Screenshots :.
Guitar Hero: On Tour
DS
Matt
01-08-2008
"Strum strum"
"It doesn't look too bad, to be fair"
"Sadly, it really doesn't work too well."
Remember back when Guitar Hero: On Tour was announced for the DS and everyone wondered how the living funk it was going to work? Remember when the little trailer with the annoying kids was released showing the hand grip accessory and everyone still wondered how the living funk it was going to work? Yeah, funny story here – I have the game in my hands now (well, not literally now, obviously), and I still can’t quite fathom out how this was supposed to all work, mostly due to the fact that it really doesn’t.
It’s not for the want of trying, obviously. The general idea is that the game – which itself is pretty much as you’d expect a Guitar Hero game to be – comes packaged with a four-buttoned plastic hand grip that you plug into the DS’s Gameboy Advance slot. You then slide your hand under the strap, hold the console sideways and strum away at the touch screen whilst the coloured dots scroll along the other. It’s pretty much the only way that things were ever going to even come close to working, but it’s flawed from the very moment you actually try and hold the thing.
You see, the natural way a right handed chap is going to hold the DS here is with his left hand attached to the hand grip. Unfortunately this means that the natural pressure of your hand actually pushes the thing out of the Gameboy Advance slot, and once this happens it’s a matter of having to turn the console off and on again. Throughout my time with the game I managed to dislodge the thing mid-song at least a dozen times, until I eventually found a way of holding the DS so it minimised the risk of it happening.
This led to the other main problem: it bloody hurts. Having to extend your fingers around the button accessory is unnatural and restricting enough, but strumming away with your right is tricky due to the relative narrowness of the DS when it’s on its side. When you’re actually using the thing to play through the songs you end up jolting and shaking it a good bit and thus it makes the line of dots somewhat harder to see than you’d have wanted, whilst at the same time it just adds to the growing feeling that the bones in your wrist are on the verge of fracturing. Oh, and to activate star power you have to blow or shout into the microphone, which are two of the least convenient and/or most embarrassing things to do mid-song imaginable.
Whilst the above are obviously issues that adversely affect the game and contribute to the score it ended up getting, they aren’t completely game breaking and can be – awkwardly, admittedly - worked around. Once you do you’ll find things rather familiar if you’ve ever played a Guitar Hero game before, but if you’re one of the handful who haven’t then a little explanation is in order. Coloured dots float down vertically from the left screen and pass through a bar, at which point the player must press the corresponding button on the grip and strum by swishing the stylus across the touch screen. The more difficult the song or the difficulty level get then the more dots you have to deal with in quicker succession, and as you can probably imagine the hardest songs on the cartridge are rather insane.
Speaking of the songs, there are a total of 26 the things packed onto the cartridge covering a pretty broad spectrum of artists from Pat Benatar toBloc Party and… er, Maroon 5. Personal preference dictates that I don’t personally enjoy the majority of the soundtrack as it is trying to be down with the kids and not really featuring much in the way of 70s and 80s stuff, but the songs that are there are pretty well charted and – when listened to through headphones – pretty decent quality given the format they’re on.
As with its bigger brothers, On Tour offers a career mode to work your way through, with five tiers of five songs to riff through. There are the usual four difficulty levels, ranging from easy to expert, although as with previous games I’d still suggest starting to ply your trade on Medium as Easy is particularly unchallenging. There’s a nifty little tutorial loaded in there for anyone without any grounding at all in virtual rocking, and the DS’s wireless abilities allow 2-player co-op or competitive play, the latter of which features each player trying to send annoying distractions over to the other, such as having a fan ask the other player mid-riff for an autograph, which he must then scribble on the screen before continuing.
