/sigh
At least I know that if I save a full bar of star power for the last half of the bridge that it'll carry me through it. I can play around with when I actually activate to be in better standing when the song goes back to being somewhat sane.
World Tour is going to take some getting used to... In addition to vocals and drums, a song editor, and rocker/guitar/drum/mic creators, it adds several new engine features:
- Extended Sustains: These are pretty neato, and I know of some songs in previous Guitar Heros that needed them. Basically, some sustains have other notes you have to hit while holding the sustain that may or may not be sustains themselves. Some of the notes need to be strummed, others are HO/POs. What's weird is you can hold upper frets during extended sustains, but not during non-extended ones. I don't think any extended sustains have notes below the first sustain fret, but I haven't played everything on Expert yet. Extended Sustains only appear on Hard and Expert, and I've only seen them on Guitar, not bass. A few extended sustains end up having you hold four fret buttons (near the beginning of Mr. Crowley, I believe, for example), but I haven't yet seen any actual four note chords.
- Touch Strip notes: These are kinda transparent, and on the PS3/360 they're connected with a purple line. If you have the WT guitar, you can (as expected) use the touch strip to play these. They're backwards compatible with older guitars though, you can just tap the fret buttons. What's pretty neat is that you never have to strum during these sections, even if you fuck up. They're kinda like HO/POs on steroids. The "no strumming" thing also makes it easy for you to move your strumming hand up to tap things, which given that most touch strip sections are complicated as all hell, you'll probably need to do. There are sustains and star power phrases within these, and they don't appear in all songs. Some songs seem to be content with massive HO/PO strings. I'm looking at you, Trapped Under Ice.
- Open Notes on Bass: This is just annoying, really. I mean, from an actual instrument point of view, they make sense. They basically added a 6th note for bass players. If you were playing a real guitar and strummed a string without holding it down at any of the frets, this is the note you'd get. They appear as thick purple lines across the fretboard, have a hard to distinguish blue border when in star power phrases, and turn completely white when HO/POable. To play them you just strum without holding any fret buttons.
- What doesn't help one single bit: one of the fretboards is purple. If you get it at random in quickplay on Bass, you'll have to quit the song and restart it and hope for a different fretboard, since the open notes blend in all too well with the purple fretboard. And Haruhi forbid you decide to play a custom song on bass. The fretboard they so thoughtfully force on you for all custom songs is the purple one. The Gem Color cheat can help you out with this, as it changes the color of the notes, including open notes. For example, set it to "Toxic Waste" and they'll all be green.
- Touch strip strumming/effects on sustains: When you're not playing a touch strip section, you can tap the touch strip to strum. Moving your finger along it during sustains also messes with effects on the sustain.
- Star Power phrases while Star Power is active: Taking a cue from Rock Band having the ability to gain overdrive while it's active, you can do the same with Star Power now. Accruing more star power while it's active extends the current activation, and whammying SP holds still works. It's kinda weird having SP active and seeing the SP gauge go up.
- Solo Bass/Rhythm, plus drums and vocals: I guess GH is trying to compete with Rock Band now. Solo Bass/Rhythm was sorely needed anyway, as some of GH3's Rhythm parts were really fun, and none of GH3's Bass parts were fun.
The song editor is both really interesting and kind of a letdown. Making songs is fairly simple, making good ones will be very time consuming. That's to be expected. However, they have stupid restrictions in place. For instance, Lead guitar and Bass guitar can't have any chords except a Blue+Orange, and even then it only sounds as one note. Rhythm can have chords galore, but all the fun ones do weird effects instead of playing the notes you've assigned to each color. Single notes on Rhythm play power chords for some reason. You can't place star power, it chooses where to put it at random when you save and only actually shows up when you play your song. There are options for things like song genre and artist name that you can't change (on PS2). The range of effects for lead/rhythm is pitifully limited unless you have a PS3 or 360, where entering a cheat unlocks a lot more. No effects for bass. Can't place touch strip notes (at least, not without a WT guitar). HO/POs are decided automatically by the engine (1/8th note (triplet?) timing or faster gets it) and isn't user-settable or overridable. You can make sustains and they tried to give you various ways to make sure they're the right length, but I haven't yet found a way to add on to an existing sustain or chop a bit off. They put in several example songs that I have found are either too easy or near impossible, and you can't load them up in the editor to see what they did. Last but not least, there's no way to practice a custom song, i.e. without the rock meter, with the ability to slow it down, etc.
