New Guitar Hero Drumset Showcased

Kotaku is just one of many to have captured a recent showcase of Guitar Hero World Tour by Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick. They have a nice video highlighting gameplay on the fancy new drumset. Looks like Guitar Hero is really turning up the heat in the ongoing war with Rock Band for dominance.

Comments

Drumming...

[Notquitecajun]

The Rock Band drumming on "expert" probably has the MOST skill required of any of the instruments. The REALLY hard levels require you to be an actual decent drummer to play the thing.

Re:Drumming...

[Tenebrousedge]

The rock band drum set requires you to have good coordination and rhythm, which are qualities that will make you a good drummer. The motions used in Rock Band are pretty similar to what actual drumming is like, but not equivalent. Take someone who has only played Rock Band and sit them in front of a real drum set, and they would probably require a significant amount of practice before being able to e.g. keep good time without a soundtrack, show up on time to rehearsal, or have a girlfriend. You know, like real drummers do...

Re:Drumming...

[1729]

I'm an experienced drummer, and I was completely baffled by Rock Band's drum kit. None of the patterns felt like "real" drumming (both in terms of the kit layout and the rhythmic feel), and the small sticks and plastic pads made it difficult to use proper sticking techniques. I didn't try expert mode, though, which some people claim is actually easier for real drummers.

Re:Drumming...

[joggle]

You should consider buying a real pedal modified for the game (see here for more info). You can also try the sock mod to make the drums more sensitive.

Re:Drumming...

[Chris Burke]

The Rock Band drumming on "expert" probably has the MOST skill required of any of the instruments.

Ah, so it's the opposite of real life.

Now now, drummers, don't get mad, I have a lot of respect for you. My father is a drummer after all, and I wouldn't even be here if drummers were capable of following the "rhythm method".

Re:Drumming...

[mrbcs]

Excuse me ... Bull Farking Shit. It amazes me that people buy this thing. I am a drummer with 20 years experience and it's exactly the same motions and training. How do you think drummers learn timing? umm, by playing to albums, cd's etc. You could move that one pad and you'd have an electronic drum set.

I would bet that you could take one of these drummers, sit them in front of a kit, and they could actually PLAY a song. Not like that joke of a guitar thing. My God! I have no talent or patience to learn an instrument so I'll spend close to the same amount of money to basically masterbate in front of a tv.

In my not so humble opinion, this is the biggest joke I've ever seen. If you can play this "game" you can play drums. You can buy a decent begginer kit for under $500.

Re:Drumming...

[Beardo the Bearded]

It's not really masturbation.

It's Simon with a really intricate skin.

But really, who cares? If someone wants to play Red Steel instead of learning how to fence, that's their prerogative too. Surgeons don't get uppity about Trauma Centre, do they?

I've been playing Baritone for almost 20 years. I guarantee you that there's a community band out there who would like to have another percussionist join. Heck, we'd like to see someone whose interest in music has been kindled by the fun they had playing Rock Band or GH:WT.

Should I tell you that several of the people I'm in the band with get together and play RB? I'm a reasonably good singer, too - I spent 8 years in a Convert Choir and have nearly perfect pitch. (Thanks to a quirk in my physiology, my natural speaking voice is a perfect D.)

And for those who enjoy irony, I sing baritone. When I sing, I can't read treble clef. When I'm playing brass, I can't read bass clef.

Re:Drumming...

[Reapy]

Because guitar is hard as fuck. Before I eventually got rock band (play drums all the time now ) I've had zero musical training, and had just bought a guitar and was trying to teach myself via videos/books whatever. All I ended up being able to do is play a few chords and bore myself trying to learn scales. So after a few months I could finally comfortably get into chord positions, and kinda sort switch in a second or two (not fast enough to play a song correctly), I still couldn't play ANYTHING I wanted to play. Every time I tried to get tabs, people would all be like, oh this song is easy, and it did look easy, and then I tried to play it, and I just did not have the hand speed to keep the rhythm of the song.

So guitar hero in 3 minutes i'm "playing" a song that I like. Real guitar, a few months in I just put the thing down out of frustration. I kinda half want to play the guitar, but I don't really want to take the years it would take to do it right.

Now, someone trying to learn guitar hero III on expert, i can see, maybe they should seriously think about picking up a real guitar, but if someone just wants to have a good time playing on med/hard difficulty, theres no sense in learning the real thing unless you want to.

pretty worthless preview...

[psychicninja]

It doesn't even show Chad playing the drum pads. All that told us is that they're pressure sensitive... great. I would have like to have seen his reaction to playing it; not just his reaction to hearing about what it was.

Harmonix is screwed

[AKAImBatman]

Looks like Guitar Hero is really turning up the heat in the ongoing war with Rock Band for dominance.

Especially when it comes to the most popular console in this generation: The Wii.

Harmonix got a lot of bad press lately for declaring that the Wii version would have no online play, no band tour support, no custom characters, no DLC, no support for the GHIII guitar, and just about every other major feature removed or gimped.

Harmonix has tried to pass the blame on to every possible target, especially Nintendo and Activision. Yet Activision already had most of the features in GHIII that Harmonix removed from Rock Band. Now with GHIV, Activision is announcing every feature that Harmonix claimed was impossible to support on the Wii, AND they have the full band support. Which further makes Harmonix look like they're trying to gyp customers.