Still, when taken as a whole package, Guitar Hero: On Tour just doesn’t hit the mark. It might be a pretty decent attempt at a portable Guitar Hero game, but the issues it has undermine the whole show. The fact that the peripheral hand grip is so easy to dislodge and gives you all the hand cramps in the world makes it a game that’s insanely frustrating at the worst possible moments and impossible to play for sustained amounts of time. As a curiosity it will probably be the kind of thing you should at least give a go once, but unless you have no better option (i.e. any of the other ‘proper’ versions) then once may very well be enough.
It’s not for the want of trying, obviously. The general idea is that the game – which itself is pretty much as you’d expect a Guitar Hero game to be – comes packaged with a four-buttoned plastic hand grip that you plug into the DS’s Gameboy Advance slot. You then slide your hand under the strap, hold the console sideways and strum away at the touch screen whilst the coloured dots scroll along the other. It’s pretty much the only way that things were ever going to even come close to working, but it’s flawed from the very moment you actually try and hold the thing.
You see, the natural way a right handed chap is going to hold the DS here is with his left hand attached to the hand grip. Unfortunately this means that the natural pressure of your hand actually pushes the thing out of the Gameboy Advance slot, and once this happens it’s a matter of having to turn the console off and on again. Throughout my time with the game I managed to dislodge the thing mid-song at least a dozen times, until I eventually found a way of holding the DS so it minimised the risk of it happening.
This led to the other main problem: it bloody hurts. Having to extend your fingers around the button accessory is unnatural and restricting enough, but strumming away with your right is tricky due to the relative narrowness of the DS when it’s on its side. When you’re actually using the thing to play through the songs you end up jolting and shaking it a good bit and thus it makes the line of dots somewhat harder to see than you’d have wanted, whilst at the same time it just adds to the growing feeling that the bones in your wrist are on the verge of fracturing. Oh, and to activate star power you have to blow or shout into the microphone, which are two of the least convenient and/or most embarrassing things to do mid-song imaginable.
Whilst the above are obviously issues that adversely affect the game and contribute to the score it ended up getting, they aren’t completely game breaking and can be – awkwardly, admittedly - worked around. Once you do you’ll find things rather familiar if you’ve ever played a Guitar Hero game before, but if you’re one of the handful who haven’t then a little explanation is in order. Coloured dots float down vertically from the left screen and pass through a bar, at which point the player must press the corresponding button on the grip and strum by swishing the stylus across the touch screen. The more difficult the song or the difficulty level get then the more dots you have to deal with in quicker succession, and as you can probably imagine the hardest songs on the cartridge are rather insane.
Speaking of the songs, there are a total of 26 the things packed onto the cartridge covering a pretty broad spectrum of artists from Pat Benatar toBloc Party and… er, Maroon 5. Personal preference dictates that I don’t personally enjoy the majority of the soundtrack as it is trying to be down with the kids and not really featuring much in the way of 70s and 80s stuff, but the songs that are there are pretty well charted and – when listened to through headphones – pretty decent quality given the format they’re on.
As with its bigger brothers, On Tour offers a career mode to work your way through, with five tiers of five songs to riff through. There are the usual four difficulty levels, ranging from easy to expert, although as with previous games I’d still suggest starting to ply your trade on Medium as Easy is particularly unchallenging. There’s a nifty little tutorial loaded in there for anyone without any grounding at all in virtual rocking, and the DS’s wireless abilities allow 2-player co-op or competitive play, the latter of which features each player trying to send annoying distractions over to the other, such as having a fan ask the other player mid-riff for an autograph, which he must then scribble on the screen before continuing.
Still, when taken as a whole package, Guitar Hero: On Tour just doesn’t hit the mark. It might be a pretty decent attempt at a portable Guitar Hero game, but the issues it has undermine the whole show. The fact that the peripheral hand grip is so easy to dislodge and gives you all the hand cramps in the world makes it a game that’s insanely frustrating at the worst possible moments and impossible to play for sustained amounts of time. As a curiosity it will probably be the kind of thing you should at least give a go once, but unless you have no better option (i.e. any of the other ‘proper’ versions) then once may very well be enough.
5/10