The reasonable limitations are size constraints, but even then they seem low. You get 1200 notes (for each part) or 3 minutes (for all parts), whichever comes first. It has tools to automatically generate portions of your song for you, or even give you an entire drum beat for your song (that you can then go in and change up). And one thing that it's important to keep in mind: You're only making the Expert chart. It automatically dumbs it down for lower difficulties. This massively reduces editing time and ensures that lesser-skilled people can play if necessary (i.e. you have a console that can upload to GHTunes, the PS2 can't). Also, for whatever reason, songs on GHTunes aren't cross-platform compatible. So for the best mix of songs you might want the 360 version, since most people seem to have that. The Wii and the PS2 kinda get discriminated against. I dunno about you, but my PS2 has a hard drive and an ethernet port, and has been on the internet before. I want some DLC, dammit.
I think they designed some of the text displayed in the game to be displayed on really huge screens, because there's text here and there that ranges from really small to impossibly small. I guess I'm supposed to hunt down and drop some money on a component video cable for PS2 so I can play the game on our plasma TV without screen lag, instead of playing it on a Commodore monitor. Some of the text that's hard to read is in text entry, such as naming your rocker, instruments, or custom songs, which means when I'm fucking around in the song editor and I want to save for the first time I have to get all the way up in front of the screen to read the letters.
They changed the buttons for name entry, I guess just to fuck with us. Green now confirms the entire name as opposed to just the letter you're working on. Yellow confirms the letter, Blue is backspace, and Orange toggles caps in some cases. I agree that confirming the name needed to be moved from start, but putting it on the button that was single letter confirm? Fucking evil.
If you're not on a system that supports named profiles (like the 360, dunno about the others), then the stats screen at the end will only ever say "Player 1" (and I guess "Player 2", "Player 3", and "Player 4"). From watching FC videos where 99% of everyone has the 360 version, I can see that their gamertag goes there, as well as in the artist field on custom songs. Thanks a lot for giving us a shitty port. Though honestly I'm kinda amazed they're still releasing PS2 versions of rhythm games.
The rocker/instrument editor is pretty neat, and I could probably spend hours in it alone. For your rocker, you have lots of different clothing choices, with unlockable ones visible right then and there (so you can see how it looks before buying it), and the ability to unlock the ability to purchase more as you play through career mode. You also unlock hidden rockers (bosses) and extra instrument parts in career mode (play guitar to unlock guitar parts, drums for drum parts, and so forth). What kinda irks me is that you can't use one of the pre-existing rockers as a base for your own and be able to change all the attributes. For instance, with Midori, you can't change her hair (not even the color), or her face (to remove the hideous red eyeliner or whatever it is she has on). You'll have to make your own rocker, make her as short and thin as possible, give her Midori's hair, bullshit the face options (it takes fucking forever to switch back and forth to look, forget being able to visually compare unless you can take a screenshot), and have fun with the clothing. You can even set aspects of their stage presence, the intro, action upon clearing the song, and action upon failing the song. Like the rest of the editors, PS3/360 users got a shitton more options, and can actually make rockers that look like The Joker, Ronald McDonald, Buckethead, Slash, and other common and/or popular personalities. Wii/PS2 users... well, we can put a female rocker in a french maid outfit. I honestly haven't looked at the male rocker customization options, as I'm fairly content with my custom Midori. The option for Anime eyes just made me laugh. I should start purchasing clothing and play around with this some more. I'm not sure how many custom rockers I can make, I know it's a single digit, but the text is so small I can't read it. I think it's an 8, which is pathetically small. They could have used an extra save file for them and had a lot more slots available. Custom songs on PS2 use extra saves, why couldn't rockers do so too?
