I recently had a phone roundtable with the team behind Guitar Hero On Tour Decades, which includes songs from the 70s till today.

One of the questions asked was about the multiplayer song sharing — was it planned from the start? And yes it was. The hard thing about it was making it forward compatible, so even though they hadn’t started on Decades yet, they had to plan an infracstructure to support Decades and perhaps other games to come out in the series, so they would all work together.

We also asked them about the process of song selection for the game. Turns out they have a huge library of songs they can pick from, but for the DS there’s certain factors that limit the songs they can choose. One of those is song length. On consoles they don’t have that factor to take into account since they have a lot of space to work with, but on the DS a longer song will take more space that could be use to add more songs instead. Another factor is if the songs have crunchy guitar, as high distortion songs wouldn’t sound good on the DS speakers. One of the other factors is exclusive content, including songs that haven’t been in previous games. In Decades they have 20 songs that are exclusive.

We asked them if they were looking into adding other instruments in the Guitar Hero On Tour series. In Decades they added the bass guitar. We got the normal “we’re always looking into new ways to play” reply.

The touch screen strumming has been improved, the graphics are crisper, and the animations are better in Decades. They’re squeezing everything they can out of the DS.

Lastly I asked them what they thought of the DSi, which Guitar Hero On Tour won’t work on, since it doesn’t have the GBA slot. They’re not planning an attachment, but are looking at the potential of the DSi. They really seemed interested in it.

4cr Preview - Guitar Hero On Tour Decades
4cr Review - Guitar Hero On Tour

I can’t wait for this game to come out, I’m a huge fan of the original. I’ll admit, I like the DS version better than the console version. Just because there’s only 4 buttons.