When I first got Guitar Hero World Tour I mostly played the drums for their novelty, working through the career on Easy and Medium difficulty. After switching to guitar and bass for a while (and occasionally vocals, much to the consternation of any animals (and indeed humans) in the vicinity) I’ve gone back to the drums, stepping up to Hard difficulty. The biggest difference between Medium and Hard seems to be the amount of bass drum, or, in plastic instrument terms, pressing of a pedal that broadly equates to what might be a bass drum in a proper drum set. On Medium there’s not too much of it, and for the most part bass hits coincide with notes (beats? hits?) where you also hit one of the pad-things with a stick-thing in your hand-thing (you might, if paying very close attention, have noticed I’m a bit hazy on the correct terminology). I can cope with that. As the difficulty increases so does the number of bass hits, which leads to my first problem of my foot cramping up in protest. This might have something to do with my seating arrangements; I can’t recall going to see a band where the drummer is reclining on a sofa to play, it’s possibly not an optimal pedal-pressing position. Or maybe my foot-tapping muscles are just hopelessly out of shape, perhaps I should bring the pedal along to work for a rigorous work-out each day. The other problem I have is devious music-making swine who start putting bass hits on their own in between other hit-pad-thing-with-stick-thing hits, causing my brain to go “yellow, yellow and purple, yellow and red, yellow, AOOOGAH! AOOOOGAH! JUST PURPLE! You’re supposed to do something with a foot but I’m not sure exactly what HIT ALL THE DRUMS, HIT ALL THE DRUMS, GET THE CYMBALS AS WELL, NOOOOOOO!” Somehow this isn’t terribly effective, but depending on the beat I can usually either just about get to grips with it, or take the slightly more cunning approach of ignoring awkward bass hits entirely. Not great for streak scores, but it gets through the song.

So I’m just about coping with the bass pedal in the early-to-middle parts of the Hard drum career and feeling moderately pleased with myself when I noticed someone had posted a video from the forthcoming Guitar Hero: Metallica. The game that will let you use a second bass pedal in a new “Expert Plus” difficulty for drums. A video of Slayer’s War Ensemble, on Expert Plus difficulty.

Crikey.