RSSActivision adds Line6 amp modeling to Guitar Hero: World Tour
By Tim Conneally | Published July 11, 2008, 5:44 PM
The next in Activision's popular line of rhythm-based music simulation games is scheduled for release in Fall 2008, and is single-handedly changing the style of the game with the addition of many new features.
World Tour will follow in the footsteps of Rock Band, offering a drum kit and vocal microphone in addition to the expected guitar controllers, which have reportedly also been upgraded. An eight-player "Battle of the Bands" mode, extended character customization, and online career mode, as well as "the largest on-disc set list in a music-rhythm game to date," have been added. A complete set list, however, has not yet been released.
But one of the most notable additions is also by far the biggest departure from the Guitar Hero norm: GH: World Tour adds the Music Studio music creator which will allow gamers to create music from scratch using just their controllers. An announcement from Activision came today saying that Music Studio will now feature the full Line6 POD feature set.
Line6 is well-known among musicians for having created the immensely successful POD digital guitar amplifier modeling unit. The first of its kind, the POD took line-level guitar signals and digitally reproduced the sound of various classic amplifier and speaker combinations. Now a technology over ten years old, the same effects can be created through software plug-ins.
This adds a legitimate musical creation tool to what has until now been only a game.
Rock Band improved upon what the Guitar Hero series had created, and now Guitar Hero is improving upon Rock Band and taking it even further. Fans of the series, however, are already complaining that it's too bloated. The latest version is expected to have a $180 price tag, which will soon be over half the cost of a new Xbox 360 Pro. Though the new controllers promise to be high quality, those Guitar Hero fans who also purchased Rock Band will have to clutter up their closets with even more peripherals.
in a way it's good this happens. The more people get hooked with guitar hero, the less mediocre people, trying to put bands together out there, the better it goes for good bands.
Although if people can start making music thru guitar hero, the next step is to be able to sell it thru the devices online stores (xbox and ps3), copyright it and whatever else must be done. So this could be the beginning of a whole new market for music.
and another note...just because a couple of illiterate morons don't know how to use sequencers and they make it big anyway, does not mean that it isn't an art that requires skill. To think that is just retarded and an obsolete mindset. It's called "evolution" because things change, otherwise it would be called "Same".
Things change...deal with it.
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|I think because it is so hard to make money these days on music. Bands are just not willing to take big risks and when they get a record contract they start making music that blends in with whats popular. thus this is what file sharing and the internet is doing to the world of music today. too many people downloading music and not going out to the record stores and buying CD's. Heck just a couple months ago the only music store in my area closed down so now if i ever want to buy a CD i have to buy it off the internet. and don't get me started on buying off services like itunes with all there DRM'ed music
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|I just wonder how many potential REAL musicians are being lost due to spending time with these games?
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|We've already lost plenty since the rise in popularity of sequencers, which require very little musical expertise. That's in part why we are today subjected to possibly the worst (non)musical artform of all time, Rap.
Recipe. Take one sequencing program, add an illiterate fool to write really bad poetry, and then utter it over an inappropriate beat which he or she stole from a real musician's record.
Hype millions of morons to think they need to purchase this garbage, by making it appear cool to carry guns, abuse people and spew m*******er every second word. Result. Hell on Earth.
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|Zero. Do you really think people with a genuine desire to create music are finding rhythm games to be "good enough" and not pursuing music?
I suppose we could also ask how many city planners have been lost to SimCity, but that would seem silly, wouldn't it?
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|Hmm.. That explains the brownouts.
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|"I suppose we could also ask how many city planners have been lost to SimCity..."
I gotta admit... that was good. :)
Then again, SimCity actually offers some degree of value with regards to strategy and planning which could potentially be applied in the "real world". The GH series offers extremely little towards any tangible training that can be transferred to a real guitar (aside from a better developed sense of timing and rhythm). If anything, I would imagine Rock Band to hold a significantly higher degree of value to drummers.
That aside, I love the crap out of the entire franchise, and I play them all the time... and I'm a guitar player.
*shrug* :)
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|well i don't know if it will get milked as much as the Mario bros. LOL
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|The whole "guitar hero/rock band" game genres are huge successes and as such will result in the most milked game of all time, surpassing the sims or anything else. Since they have hundreds of thousands of songs to go by, they can just release these types of games without a problem for the next 10-15 years
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