After suggesting Van Hemlock try Frets on Fire in the absence of frankly ludicrous quantities of plastic instrumentation for a console, I took another look at it myself. I’d had a bit of a play a year ago, but after getting Guitar Hero III for the Wii hadn’t particularly bothered, and it’s come on quite a lot since then. There’s a fork, Frets on Fire X, with all sorts of extra fun like optional Rock Band or Guitar Hero-type configurations and support for drums and scrolling lyrics, so after getting that going I had another tinker with pairing a Wiimote with the PC to use the Wii guitar, and that worked an awful lot better than before as well, some hunting around for native drivers for my bluetooth dongle eliminated the need for any extra software past GlovePIE to map Wiimote inputs to keys, and either the new drivers or new version of Frets on Fire picked up the inputs much more smoothly. Next stop, fiddling around with the drums to see if they work as well, then maybe multiple inputs, and if I ever get bored of the World Tour songlist I’ll have no shortage of other stuff to play through. Nifty!

Since picking this up yesterday, I’ve made a start on all four careers (guitar, bass, drums and vocals). The new guitar peripheral feels really good, I’ve dived straight into the Expert career (after making it to the final Expert tier of Guitar Hero 3 by beating Cult of Personality the day before picking up World Tour); I haven’t used the slide panel on the neck very much, but it gives quite a fun wah-wah effect on held notes, as well as being used for specific segments. Bass is pretty straightforward too, once you get used to the new open notes.

Song selection’s been a real mixed bag; World Tour moves away from the very linear tiers into slightly more free-form venues with (to start with) two or three songs before an encore, with some great stuff mixed in with songs I haven’t come across before, nothing awful so far, I’m sure the newer songs will grow on me. Starting out on the Easy setting on the drums, I’m slowly getting to grips with the new gameplay, generally doing fairly well, though odd rhythms in unfamiliar songs are tricky, I think working up the difficulty levels will offer the most challenge. Finally, I’ve even tried vocals on Easy, though only when nobody else is around to inflict my singing attempts on. The first two songs, About A Girl and The One I Love went pretty well (mostly due to very wide tolerances, I presume), but then the encore of You’re Gonna Say Yeah! came along, and while I’ve done fine sight reading guitar and drum parts, vocals really don’t work so well; I did pass, somehow, but I think I’m going to work through the set list on the other instruments to at least get vaguely familiar with the new songs before tackling the vocals again.

There’s a few niggles, like a lot of the text being quite small and hard to read even on a 37″ screen, but overall it’s a worthy full-band follow-up to GH3. Just downloading a couple of the free songs to test how downloadable content works out, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some rocking to do…

A few months back a Plastic Instrument Battle Royale was brewing, with Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Revolution all due out around the same time (in America, at least). Back then it looked like all-out war, with frostiness between Harmonix and Activision over instrument compatibility forcing a choice between one game or the other (after entirely discounting Rock Revolution) for all but the most die-hard of plastic instrument fans. For the Wii, the Rock Band prospects were particularly bleak; no instrument compatibility, no downloadable content, and no sign of even the first game in Europe let alone a release date for the sequel. I know the true battleground is the XBox 360, and with plummeting prices I could pick one up for even less than a Wii now (the 60Gb model, let alone the hard-drive-less Arcade), but, plastic instrument based games apart, there’s nothing I’d rather play on a 360 than a PC, so I’ll stick with the Wii.

By the time Wii Rock Band was actually released over here (September), Guitar Hero World Tour had a release date (November) and for a UK Wii owner, Guitar Hero World Tour vs Rock Band is a no-brainer, really, with World Tour on the Wii having comparable features to the 360 and PS3 versions including downloadable content (with the option to use SD cards). Order placed!

Good news, though, everyone! Harmonix and Activision have since been playing nicely, and the Instrument Compatibility Matrix now shows a refreshing amount of green, most importantly for me in the last week including Guitar Hero III guitars being compatible with Rock Band 2 on the Wii (no word on the World Tour peripherals, but as the guitar uses the Wiimote as well it would seem likely, and if not never mind, least I can use the GHIII guitar). Wii Rock Band 2 will also support downloadable content, again via SD cards if needed, so once that actually makes it over here I’ll grab that as well, as it has a rather excellent song list. Maybe it’s not quite the Final Rock Battle after all, but a new era in cross-compatible fake plastic rock for all.

