4cr Hands-On: Guitar Hero 5

I am absolutely horrible at music games. Guitar Hero or Rock Band, it doesn’t matter which. I can sometime manage the “hard” mode on the guitar, but I generally just hover around a comfortable medium. Hell, don’t even get me started on vocals – a karaoke king I am not. Of course, I didn’t let that stop me when Activision invited the game journalist masses out to the Temple nightclub in San Francisco to get some time in on their newest Guitar Hero title. I mean, I’ll drink their booze. If the game sucks, I’m still going to tell you guys.

Fortunately, Guitar Hero 5 doesn’t suck. I mean, they’ve done so many of these games now that it would be hard to screw the formula up. It’s still a Guitar Hero game, you still play a bunch of plastic instruments by timing button presses with on-screen colors. By now, you’ve played one of these band games (if you haven’t and are reading this, welcome back to the civilized world). You either love them or hate them, and that’s not going to change.

So, instead of wasting several paragraphs telling you what you already know, I’m just going to focus on some of the cool new details that emerged from this press shindig.

Forward-Compatibility:

Guitar Hero 5 and the upcoming Band Hero will both have the ability to import and use the songs from both Guitar Hero: World Tour and Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. All that you need to do is grab the ID number from the back of the instruction manual of the game that you are importing from. I hope that you didn’t toss it out. Like in Rock Band 2, You’ll apparently also have to pay a re-licensing fee. I couldn’t get an exact dollar amount out of them, but I doubt that it’ll be more than five or ten bucks. Song imports work on the 360, PS3m and Wii. On both the 360 and PS3, you’ll have to download the entire set of songs, but you can delete them individually later on to free up space. Wii users will be given a list of songs, and can then select which ones they want from there. The selected songs will be downloaded directly to your SD card.

In addition to the songs from the disc, 152 of the 158 World Tour DLC tracks will work in both Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero. By downloading a free title update, those tracks will be updated with all of the new features from Guitar Hero 5 like band moments (if everyone plays through the same section without missing notes, you get a score bonus) and vocal star power.

The Wii Version Is Actually Good

Honestly, my entire experience with these band games has been on the Xbox 360, so I don’t know how gimped the Wii versions have been in the past. I remember hearing horror stories about Guitar Hero 3 being in mono and the entire trainwreck that was the first Wii Rock Band. So, I’m willing to bet that past Wii versions have been pretty bad. Well, the Wii port of Guitar Hero 5 actually sounds pretty great. Basically, all of the features from the other consoles survive intact.

The online mode is actually what impressed me the most. The Nintendo WiFi Connection uses a decentralized p2p model that is less than optimal at times. Guitar Hero World Tour would connect two Wiis together to pit band members head to head. Guitar Hero 5 can connect up to eight Wii systems and form bands from any combination of players from those systems. Oh, and not a fan of friend codes? Guitar Hero 5 uses your Wii’s system-specific code and automatically imports your Wii address book to populate your buddy list.

Better Music Creation Tools

This is the part that I was the most interested in. Guitar Hero World Tour’s music creation mode was a neat toy, but not much more than that. It had several limitations that kept you from going crazy with your music creation. I wanted to know if they had improved on it, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.

Guitar Hero 5 has two music creation tools – GHJam and GHMix. GHJam is the simple mode, intended to be accessible to anyone that wants to, as the title implies, just jam with their friends. You simply select a musical style (from hard rock to chiptunes), choose an instrument, and start playing. Your musical “sound” is generated naturally from what notes you play and the style you chose, and a trippy visualizer reacts to your jam session. While those actually interested in mixing some tracks will ignore this mode entirely, I could see GHJam becoming popular at parties (especially if your parties happen to involve certain substances).

GHMix, however, is where the real music creation meat is at. This advanced editor has been pretty heavily beefed up since the last game. A far more diverse set of samples has been included and every sample has been recorded at a higher quality than those in World Tour. Each instrument actually contains several subtypes that you can play. For instance, if you select keyboard, you can choose from several varieties of keyboard-based instruments from the piano, to the harpsichord, to several different 8-bit keyboards. You can assign effects to your song, and switch them around mid-track. The touch-slider on the guitar can even be used for cool effects like slides on the keyboard. Don’t want to worry about a certain instrument? If you don’t want to worry about things like the drumming, you can just drop in a drum pattern. Editing the track has also been made easier, you can skip through the track in an analog fashion by pressing on the strum bar (press slowly to go slowly, slam it to skip to the end). If you’re ever confused, they have also included a pretty complex help manual that even includes music theory lessons.

If you like your track, you can design some cover art and share it on their GHTunes service. Each user gets fifty slots to save custom tracks in, and the developers expressed the hope that users will actually put those slots to use. A bunch of in-house musicians at Neversoft have been tasked with designing tracks, and the developers plan on picking a dozen or so of the best ones to put out on GHTunes on day one. Activision is pretty clearly trying to get the chiptunes artists to adopt Guitar Hero as their platform. Honestly, it’s kind of an interesting move, especially in light of Harmonix’s recent Rock Band Network announcement. GHMix does have a bunch of neat 8-bit samples and instruments. While Rock Band Network is pretty clearly the way to go for the big label-backed bands, the ease-of-use and availability of Guitar Hero’s tools might entice a huge number of amateur artists.