Guitar Hero 4 coming for PC

Overheal

About damn time. What takes these ****ers so long? I was this close to buying a console for the pure sake of it.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/966/966124p1.html

March 25, 2009 - AUSTIN, TEXAS – March 25, 2009 – Aspyr Media and Activision Publishing, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) have teamed once again to rock the computer gaming world with the announcement of Guitar Hero World Tour for Windows PC and Mac. Transforming music gaming by expanding Guitar Hero's signature guitar gameplay into a cooperative band experience, Guitar Hero World Tour for PC and Mac offers state-of-the-art wireless controllers to computer gamers for the first time, new online and offline gameplay modes and a Music Studio feature for composing and editing original rock and roll anthems. Guitar Hero World Tour is the most complete music game to-date with 86 on-disc tracks from music legends such as The Eagles, Van Halen, Metallica, Michael Jackson and The Doors and features in-game appearances by world famous artists such as Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Corgan and Travis Barker.

"Guitar Hero World Tour is the standard for music games on consoles and we can't wait to unleash this incredible experience on computer gamers," said Ted Staloch, Executive Vice President, Aspyr Media. "With full band play, support for the new wireless controllers, the ability to create their own music and an amazing array of customization options, Guitar Hero World Tour will be the definitive music game on PC and Mac. We are proud to once again be working with Activision to extend this powerful brand to an eager audience of gamers."

Guitar Hero World Tour delivers more ways to play than ever before. Virtual musicians can live out their rock and roll fantasies by playing either a single instrument in-game, or any combination of instruments within the game, in addition to the full band experience. Building on all of the online gameplay modes from Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Guitar Hero World Tour introduces Battle of the Bands mode, which allows eight players to join online and challenge each other band-to-band to determine who is the best of the best. In the Band modes, up to four players can jam together, online or offline, as they progress through the game. In single-player Career Mode, players can jam on any of the instruments in-game utilizing the controllers in branching venue progression enabling them to rock out in the order of their choice.

The game's innovative new Music Studio lets players express their musical creativity by giving them access to a full complement of tools to create digital music from scratch, utilizing all of the drum kit controller and guitar controllers, and then play their compositions in the game.

Guitar Hero World Tour for PC and Mac will be available summer 2009. The game is rated "T" for Teen by the ESRB.

It being mid august though, I wonder what summer 09 means to these people.

edit: Amazon lists Preorder Release as December 31.

Twilightning

Too bad World Tour sucks. Just get Rock Band 2.

Stev_o

PC getting drums?

Overheal

Twilightning wrote: »

Too bad World Tour sucks. Just get Rock Band 2.

Too bad only GHIII and Aerosmith are for PC.

Twilightning

Obviously you've never heard of Frets on Fire.

Overheal

have, but it doesnt feel the same.

grimm2005

strange, i thought this was already out. I've seen it on "certain websites" a good month or 2 ago.

Personally, after getting guitar hero 3 on pc (got an xbox about 6 months later) and then getting rock band 1&2 on 360 (havnt played world tour), its almost worth just getting a console for, especially with the low price of the xbox these days. Apart from the RB games being better than GH, theres so much DLC (which, if GH3 is anything to go by, won't be supported by the PC version of GHWT).

Twilightning

grimm2005 wrote: »

strange, i thought this was already out. I've seen it on "certain websites" a good month or 2 ago.

Personally, after getting guitar hero 3 on pc (got an xbox about 6 months later) and then getting rock band 1&2 on 360 (havnt played world tour), its almost worth just getting a console for, especially with the low price of the xbox these days. Apart from the RB games being better than GH, theres so much DLC (which, if GH3 is anything to go by, won't be supported by the PC version of GHWT).

That and GHIII suffered from performance issues (even on high-end machines), which is ridiculous for a rhythm based game. I can't imagine World Tour being any better.

cherryghost

Twilightning wrote: »

That and GHIII suffered from performance issues (even on high-end machines), which is ridiculous for a rhythm based games. I can't imagine World Tour being any better.

now that i dont understand. because i've seen it run on a nvidia 7300 LAPTOP card, and it looked silky smooth at low-mid with a 1.66ghz core 2.

Anywho i purchased GHIII a while back, and modded it to get all the Rock Bands song into it :cool:

grimm2005

cherryghost wrote: »

now that i dont understand. because i've seen it run on a nvidia 7300 LAPTOP card, and it looked silky smooth at low-mid with a 1.66ghz core 2.