The ability to save custom instruments is pretty neat, especially since I made my custom guitar on my Midori-based rocker edit and had to transfer it over when I made the completely custom rocker. The instruments get saved anyway, but if you want to transfer them between rockers, you'll need to explicitly name and save each one. I laughed at the microphone customization options. You can change the mic and the stand. That's it. There's nothing else to customize. Drums have a plethora of options, so many in fact that they had to group them alphabetically in sections like A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L and so on. I'll customize my drums when I actually have a drum kit to play the game with. I was kinda disappointed that I couldn't use the star-shaped guitar body on a bass guitar, and that there was no corresponding star-shaped guitar head. My setup in GH3/GHA was Midori in the Puffball outfit, Maroon style (that's mostly orange) with the Star guitar using the Inevitably Dark finish, and the Nemesis 13 as bass because all the other bass guitars in those games look like shit. She looked pretty cool, and I can't reproduce that look in GHWT :( Also, her default costume is ugly as fuck, all purple and green. It just doesn't work. The item store is integrated with the rocker/instrument customization options, so you just have to select something you don't have, hit green to buy it, and then it gets put on immediately and you can go customize colors.
One thing that's annoyed me about GH3, GHA, and now GHWT: it saves even when you fail. Why? No data has changed when you fail a song. Does it update a hidden "songs failed" counter? Also, GHWT career mode doesn't save after every song, instead, it saves after every set. This wouldn't be an issue if the game were stable. But on some sets it crashes between songs (might just be because I'm running it off the hard drive), making you lose money and career progress.
Money. That reminds me: You get money for doing just about everything in World Tour. When you clear a song, it has a few bonuses like "5-Star Performance", "Hot Start", "Never Red", "Strong Finish", "Perfect Performance", and so forth that give you various amounts of money. These bonuses happen every time you play a song, even on repeat plays, and even in quickplay. For custom songs, you just get money according to the difficulty level you played it on (Expert gets $25, Hard gets $20, and I suspect it goes down by $5 for each level). No extra bonuses, but then again, I guess that was just to prevent people from making one note custom songs and getting boatloads of money for playing them over and over. Even then, the ability to continuously get money just by playing the game makes getting the purchasable stuff a lot easier, as you don't get dragged into looking for another song to clear, finding a similarly skilled friend to play something on co-op with, or to improve your star rating on a few songs to get a couple hundred extra bucks for that guitar. All you need to do is play a few more songs and do somewhat well. And you know what? As you get better at the game, you get more money to spend. With the flow of money essentially being infinite, getting all the purchasable stuff goes from previous games' methods of saving money and buying from most expensive to least expensive, to basically just spending whenever the hell you want to.
I haven't had the opportunity to check out the multiplayer stuff yet. You can't plug in a dualshock and have it pretend to be a guitar anymore (dualshock presence indicates a vocal player now), so I haven't gotten farther than the screen that basically says "um, hey, vocals might want a microphone", and I don't have a USB microphone to plug in. Vocals doesn't need a controller on PS2 anyway, as one of the guitar players or the drummer can hit Blue to become the band leader and handle song selection.
The ability to adjust audio volume levels per-track is awesome. Now I can turn down everything but bass when I'm playing bass so I can actually hear what I'm fucking playing. Speaking of playing stuff on Bass, I've played Beat It twice, and FCed it both times. My higher FC score is currently 7th on ScoreHero (look in Solo Bass on PS2). Whee. Bass is pretty easy, as I sightread FCed a couple other songs whose names I forget at the moment, and had a couple shoulda-been sightread FCs that were -1s instead.
