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Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades Preview
Written by Chris Buffa on Tuesday, November 4, 2008
We attempt to impress women with our Guitar Hero DS skills and fail miserably. Oh well, at least it's a cool video game.
Although we're in a Call of Duty: World at War and a Resistance 2 coma, we found some time to rock out to Activision's Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades for DS. Like its predecessor, the game lets you strum to a plethora of songs using a special guitar peripheral, except developer Vicarious Visions made some tweaks to make it a more enjoyable experience. Our hands still cramp up in less than ten minutes, but the improved soundtrack encourages us to fight through the pain.
On Tour: Decades takes you through 40 years of rock and roll and features an excellent mix of songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s and today. This includes Journey's "Any Way You Want It", Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way", Queen's "We Are the Champions", Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Weezer's "Buddy Holly", among others. Even better, you can wirelessly transfer them and the ones from Guitar Hero On Tour if you have both copies of the game and two DS systems. Keep in mind, however, that it's a temporary download, and you'll lose the data once you move out of range.
Career is where we spent the majority of our time. Sal, our campaign manager, informed us that we were about to play at the Rock the Decades Festival. To start, we named our band and cursed Activision for only giving us eight characters to work with. Then we selected a character (we only had Midori and Clive Winston to choose from) and picked our guitar from a short list that includes the Blue Fog Pompador, Classic Mythology and the Riff Maker; playing Career unlocks new guitars. We also messed around with new outfits to see how our rock star looked in different threads; like guitars, you'll unlock new clothes the more you play.
In typical Guitar Hero DS fashion, you play at different venues, the goal to complete five songs so you can move onto another location and five more songs. Vicarious Visions breaks venues up by decade and you begin with the 90s, followed by the 80s. You also have four difficulties to choose from (easy, medium, hard or expert) and the ability to play Lead and Bass/Rhythm Guitar. Finally, you have the option of changing difficulty during the campaign, a feature its predecessor lacks.
For the most part, the game plays similar to its prequel, with you strumming the touch screen and pressing the green, red, yellow and blue fret buttons as similarly colored notes stream down the DS' top screen. In addition, you can access Star Power by yelling into the system's microphone or tapping the microphone on the touch screen.
Although it's fun, we still had trouble playing for more than 30 minutes, as our hands cramped trying to hit all those buttons. The bundled peripheral is the same as the last one, so if you struggled to enjoy its predecessor, On Tour: Decades will likely be just as frustrating.
However, the soundtrack makes this a much better game, and the always fun Duel multiplayer mode should make it a huge holiday hit. Be sure to check out our star powered review the week of November 17th.
