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Guitar Hero II Coming to 360
Eurogamer reports that Guitar Hero II is coming to 360 at some indeterminate time in the future. From the article: "'The tour will continue the rockin' gameplay Guitar Hero fans have come to enjoy, and will now include expanded Xbox 360 capabilities,' according to RedOctane president Kai Huang. Who sounds pretty hip. Well, I think that sells the console pretty much single-handedly. Sony: it's SO OVER. 'With Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 rock rhythm, lead, or bass guitar tracks with downloadable content and the new X-Plorer controller, designed specifically for the Xbox 360.' Woo! Yeah!" All I know is that the axe is killer.
Just like DDR, I laughed the first time I saw somebody playing Guitar Hero. But after sitting down and actually doing it ... you're instantly hooked. Wow.
So, all the next gen systems are going to have USB ports, right? And the PS2 has them as well. So, why are they making guitars that only work with one system? I would really love to just be able to pick up any two guitars and have a multiplayer game. I play Guitar Hero sometimes with friends, but we only have one controller. The other day I was in Best Buy and they had two controllers hooked up. That's probably the most fun I've had with a video game recently.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
It's a no brainer that the game would appear on the 360 especially since with the 360's early release, it already has a significant user base. Will will see it on the other two platforms? That's the real question. Both the PS3 and Wii will ship with built in memory, and downloadable content as well, so Red Octane has no excuse. Actually with Wii's lower price tag, and expected ample availability, it is actually poised to be the top seller this Christmas. That might be the next logical platform choice.
Since there are digital tuners galore that detect the pitch or volume of a signal, couldn't there be hacked an adaptor for a regular electric guitar for this game to some extent? It would be way cooler to play along with a real guitar versus that tiny plastic thing.
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Where does it say it's going to be a 360 exclusive?
Yeah its a Gibson Explorer, hence the controller name, X-Plorer
Oh, so that's what they meant when they said it would be coming out on the next gen consoles...
This guy's the limit!
How is this going to kill Sony? The controller is just a controller. Heck if you want some "killer axes" check out these:
Diamond plate/fender style neck/head
Full Size Eternia Strat Body replacement
And that is just a taste of what is out there...
Again how is this going to kill Sony? Sony will have GH2 BEFORE everyone else! If anything that means its a WIN for Sony. It is "nice" that the 360 will get it, but it probably won't happen for at least several months after Sony has had people playing it (you guys do know this comes out in a couple weeks don't you?).
As for the controller, well, all I can say is that it is nothing compaired to ones I have seen out there.
Oh, didn't you guys also know this will be out on the Wii as well? I think they are also looking for a PC version too, but it might not happen because most people would rather play this on a big screen with a decent sound system, and not many people have their PC connected to those things (although I do).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I've been a musician for years and many of my friends have. Is this game fun for non-musicians? I never got into DDR, but I'm not a dancer and don't particularly think dancing has the appeal pretending to be a rock star might have...
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
People have already been doing this to an extent. You can't just use the pickups in the real guitar because they output an analog signal. In theory, you "could" put together an external board which you plug the guitar into and have it decide what note you are hitting, but the problem is that in the game, there are only 5 frets. So you need to have 5 "steps" of frequency to figure out what notes you are hitting, but you also need to remember that you can hit multiple frets at the same time, so you would then need to have multiple external highpass/lowpass filters to discretely separate the signal into the 5 frequency bins to coorespond to the 5 different frets on the game controler. Now if you do this, how do you send the fignal for the wammy bar, since all the wammy bar does is lower or raise the frequency of the note? It would be impossible to calculate if the wammy was being used since you are simply dumping the analog out, splitting the different frequency ranges detected and putting digital on/off for each of those frequency ranges. Now this didn't even come close to talking about the harmonic frequencies that will also be generated when strumming a single string on a guitar (you will get multiple harmonics from each string, 1st order, 2nd order and sometimes even 3rd order are easily detectible).
So to make the long story short, no you can't just plug a regular guitar into a box and have it output guitar hero controller data. You CAN however, take a real guitar, pull out the pickups, remove the strings, cuts wholes for the frets in the neck, run a bunch of lines through the neck using the slot for the neck truss bar (or cut your own), put in your own wammy bar, tilt sensor, start/select buttons, and strum bar/mechanism, and wire it to a sony PS2 controller board (make sure you wire properly, the left analog directional key needs to be hard wires in the down position, and the up and down analog directional keys need to be wired to the strum bar's up/down motions, etc., etc.,)
There are lots of people who have taken cheap guitars and did this to them (or broken guitars, or even their normal guitar and swapped out the neck and electronics, this is easy to do on Fender Strats since the neck is bolt on and the electronics are all attached to the pickguard).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
If anything, I'd sooner expect to see a third party GH emulator (like Freetar Hero) get really popular. With how the PC games market is sliding, it probably wouldn't be worth it to Red Octane...
I've gotta say though, I can't wait for third party GH songs to come out.
I play guitar...though im no Hendrix or Van Halen, I worry that playing it would completely jack up my real guitar playing. I know it sounds silly, but do any actual guitar players play this? it looks like a lot of fun, I just dont want to end up developing bad playing habits due to letting the controller retrain me.
For me, it's big news. GH2 was going to be the last reason to keep my PS2 hooked up, after finishing with Okami and FFXII. However, with news that its also coming to the 360, it's buh-bye Sony consoles for a loooong time. (Well, until FFXIII comes out, although who knows, Squeenix might make it multiplatform by then)
Is it Slashdot newsworthy though? Not really. It probably should have just been lumped in with all the other X06 news.
-- jchenx
I love Guitar Hero and I will buy 2 the second it comes out. That said, I'm not sure about this. The downloadable content is nice, but I'm not sure if it would be enough to get me to re-buy the game (since it won't come out 'till next year at least and I'm not waiting that long).
If they offered me a way to transfer my profiles off my PS2 (and even better, to copy the tracks off Guitar Hero 1 and onto the 360's HD so you could play those also) I would plunk money down no question.
If they were going to release it on the same day as the PS2 version (which they won't) then I'd buy it then no question, including the 360 I would need to play it on.
But as a PS2 owner, I don't think it's compelling enough for me to wait to buy at all.
Maybe I could buy now, then get the 360 version and sell my PS2 version when that comes out...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
initially, you'll have a wire running from the controller to the console. After roughly 100 hours trying to master the same song and failing, a sharp yank on the cord enables the wireless feature.
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How can you support a company that sells its own DDR pads, yet sues a company making wireless controllers?
The PS2 has no online base, but the 360 certainly does. I'd love some online matches and the downloadable content makes it worth picking up a 360. So long as they actually come through with their promise of more downloadable tracks...
A whole generation of kids playing a video game instead of taking up the guitar.
Kinda like bragging about being a trackstar yet the only track you ever saw was Konami's Track n Field.
It's not like an entry level guitar and amp are that expensive.
Some of us have disabilities that prevent us from playing a real guitar but still permit (limited) console gameplay. That is why many of us play GH.
I, personally, was heartbroken last year when I discovered that my disability would prevent me from learning the guitar, a personal goal that I had just made months earlier. Guitar Hero, while nothing like the real thing, still gives me much enjoyment.
Harmonix, you are my true heroes.
P.S. The bit about "bragging about being a trackstar" reveals your true troll nature. I have never heard any GH player brag about being able to play a real guitar. Nice try, though.