Anywho i purchased GHIII a while back, and modded it to get all the Rock Bands song into it :cool:

I ran this off a 2ghz core2, 256mb geforce 7900gs, 2gb ram and found the game to be pretty sluggish also, to make it playable without any frame skipping the crowd had to be turned off entirely. There was also never any support for DLC despite a menu option being listed. Not a very good conversion imo and as twilightning said i wouldn't expect GHWT to be much better

Overheal

I wound up getting GH3 on pc and youre right about performance. It runs smooth most of the time and then the wrong camera angle happens and Pow - there goes your framerate. Still enjoyable. But what hurts the most is that lack of DLC despite the PC Version being built to accomodate it. Why did it fall through anyway?

Stev_o

Overheal wrote: »

I wound up getting GH3 on pc and youre right about performance. It runs smooth most of the time and then the wrong camera angle happens and Pow - there goes your framerate. Still enjoyable. But what hurts the most is that lack of DLC despite the PC Version being built to accomodate it. Why did it fall through anyway?

Dunno but most get by just adding custom songs which is fairly easy to do. Played the game for a few weeks and stopped, my eyes just couldn't take it, that weird effect where static objects move when you look at them never went away and became nauseating for me.

Overheal

so its not just me @_@

Stev_o

Overheal wrote: »

so its not just me @_@

I pity the fool who decides to do a hard drug and play it, they'd probably jump into the wall are something.

What's strange is that there is no warning for it at all in the game or cover.

Overheal

unforseen I guess. I have no idea why it happens. Something to do with the framerate while youre playing a song? Like staring at a black dot then looking away, sorta deal.

Anyway poor Red Octane - if they had enabled the Downloads, I probably would have paid for them. As it stands, I've got them all anyway. FoolS!

SeantheMan

Rock Band ftw !!

Beatles rock band in september !!

cherryghost

wouldnt be suprised if 10 rock band/guitar hero setups end up at midlans

Overheal

I dont like rockband. They screwed up the highway. wtf is up with the squares?

beyond that I dont understand what makes it different from GH. Even GH4 has the Drums and Mic. So Explain?

grimm2005

Well the original rock band came out a year before GH4 and was developed by the original developers (harmonix) of GH1+2 so is generally seen as the "true" sequel to GH2 and GH4 is a bit of a shameless rip off.
Also they don't release about 4 games every year, rather they just release loads of DLC (at least 3 - 5 songs every week) and it's all compatible with RB1 and RB2. They even added the ability to import RB1 songs to HDD to play in RB2, giving people a huge library of tracks to play in a single game.

Also, i havn't played GH4 apart from briefly but the interface is a lot more cramped and generally not as good and also if your playing a band game, if one person fails, everybody fails. In RB if one fails they can be saved by someone elses overdrive and everyone gets 3 lives before they can't be saved. Very useful feature and also theres a no fail mode for when everyone gets a bit drunk and uncoordinated
People seem to think the tracks are more realistic then GH where they are made harder for the sake of it

Twilightning

grimm2005 wrote: »

Well the original rock band came out a year before GH4 and was developed by the original developers (harmonix) of GH1+2 so is generally seen as the "true" sequel to GH2 and GH4 is a bit of a shameless rip off.
Also they don't release about 4 games every year, rather they just release loads of DLC (at least 3 - 5 songs every week) and it's all compatible with RB1 and RB2. They even added the ability to import RB1 songs to HDD to play in RB2, giving people a huge library of tracks to play in a single game.

Also, i havn't played GH4 apart from briefly but the interface is a lot more cramped and generally not as good and also if your playing a band game, if one person fails, everybody fails. In RB if one fails they can be saved by someone elses overdrive and everyone gets 3 lives before they can't be saved. Very useful feature and also theres a no fail mode for when everyone gets a bit drunk and uncoordinated
People seem to think the tracks are more realistic then GH where they are made harder for the sake of it

+1.

What he said. World Tour was just a blatant attempt at cashing in on Rock Band's success.

DLC is a big selling point. Rock Band got 12 Iron Maiden songs one week. What did World Tour release the same week? I think 3 songs from foreign bands nobody's ever heard of. Absolutely pales in comparison.

