Rock Band 2 vs. Guitar Hero: World Tour
So I’ve been meaning to do a post like this ever since Guitar Hero: World Tour first came out. I, of course, have both of these games and play them all the time (well, when I’m not playing World of Warcraft, of course). I’ve loved Rock Band since before I even bought an Xbox 360, and I became addicted to Guitar Hero 3 when we first got our Wii, so when I heard that Activision was doing GH:WT, I was instantly excited. I love playing drums on Rock Band, so I couldn’t wait to try it out on GH:WT.
Of course, the two games, while similar, have many differences. Some are good; some are not so good. Not only are there differences between the two games but also between each game and their own predecessors. There are things that I personally think are improvements in both games and also some features in each game that make them each more fun. So let’s dive in! But one quick thing to note. I didn’t get any new hardware with these new games. Basically I use the Les Paul wireless guitar controller and the RB1 drum set, so I’m not able to talk much about the new guitar and drum controllers for each game.
User Interface
I had always liked the Rock Band 1 interface better than Guitar Hero 3. It was easy to find songs because you could sort them in different ways. The Guitar Hero 3 set list basically showed the same as you would see it in Career Mode. Now, I didn’t like that you couldn’t save your scores in Rock Band unless you played the songs in the Solo Tour. I had gotten used to just playing in Quick Play on GH3. But I did like how easy it was to see which songs you had gold starred in Rock Band.
The newer versions of each interface have both improvements and faults. The Rock Band 2 interface, again, is the hands down better interface. Perhaps it was necessary with the vast amount of music you could potentially have in your Rock Band library, but the ability to sort is once again there but improved, letting you quickly skip between the different sub sections of your sort. The song list is also very neatly presented, complete with cover art and song difficulties for each instrument as well as the band. The GH:WT interface is very clunky and the choice of font is poor. It’s really hard to read at times when you’re looking for a particular song. Again, no way to sort, but really it’s not that necessary considering the vastly smaller song list.
One thing I was disappointed with in RB2 is the fact that you can’t see how many stars you earned on the songs anymore. I guess with the way they change the gameplay to allow one character to play all instruments, that might have been a little more difficult, but I miss being able to quickly scan the song list to see which songs I hadn’t yet gold starred. That’s less of an issue with GH:WT considering the only gold stars you get are for 100% and even then I’m not sure if that is true for all instruments anymore. All in all, RB2 definitely has a better interface.
Gameplay (Single Player)
Guitar and Bass
Of course, I started out playing GH3, so when I first got Rock Band, I was always of the impression that the guitar parts were a bit more challenging in GH3 than they were in RB. The more songs that got released as downloadable content, though, the more that trend started to fade away. There are definitely some challenging songs on guitar in RB and RB2 now. Of course, I love the guitar solos in RB2. I wish they had included something like that in GH:WT but I guess that would have made the two games more similar than they wanted to be. Each game added a new feature to their guitar and bass gameplay. In RB2, they put in these weird double and triple note hammer ons and pull offs. To this day, I still have a hard time hitting those properly and find myself strumming most of them. It did seem to add a little complexity to the songs, though, which is always good.
On the GH:WT side, they put in the slider notes, to be used with the slider bar on the new GH controllers. Again, some added complexity but I’m not the biggest fan. First, I don’t have a GH:WT controller, so I’m having to do these notes with the frets anyway. I guess in that sense it mimics the solo buttons on the RB controller, which I was never really a fan of to begin with. I’ve heard that even with the GH controller, using the slider bar is more of a pain than it’s worth. Another feature they added to the guitar and bass gameplay is what they called “extended sustains.” Basically, those are held notes with a twist. You could be holding one note and then have to play other notes while continuing to hold the first one. It takes some getting used to but it really ups the complexity a lot. On the bass side, they added the open bass notes. Just like it sounds, the open notes are notes that are strummed without pressing any fret buttons. I really like those. Again, it takes getting used to, but if you like playing bass, this one thing gives it a whole new level of playability. They’re really not as easy as you might think.
Overall, I was hoping to see other features, like maybe bass solos. Again, I wish I could get things like extended sustains and open bass notes on RB2.
Drums
Right off the bat, I’ll tell you that I have absolutely no plans to get the GH:WT drum kit. I don’t care if I’m not playing the game the way the devs intended. I think it was a stupid idea to completely change the design of the drum controller. Sure, you have actual cymbals on the controller now without having to buy something to add onto the standard controller. But think of it like this. The RB controller has 4 pads and a bass pedal. The GH:WT has 5 “pads” and a bass pedal. On the surface, it seems like the drumming experience would be more realistic on the GH set. That is, until you consider that you can ONLY play cymbals on the yellow and orange pads on the GH set. That leaves you with a snare, two toms, and two cymbals. With the RB set, all pads can be used to play either a drum or a cymbal. So you’ve got essentially a snare, three toms, and three cymbals. Plus, with the RB2 set, you can connect the additional cymbals that are sold separately and play cymbal parts on the cymbals and tom parts on the pads.
Anyway, enough about the controllers. Gameplay wise, drums in GH:WT are pretty decent. The thing I’ve always loved about GH games is the flexibility you have with hitting notes. When I first started playing RB, I had a hard time adjusting to how little give I had when stringing notes together. Hammer ons were always harder for me to get at first. The same went with drums. If you were even a little bit off, you missed the note. On GH:WT, that flexibility can be felt when playing drums. It’s a lot easier to hit a string of 1/8th and 1/16th notes in GH:WT than it is in RB2, even with the same controller. That being said, however, because the charts in GH:WT were really created for their own set, playing charts with the RB controller can be awkward and boring at times. It felt like they didn’t really put a whole lot of effort into translating the charts for the 4 pad sets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they did take the time, because I didn’t have to go out and pay for another drum controller. But it still left me wanting a little. Another thing I dislike about drums in GH:WT is activating star power. Rather than utilizing fills with a green pad hit at the end to activate star power, you have to hit both cymbal pads at the same time. In my case, that’s hitting yellow and blue. While it doesn’t restrict you from having to wait for a fill to activate your star power, it’s a very awkward way to do it, and not really effective at all. I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to activate star power and it not only fail to activate but also cause me to break my streak because I hit a pad that wasn’t charted.
