And you can drum? For those of you who have known me for all of my life, I can't play the drums worth a shit. But I always pretend that I can. I'll drum the current beat in my head on my steering wheel, on my legs, on my brother's head, on whatever is available at the time. So I can drum without really learning how? AWESOME!

Rock Band was amazing. It still had the fun guitar parts, but the drumming was unreal. I loved it, and I played it until I was good enough to play songs on expert. There aren't too many songs I can't play on expert Rock Band (damn you Iron Maiden drummer, damn you.) and I can play most anything on expert guitar as well.

Eventually Rock Band lost a little luster, but it was still fun to play here and there in a group setting. And I believe that I posted a while ago my thoughts on Guitar Hero III vs. Rock Band. Rock Band is a lot more fun in a group setting because you can play with 3 others instead of only 1. But Guitar Hero has a much better single player mission mode, and has a lot better guitar parts in my opinion.

Then the problem with Activision vs. Harmonix broke out. Instruments weren't compatible. WTF guys! You're missing an incredible opportunity to reach more people!

And then we found out that Rock Band 2 (hereby known as RB2 because I'm lazy) would be coming out around the same time as Guitar Hero World Tour (hereby known as GH4 because I'm really lazy). And GH4 will be competing directly with RB2 by added singing and drums? Wow - that's awesome! But.....GH4 drums have three toms and 2 cymbals. There goes the idea of eventually having compatible instruments, eh?

So we reach around a few weeks ago just before Rock Band 2 comes out for the PS3. I got to "rent" the game that weekend before it came out because I'm cooler than you. We set it up in my parents' basement where we usually play, because there's a high def projector screen down there and plenty of room. We hook it up and start playing. And initially it was fun, though it didn't seem much different than RB1. Then it started to happen. We started to fail song after song. We each have been mostly playing Expert level for weeks now, and we couldn't do it. Even the original songs. We couldn't get the calibration to work, despite the new tools being MUCH better. Every song felt off, and even though we were hitting notes right, it wasn't giving us credit. Even when we played the downloadable songs that we could ace on RB1, we couldn't do it.

That combined with the limited song selection frustrated us to no end. We ended the night prematurely having played for about 2-3 hours. What was to blame? Perhaps the calibration, perhaps not. But one thing was for sure...it was much harder and more frustrating.

That brings us to tonight. We got to "rent" GH4 for the weekend before it goes on shelves. Thank God that Sony made Activision and Harmonix play nice. Our 4 tom drums worked just fine and our RB1 guitars played the songs very well. I can only assume it works the same way in the other direction. PRAISE BE!

So we picked it up in the same way as RB2. We calibrated and started playing. And.....it worked. We could play the songs on expert! Amazing!

We played three player tour unlocking set lists. If we got stuck on a song, we kept trying it until we got it (because GH4 doesn't give you fans that you will lose). Some of the GH4 parts were really challenging. It seemed that the notes don't appear for quite as long as they do in RB2 before you need to hit them. While this difference may be measured in milliseconds, it was enough for it to be harder to see unpredictable parts. Also, the parts though still pattern based, differed a lot more. So yes it was harder. But it wasn't frustratingly hard. RB2 was frustratingly hard - when you think you are playing the part correctly, but it's not precise enough. After a single calibration of GH4, we didn't have this problem. GH4 parts were more challenging (and I'm sure they'll get harder) but we didn't feel the level of frustration. We played one song 8 times before we got it, and it felt great when we were done. We played for 3.5 hours, and if our hands and legs didn't hurt so badly from Expert drumming Dammit, we might still be at it.

Also, to address the set lists, I've heard so many people say that they like RB2 setlist a lot better than GH4. I call shenanigans. RB2 has some great artists like Rush, Guns N Roses, and Panic at the Disco, but the songs are "The Trees," Shackler's Revenge," and "Nine in the Afternoon"? WTF! Meanwhile, we actually didn't mind playing Beastie Boys and Michael Jackson because the songs were "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" and "Beat It." Note to Harmonix: Please pick better songs from these artists! Songs that are fun to play maybe? Seeing Mighty Might Bosstones and finding out the song is "Where'd You Go" is like the guy finding out that Lola was a dude. Meanwhile, "Hot For Teacher" is an amazing Van Halen choice for GH4 - I can't wait to unlock it.

To be fair, my assessment is biased. I'm playing expert mode, which is not going to be the most popular mode. Also, I couldn't get RB2 to be comfortably synchronized, though part of that I feel is the game's fault. I also got stuck with songs that I didn't enjoy or couldn't beat on expert - and Hard is just a joke once you've beaten Long Time/Foreplay on Expert. Not even fun.

I'm also using Rock Band 1 instruments, which means only 4 drum spots, no cymbals, no touch sensitivity, no guitar slide, and no wireless drum. I didn't try singing on GH4, (though it was much improved on RB2 from what I noticed) and I didn't try out enough songs on either to give a solid opinion. But what I can say from experience is that both are MUCH more difficult on expert than Rock Band 1. Rock Band 2 requires more precision, whereas Guitar Hero builds on GH3 and went balls to the wall on some of the parts, even for the drums. If we could get RB2 to calibrate right, then I'd have a fair assessment on my hands. But based on what we saw, I would recommend GH4 over RB2. A week ago I wouldn't have believed it, but it's true. I'd like to try out the guitar slide and the 5-piece drumset sometime, but money doesn't grow on trees. At least we can play both because Sony helped out the consumer. I hope both games do well.

Couple small notes I didn't touch on

• still don't like how GH4 makes you choose difficulty level of you instrument before your setlist - makes group setting more difficult for rotation
• I've heard the RB2 "No Fail Mode" is amazing, but I haven't tried it (maybe I should have....)
• I like and don't like how GH4 shares star power among the players - it helps single instruments struggling to stay alive - I would have failed one song 7 times because it took me a while to get the hang of it. However, it's frustrating and not very intuitive to know whether you can/should use it before someone else.
• I like the way that drums trigger the star power in GH4 - you can choose when to do it at will, not when they decide to give you a fill part.
• I don't like how you can't do a single song in a setlist in GH4 - you have to do the whole setlist at once. Pain in the ass. Plus the hard song is always last, and you're like "well we're this close, we gotta beat it!" Never have I hated Blink 182 more than tonight.
• I'd better stop because I'm exhausted - I'll post again with more info once I've tried both again, but those are my impressions for ya. Sorry for all the rambling.