Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Where the hell is Matt?

Watch the video on the front page.

I never thought I’d see the day, but Red Octane has brought the ever-popular Guitar Hero series to the Nintendo DS. While not quite as good as its console relatives, Guitar Hero: On Tour’s experience is incredibly fun and entertaining in its own right.

Boasting 25 tracks (see the full setlist), most of which are master recordings, On Tour has a much smaller musical selection than its console bretheren. It’s not difficult to imagine why; the maximum size for Nintendo DS cartridges sits at 2 gigabits (or about ~256 megabytes), and when one needs to keep audio quality as high as possible, there’s not much wiggle room for additional songs. As a result, the audio quality is fantastic (right up there with AAA DS titles), even through the DS’s tiny speakers.As far as modes go, Career Mode is back with five venues, each with five songs to play and four difficulty levels. Practice and Quickplay modes return for those wanting to perfect their skills. On the wireless multiplayer front, a much-improved Guitar Battle mode returns from Guitar Hero and you can still engage in Face-Offs or play Cooperatively with a friend.

But what about the experience? How did Red Octane get the essentials of the Guitar Hero experience on to the DS? I’ll explain with some photos:

Everything comes packaged in a solid cardboard box with plastic shells holding the items in place.

You’ll get a copy of Guitar Hero: On Tour, the Guitar Grip (more on that in a second), an extra stylus pick (great quality), manuals, and an adapter for original Nintendo DS units (their GBA cartridge slot is full-size). Switching out adapters requires a straight-head screwdriver.

Here’s the result of over 25 prototyping iterations; the Guitar Grip! It’s extremely well-built for starters; everything from the straps to the buttons feel solid. An adjustable handstrap allows the grip to adjust for different-sized hands, and the artwork can be easily replaced by simply popping the plastic shell apart and inserting a new paper inlay.

The grip itself slots snugly into the GBA cartridge slot on the bottom of the DS. If you want to switch out the slot adapter for an original DS-compatible one, you just need to loosen two straight-head screws, slide the old adapter out, slide then ew one in, and retighten.

Red Octane apparently tried a grip with five buttons (and it worked alright), but you can’t really slide your fingers properly when you’re holding the DS. Also, I’m thinking that the buttons would be a bit…shall we say squished…if there were five instead of four. Expert players needn’t worry; the lack of the fifth fret button doesn’t reduce the difficulty of Hard and Expert modes. All of the note tracks for On Tour’s songs have been reworked from scratch (you may recognize a few songs from Guitar Hero III).

The DS is a little bulkier with the grip inserted.

And here’s another shot from the back.

Now, on to the gameplay! Single player houses Quickplay, Career, CPU Guitar Battle, and Practice modes, while multiplayer provides access to Face-Off, Cooperative, and Guitar Battle modes that you can play with a friend.

Instead of hitting a strum bar, in Guitar Hero: On Tour, you slide the pick stylus across the guitar on the touchscreen. This works pretty well, although I’ve experienced a few situations where I was positive I hit the screen and a note didn’t register. To whammy, you simply wiggle the stylus on the screen post-slide and lift off when you’re finished. Activating Star Power is done by pressing the appropriate incon on the touch screen, hitting A/B/X/Y/Start/Select, or yelling loudly into the microphone. So how does it all feel? The Guitar Grip takes a little getting used to, and you’ll have to adjust the strap and experiment with a few ways to hold the stylus pick before you get into a groove. However, patient folks will be rewarded with a very fullfilling portable Guitar Hero experience. Career Mode is fun, but the real entertainment comes from the multiplayer modes. Guitar Battles have a slew of new power-ups, ranging from the shirt-signing to lighting your opponent’s guitar on fire (blow out the flames by blowing into the microphone). Cooperative Mode and Face-Off are just as much fun as they are on the console versions.

So, as I said at the begining, I don’t think you’ll end up prefering Guitar Hero: On Tour over any of the console iterations; there’s something about holding that guitar controller that just makes the experience more fulfilling. However, the DS iteration is extremely fun (especially if you have someone else to play it with), and it’s one of the finest portable rythym games available. At $50 it may seem expensive, but it’s only a small premium over the usual AAA DS titles (and this is including a hardware peripheral). A worthy buy for any Guitar Hero fan with a Nintendo DS!

Crazy conspiracy theorists will try to sell you anything to “protect yourself against the looming threat of chemtrails.” Especially rocks with pipes sticking out of them.

4:29:41 PM: Timothy Maguire: Discussed the looming threat of chemtrails.
4:29:44 PM: Timothy Maguire: going in my timesheet
4:29:50 PM: Timothy Maguire: under 4.0 development
4:31:14 PM: Kyle Bedell: Brief discussion of the looming threat of chemtrails
4:31:23 PM: Kyle Bedell: And my amazingly accurate guess about them selling rocks.
4:31:34 PM: Timothy Maguire: it had a copper pipe
4:31:42 PM: Kyle Bedell: But it was mostly rock.
4:31:53 PM: Kyle Bedell: A rock with a pipe coming out of it
4:32:02 PM: Timothy Maguire: pretty much

I’ve been playing Funcom’s Age of Conan recently (yes, another MMO). The game world itself is based off of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, written for Weird Tales in the 1930s. Because I feel like I get a lot more enjoyment out of a licensed game when I know the universe and its characters, I picked up the first compilation of Howard’s stories for my Kindle a few weeks ago. It’s basically pulp fantasy, but with a much darker tone than what I’m used to reading.

What intrigues me the most is that there’s no chronological order to these stories; one might have Conan reigning as king of Aquilonia, while another goes back to his youth adventuring as a corsair on the high seas. Howard himself had this to say when asked about why he chose to tell his tales in such a fashion:

“In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”

I’ll have a review of the game up when I’ve experienced more of the content. So far, it’s looking pretty good!