Drumming in RB hasn’t changed much from the first game. The one thing they added that I was pleasantly surprised by was the drum solo. When I first played We Got the Beat and got to the drum solo, I got all excited. Unfortunately, I haven’t really seen a lot of songs that have a drum solo charted, so while the prospect of a drum solo is awesome, it’s really underused. On a side note, while I don’t have a RB2 kit, I’ve seen videos of them with the cymbals attached, and apparently the brains of the controller is smart enough to know that cymbals are attached to the point where, if you are in practice mode, for example, and play the yellow cymbal pad and the yellow regular pad, it knows to play a hi-hat sound for the cymbal, and a tom sound for the pad. Really neat stuff.
Vocals
Honestly, I don’t do enough vocals to speak to it. I’m a horrible singer. I haven’t even tried vocals on GH:WT at all yet. Maybe one day I’ll try it out and add a comparison about that here.
Multiplayer
Because GH:WT features a full band now, they’re multiplayer capabilities have improved, although only slightly in my opinion. It is much easier to set up multiplayer play in GH:WT than it was in GH3. In fact, you basically could only do co-op play in Career Mode in GH3. You can actually now quickplay co-op, which is awesome. This also has the added bonus of allowing a single player to play bass in Quick Play if you wanted. In GH3, the only way to play the “bass” (sometimes it was actually rhythm guitar) without a buddy was to go into practice mode. Unfortunately, things spiral downward from there on the GH:WT multiplayer front.
First off, Star Power in multiplayer is strange. It’s shared between all players. There’s only one star power meter that increases collectively. To prevent one player from hogging all the star power, they made it only last a couple of seconds, which just makes it even more worthless. Never mind that shorter star power is dumb. It doesn’t solve the problem of one player hogging it all because they can just keep activating it until it runs out. Another thing that sucks is that once a player fails, the entire band fails. There is no option to save a failed band member by activating Overdrive like in RB. Once one fails, you all do. I’ve not done any competitive multiplayer play in GH:WT yet so I can’t speak to it.
In RB2, multiplayer is pretty much the same as it was before. One of the biggest changes is with how the World Tour works. In RB1, once you created a band for the Band World Tour, you were forced to play those instruments for the entire tour. In fact, once you created a character, that character was doomed to only play that instrument, forcing those that wanted to try everything out to create multiple characters. Now that one character can play all instruments, it makes band play a lot better.
One thing I should have noted earlier is that there isn’t a separate tour for solo and band anymore. Basically, right after you create your character, you create a band. You then do the tour as your band. So unlike in RB1, you don’t actually get to play through the setlist like you did in RB1. This is good and bad, in my opinion. It’s good because I never really got to do the Band World Tour all the way through because I could never get someone to do it with me. Also, not to toot my own horn, but I’m the only person in the house that can get through a vast majority of the songs on Expert, so even if someone did do Band World Tour with me, I could never get any of it done with Expert. It’d always be Medium at the highest. In RB2, I can complete the entire tour, including the Endless Setlist, all by myself. In addition to that, I can do it on any instrument in any difficulty, even changing in the middle of the tour. I actually finished the final set in the tour on bass after having played most of it in guitar, with some parts done on drums. The flexibility of one character for all instruments made that possible. The downside of this is that a lot of the gigs have multi song sets with randomly chosen songs. These include songs from your list of available DLC. There were times when I’d get the hardest DLC songs added to my setlist and was unable to pass it because of that, forcing me to lose fans, money, etc. On the other hand, there were also times were I’d end up playing the same song in three consecutive sets, so I guess that’s a toss up.
Downloadable Content
Not unexpectedly, RB2 is still the king of DLC. Harmonix has lived up to its word of having downloadable content available every week since launch, and the total number of songs available for the game is huge. I can say, though, that Activision is getting better with their DLC. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that I was able to play the new Metallica album in GH:WT. I had downloaded it for GH3 not expecting that I’d also be able to play all the other instruments for those songs. All Nightmare Long on Expert Drums is REALLY fun. Activision doesn’t seem to be coming out with new DLC every week, but I have been pleasantly surprised with some of the packs they have released since GH:WT went live. I just downloaded an Eagles song pack this morning. There was also a Nirvana song pack and a Jimi Hendrix song pack, along with a couple others. Hopefully the DLC available for GH:WT will improve over time, although that’s gonna mean more money out of my pocket every week.
Summary
Wow this turned out to be a long post. All in all, I’m enjoying both games a lot. Next to WoW, RB2 and GH:WT are like crack for me. I do have to say that I’ve been playing RB2 a lot more than GH:WT. I think that is mainly due to the fact that I just have a LOT more songs for RB2. I will throw GH:WT in on occassion, especially for songs that aren’t available for RB2. I would like to get a new drum controller to play with these games. Money permitting, an Ion Rocker would be awesome, but short of that, I’ve been considering getting one of those GoodWoods mod kits for my RB controller along with a bass pedal mod. The stock RB1 controller I have is beat to all hell and getting worse every day, so anything I can do to continue drumming will work for now. Anyway, that’s it for my very lengthy comparison of Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2!