Final thoughts on Guitar Hero World Tour:
- Regardless of everything negative I said about the game (which is mostly nitpicks), if you're completely hooked on Guitar Hero and need more songs to play, World Tour is there for you. Lots more songs, plus they're all master tracks this time, which means no crappy covers.
- If you've played Rock Band with a full band, then World Tour's Band mode should give a comparable experience. World Tour is even compatible with the Rock Band instruments.
- If you're new to the whole thing... It's pretty accessible actually.
- The tutorials are still there (though the voiceovers are downright boring in this one)
- There's also an added tutorial that covers some of the new features, as well as tutorials for drums and vocals
- The game has a lower difficulty all around than GH3
- Try out the new Beginner difficulty level, if three frets are too much for you. You can learn to strum a rhythm and then work up to Easy which adds the frets in.
- The tutorials are still there (though the voiceovers are downright boring in this one)
- This is kinda biased towards guitar, but it's all I've got. I'll post more once I get the other instruments.
Through some Youtube videos, I found and reproduced for my own amusement/benefit a fun glitch in Guitar Hero 2. It enables you to pass a song while only having to play a single section. I played around with it and discovered some fun things:
- Using the glitch hides the rock meter and your score display. Your rock meter is still active, and you can still fail the song. You can also still accrue points.
- Using the glitch changes your fretboard to the training mode one, and your newspaper portrait is just random noise.
- Once triggered, the glitch remains active until you reset your console.
- Guitar Hero 2 will not give you credit for finishing the song if you get 0 points (i.e. you have to hit one note and get 50 points).
- If you hit all the notes in the section, it will be counted as 100% and your setlist stars will turn yellow. Even if you only got three stars.
- Using the glitch removes star power from the song.
- Using the glitch disables all the pre- and post-song sounds at whatever venue you're playing at.
- Using the glitch replaces whichever song you select in the setlist with the one you used to trigger the glitch, though you still get credit for completing the song you selected.
- On the 360, you can use the glitch to get the achievement for passing Jordan on Expert easily.
- Look at the More Info screen after clearing the song, whee...
- Start up GH2 and go into Training->Practice.
- Select a song. Any song will do. See below for some suggestions on which song to take from a "let's make this as easy as possible" point of view.
- Select your part. I've chosen guitar every time, but I don't see why it wouldn't work with rhythm or bass.
- Select your difficulty.
- Select your section. You may wish to look up some note charts to find good sections. Here are my suggestions:
- The Vocal Break near the end of Stop only has one note, which is a Blue+Orange chord sustain on Expert. If you hit it and hold the sustain all the way you'll get 150 points and three gold stars. If you strum early and release before the sustain, you'll get 100 points and three gold stars. Whee.
- Another good section is Intro B of Carry Me Home, as it's only one measure long and even on Expert won't fail you if you only hit one note in it, allowing you to score the minimum of 50 points and even allowing you to do the encore at the end of the set, where your rock meter carries over from the previous song.
- Whatever you choose, you'll be stuck hearing that song (with or without the guitar) until you reset your console.
- Another thing to consider is the length of the song. If you want to glitch your way through a lot of stuff quickly, better take Trogdor, as it's the shortest song in the game (I believe).
- Let the section run, you don't have to hit any notes in it.
- After it finishes, count the beats until the menu comes up. I find it's usually three, or just before the third beat. If you're using the Vocal Break in Stop, you'll have to find the right vocal cue for the end of the section, but that's not that hard.
- Restart the section.
- When it gets to the end, unplug your controller just as the menu would pop up. If it's wireless, this means you'll have to yank the receiver. People say it works when you remove a battery, but I haven't found that to be the case and yanking the receiver is faster anyway. Done correctly, you'll get the "You're rocking out too hard" screen instead of the menu.
- Plug your controller back in and hit resume.
- If you timed it right, the note track will just scroll on forever. If you didn't time it right, you'll get the menu. Restart and try again.
- Once you get it, hit start and choose Exit. You're now glitched and ready to go.
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