I played World Tour while I was on holiday and the UI is just utter crap, especially when you're doing drums. The bass notes just don't match up nicely with the rounded notes on the main fretboard, it's abysmal. That and you can't tell when somebody's about to fail either, and when one person does, everyone does, as was mentioned earlier. Being able to save somebody is a real help, especially in an online situation.

As was mentioned earlier too, the note charts are horrible too. This is taken from the reception section of World Tour on its Wikipedia page:

Critics did observe poor note charting, stating that some of the song charts "simply don't match the music" and that "you'll be asked to hit notes where there are none, or not hit notes that are there."

In short: Rock Band > World Tour (Or Guitar Hero in general)

SeantheMan

In fact....Rock Band is so much better than Guitar Hero : WT etc, that I gave my copy of GH :WT away for free to boardsie , as i had no use for it.

It basically got played the first 2 days.....Band on the run was cool, the rest was mediocre. Interface was horrible,

Rock Band...just love it, though in fairness I prefere the GH guitars to play with, which I use on RB, and the RB drums

Overheal

And yet I dont see Harmonix making the PC version /:|

However I did prefer GHI and II tracks. Of no mind on the interface. Except I know I ****ing hate the Squares

calex71

Rock band is also more accurate in terms of the hit boxes, you can miss notes my mile sin GH:WT and they'll still count. This is something i never noticed until id been playing rock band for a while and went back to GH.

The phantom notes added for the sake of difficulty are a joke, especially annoying if you know the song well before playing it. Here's a tip guitar hero ... pick harder songs if you want to make it harder!!!!!!!!!

Also i found the circles harder and more cluttered to read to me. It's a shame to see it has gotten so bad because if they fixed the issues to me anyway it would be enjoyable to play.

SeantheMan

There is one song if i remember correctly on GH:WT..on hard for the drums...where it is just the red not...for the whole song, no bass, just red.


Most boring song ever to play

grimm2005

Overheal wrote: »

And yet I dont see Harmonix making the PC version /:|

However I did prefer GHI and II tracks. Of no mind on the interface. Except I know I ****ing hate the Squares

I used to be pretty much of the same mind that everything was better on PC and was annoyed i couldnt play GH2 on PC, so was thrilled when they released GH3 on PC, which i bought straight away but i realised it just wasn't the same as playing on xbox. These sort of games just don't transfer so well over to PC.

It dosnt get more fun than gettin a load of mates and beers and playing with surround sound on a 40' telly

Also noticed there that this is the last week of DLC for GH4 before GH5 comes out so anyone who wants to get GH5 is stuck with a load of useless DLC not compatible with GH5

calex71

grimm2005 wrote: »

Also noticed there that this is the last week of DLC for GH4 before GH5 comes out so anyone who wants to get GH5 is stuck with a load of useless DLC not compatible with GH5

The world tour dlc is compatible with GH5 , shocking I know :eek:
Maybe they learned something from RB after all

grimm2005

calex71 wrote: »

The world tour dlc is compatible with GH5 , shocking I know :eek:
Maybe they learned something from RB after all

wow, seems like they'll let you import from GH4 and Smash Hits, which is something i guess, even if it is a year late (although I'm sure the DLC won't be backwards compatible with GH4)

They still have a lot of catching up to do on the DLC front aswell. Over 600 songs available for RB (not including disc songs, and thats as of july 2009)

Overheal

grimm2005 wrote: »

I used to be pretty much of the same mind that everything was better on PC and was annoyed i couldnt play GH2 on PC, so was thrilled when they released GH3 on PC, which i bought straight away but i realised it just wasn't the same as playing on xbox. These sort of games just don't transfer so well over to PC.

It dosnt get more fun than gettin a load of mates and beers and playing with surround sound on a 40' telly

Also noticed there that this is the last week of DLC for GH4 before GH5 comes out so anyone who wants to get GH5 is stuck with a load of useless DLC not compatible with GH5

long story short - getting back into consoles is not an expense I have planned.

Twilightning

Overheal wrote: »

long story short - getting back into consoles is not an expense I have planned.

If you have the console already, it'll be cheap enough.

Buy Rock Band 2, which is cheap enough if you look for the right deal. Then get Rock Band 1, import all the songs from it (which comes at a small fee, still better than paying for the whole game) and return it the next day, it's what I did.