Mopping up with Guitar Hero: World Tour

Above: That red ring means the pad is broken.

It wasn't specifically part of my quest to catch up on a few noteworthy releases before the year is up, but recently I had the chance to try out Guitar Hero: World Tour. My love for Rock Band is well documented, as is my recent antipathy for Guitar Hero, but I tried to approach World Tour with an unjaundiced eye. Believe me when I say I do not feel personally gratified for having witnessed -- and even participated in -- the demise of gaming's once most unimpeachable brands.

From what I can tell in one short session, World Tour seems all right -- if not immediately distinguishable from Rock Band. I was most interested in comparing Red Octane's drumkit to Harmonix's. The cymbal placement, surprisingly, made a big difference. I didn't love the feel of the cymbals themselves -- they're just rigid pieces of plastic. They don't swing freely after hits like real cymbals do. But their location above the pads felt just right, and having to cross my right hand over my left to ride a cymbal was perfect.

The kick pedal, though, was much worse. There felt like a centimeter's worth of difference between the up position and the down position. When I first sat down and tried it, I had to ask its owner if it was jammed. No, she assured me, it's just like that. I'm no drummer myself, but we had a set in my house when I was a kid, and one thing I remember about the bass pedal was that it was heavy and complicated, with joints and counterweights all over the place. Rock Band's springier pedal comes much closer to approximating that feeling than Guitar Hero's.

If those were the only differences between them, I'd be tempted to call it a push. Both of those were things you could get used to, no matter which kit you were using. But I've read that lots of World Tour users have had trouble with the pad sensitivity, and this was definitely the case for me. The red pad -- which, as in Rock Band, functions as the all-important snare -- only seemed to be registering hits about half the time. I couldn't tell if it was my placement or my velocity, but I found myself bashing the sticks down as hard as I could to try to get it to take. That led to less bounceback, and worse drumming. Without being able to compare anything else about the two games, Rock Band wins by TKO.

By the way, given that the Rock Band kit now supports third-party cymbal peripherals, not to mention the altogether more real Ion drum kit, the one advantage the World Tour kit has over it is wiped out, assuming you're willing to spend the money. And I am willing to do that? Good god no.

I must be holding the drumsticks wrong

Yesterday, this bruise appeared on my hand and wrist:

Above: Now that's just gross

I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I'd done. I hadn't fallen, hadn't tried to catch anything heavy, hadn't smacked my forehead in response to idiocy. And yes, it does hurt a little, particularly on the bone right where the wrist meets the hand. There's only one thing it could possibly be.

It's got to be the drumsticks.

What else was I doing all weekend? Just drumming my brains out in Rock Band 2.

(This includes completing "Give It Away," btw, and nearly five-starring it. I was feeling confident until "We Got the Beat" added 10 times as many kick drums as anything else I'd played to that point.)

That still doesn't explain the bruise to my satisfaction. It's not like I've got the sticks in a death grip, pounding away on the skins as though they'd killed my parents. I hold the sticks pretty loosely between my thumb and forefinger. I hit the pads lightly, for fear of annoying the neighbors. There's just no way I'm rocking hard enough to cause bruising. But what else could it be?

Above: One more look

Not that mere injury will keep me from continuing to rock out. Rick Allen lost an arm and kept playing the drums. What kind of a wuss would I be to let a bruise stop me?

Beat not happening

Above: Livin' the dream

Seems like it's always two steps forward and one step back in Rock Band 2. I'd mentioned recently that I seemed to be stuck between medium and hard difficulty on the drums. At this point, drumming on medium is almost boring -- which is not to suggest that I'm hitting 100% on most songs, just that I feel like I've got a handle on it and I'm ready for something new.

On my first attempt at increasing the difficulty, I attempted challenge mode on hard difficulty. Did all right for the first couple of songs, and then got trounced by "Give It Away," making it perhaps 20% of the way through the song before failing out. I retreated back to medium.

Last night, I quickplayed a few more songs on hard, and found to my suprise that I was owning them. During "Go Your Own Way," I couldn't believe my limbs were actually keeping up. I felt like they were doing all the work on their own, with my brain acting as a spectator. I earned five stars. That was also the case on a few other of the easier songs. Flush with confidence, I returned to my saved challenge game and restarted "Give It Away."

Well, this time I only failed after about 40%. There is a fundamental conceptual shift from the beats I've been playing succesfully, and the beat in "Give It Away." It's as hard as moving to hard mode on the guitar for the first time, when you have to learn to shift your hand up and down the neck. Instead of being iteratively more difficult, it requires you to learn an all-new mechanic. That's where the challenge and the fun both come from.

I don't know the terminology -- maybe Dan Bruno can help with this -- but the problem I'm having is that "Give It Away" starts to insert the bass drum in between hits on the pads. Other songs have done this, too, even on medium difficulty, but they haven't tripped me up in the same way. Usually that's because you at least ride one of the pads the whole way. Here, you ride the blue pad most of the time, except for one hit where the bass pedal takes its place. You sandwich that kick between two other beats: the blue pad by itself, and then the blue and red pad simultaneously. I can't make this work in my head. Playing at 80% speed in practice mode helped a little.

No doubt I'll get past this, sooner than later. That's how these games usually go. By Monday I'll probably be talking about how I ripped through several tiers of songs on hard mode. At least, that's the plan. But this is the difference between difficulty that entices and difficulty that discourages. Rock Band 2 gives you endless avenues for improvement, while dangling the carrot right in front of you. When I say that Mega Man 9 demonstrates, more than anything, how much games have changed, this contrast is what I'm talking about. Games today are your friends.