The truth is that Harmonix had a contracted developer do a cheap-o port of Rock Band to the PS2. Since the PS2 had the weakest hardware of the last generation, they replace the game visuals with FMV and hoped that no one would notice. (Thus the lack of character creator.) At some point, some Harmonix or MTV exec got the bright idea that doing a quicky port of the PS2 revision (which is completely inappropriate for a console of the Wii's caliber, regardless of its graphical capability in comparison to the 360/PS3), thus resulting in a ton of missing features. Especially things that didn't make sense on the PS2. (e.g. No networking meant no online play or DLC. And the more massive FMV wasn't a problem since no one could download new songs anyway.)

Honestly, I think Harmonix would do a lot better if they just owned up to their mistakes and worked to correct them in the future. Instead, they keep blaming Nintendo for all their problems. As a result, I've decided that Harmonix does not need my $170. I'll be saving it for GHIV.

but seriously Re:I'm actually

[Essron]

I would be happy to hate Travis from Blink 182 for you. Seriously.

But seriously, this interface has far more potential to work like a real instrument than the silly guitar doohickey. Could have a lot of value for training a real drummer without the noise and with fewer lessons.

Even more seriously, since it appears to track velocity, it probably has a midi output, which means someone will hack it to be a synth controller, which would be really cool and make me, a musician who loves to mock guitar hero, have to stop mocking guitar hero, if the hero is playing drums, thru a synth.

One final for serious: You could set a learning workstation like that up right now with midi drums, a sequencer and a giant screen but the cost and level of knowledge required make it untenable for a student, but I'm sure some wealthy folks have this set up so that they don't have to hear how bad of a drummer their spoiled kid is. Seriously.

High Speculative Wii Features?

[EXTomar]

The reason why features were stripped out of the Wii versions of both games is that the Wii itself doesn't support the features very well. How in the world is Activision going to support downloadable content on a system that only allows 512 MB of accessible space? 4 songs can add up to be 100 MB. Now they are saying they'll allow "Create A Song", downloadable content, dynamic customizable characters, "just like the other versions"? Where are they going to hold all of that on the Wii??

I don't think Activision or Harmonix had much choice of a choice but to strip these features out. So what has changed on the Wii where suddenly Harmonix is screwed and Activision can succeed? It still has the same storage restriction. It still has no common online framework. Nintendo's online store isn't geared to sell this type of DLC. I'm very dubious of Activision suddenly claiming they can do now do it for GH4.

ps. I don't know if anyone is blaming Nintendo/Wii for any of the problems but consider what happens to those faithful GH3 who bought 3 song packs at $6.25US. Compatibility goes beyond the stuff you plug into the console...

Re:High Speculative Wii Features?

[AKAImBatman]

4 songs can add up to be 100 MB.

4 songs for 100MB is not a problem. That's ~80 songs per 2GB SD Card. The problem is that the Rock Band FMV would be a lot more than 100mb/4 songs. That's the real reason why Harmonix thinks Nintendo "needs a hard drive". High-quality, FMV-based songs would chew through the available storage at an ungodly rate.

I don't think Activision or Harmonix had much choice of a choice but to strip these features out.

Activision didn't strip anything out. Online play exists in GHIII. Varied characters and costumes and purchases exist in GHIII. Even DLC is supposed to be arriving for GHIII. (Though I get the distinct impression that Activision is reneging on that particular promise in favor of making it a feature of GHIV. DLC was supposed to arrive as part of the "Pay to Play" branding that Nintendo released with WiiWare.)

So what has changed on the Wii where suddenly Harmonix is screwed and Activision can succeed?

Oh, I dunno. Activision already does everything that Harmonix says is impossible? Or am I just imagining that Nintendo WiFi support in GHIII? Harmonix can claim that the problem is that Rock Band is so much more complex than GHIII, but that excuse isn't going to fly with GHIV coming out. (Not that anyone bought it to begin with.)

Harmonix did a cheap port to the Wii. Worse yet, they expect everyone to pay PS3 and 360 prices for a PS2 game. Those are the facts. People are upset and are going to continue to be upset. Given that Harmonix shows no real signs of fessing up to their (rather stupid and transparent) attempts to pass blame onto Nintendo, they can expect that consumers will tell them to go screw themselves.

Re:Hero!

[Qetu]

http://xkcd.com/359/

Re:another drum set?

[hardburn]

I was thinking about that problem the other day. The Rock Band set is a normal USB HID device, and I wrote a program a while back to play sounds on a normal computer when the pads are hit (link for the interested). Presumably, the GH kit will also be a USB HID device, so if they're not compatible, then it should be possible to easily create an adapter using an AVR USB device that translates codes between the games. For that matter, it should be possible to do the same for guitars.

Re:Stupid

[Cornflake917]

Anyone who actually plays the drums can spot this as garbage from planets away. It isn't even set up like a real set Damn, I never would have guessed. Well, at least the guitars are still completely identical to real-life guitars.

Re:Stupid

[Atriqus]

Yeah, and while we're at it, everyone should stop playing GTA since it doesn't even come close to operating a gun, or a helicopter, or a.... what was that? Nintendo has a bowling game and you don't actually throw a 12 pound ball at your television?! Heresy I tell you!

Oh, and that was sarcasm. I thought it was obvious, but since you're so dense as to completely miss the fact that it's just a damn game, I thought I'd point it out for you...

You Welcome, BTW. :)