Warhammer is all very well for violence, conflict, life-or-death struggle and light raffia work, but sometimes you just want to sit back, have a nice cup of tea and KICK OUT THE JAMS, PERSON WHO ENGAGES IN INAPPROPRIATE MATRIARCHAL RELATIONS!

[This post has been classified as ’12’ by the BBFC for mild satirical references to the edited versions of songs in Guitar Hero games]

Though some of you foreign types have been Rocking in a Band since somewhere around the early 14th century (using game-time, “last year” if you prefer conventional chronology), and are even now Rocking in a Band 2 if you’re of the XBoxier persuasion, the Wii version of the first Rock Band has only just come out here in the UK. Bollocks to that, if you’ll forgive my Sex Pistols, but salvation is to hand with Guitar Hero World Tour only a couple of months away, and they’ve just released the full song list. Plenty of lovely rock there, including a re-recording of the the titular MC5 classic, just leaving the ever so slightly Herculean task of persuading my wife that a plastic drum kit would be a lovely accessory in the living room…

Just to prove my own point I fired up Audiosurf for a quick five minutes last night, and wound up playing through most of the Solaris soundtrack, which produced some amazing looping tracks. Oh, and then the Ying Tong Song.

While on a music game kick, there’s been a whole bunch o’ plastic instrument type news in the last few weeks. Still no sign of a UK release date for the Wii version of Rock Band; I’ll keep an eye on reviews when it’s out in the US in a few weeks, see how it measures up to the other consoles, but I suspect I’ll give it a miss thanks to a slew of rivals out there. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is out at the end of June, so I’ve stuck an order in for that to get an immediate fix of plastic guitaring. I don’t know much Aerosmith past their singles, but the song list looks like there’ll be enough to keep me going for a while at least. If nothing else it means I shouldn’t be so tempted to do something rash like get the Nintendo DS release, Guitar Hero: On Tour, though watching the promo video had already altered my interest level from “hmm, possibly intriguing” to “FLEE! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The biggest news, though, is Guitar Hero IV, or Guitar Hero: Roman Numerals Are So Passée And Colons Are In So It’s Not Guitar Hero IV But “Guitar Hero: World Tour” Just To Sound A Lot Like “Guitar Hero: On Tour” So You Can Get Them Confused A Lot, to give its full title. World Tour, perhaps inevitably, brings drums and vocals to the Guitar Hero series, as well as a few other new features like the ability to create custom songs. With the Wii version of Rock Band being somewhat cut-down compared to the PS3 and 360 versions, notably lacking Downloadable Content, it remains to be seen how many World Tour features will make it to the Nintendo system, but there are encouraging noises about downloadable functionality for the Wii. Scheduled for an October release in the US, with a bit of luck we might see it in the UK before the end of the year if the Guitar Hero III release dates were anything to go by, though if Rock Band is any precedent then the mid-23rd century may be more likely. In the past couple of days, word is also emerging of Guitar Hero: Metallica for early 2009.

Not content with the possibility of a mere two plastic drum kits cluttering up your living room, Konami have announced Rock Revolution, though I haven’t seen much about that apart from the drum set. There are murmurings of Rock Band 2 for this Autumn as well, so October/November may see a Plastic Instrument Battle Royale on a scale not seen since the Bakelite Beatles vs Rolling Polyethylene Terephthalate Stones duels of the 60s.

Based on the current situation, it seems unlikely that many, if any, of the instruments will be compatible between games, which is a shame. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “to have one plastic guitar cluttering up the living room may be tolerated by an understanding wife, to have three plastic guitars, a bass or two, three drum sets and an assortment of USB mics is probably pushing it a bit”. We’ll have to see how UK pricing and release dates pan out, but it’s looking like interesting times in the world of pushing buttons and pretending to be a rock god.

I hit 800 “performances” in Guitar Hero 3 last night, if the guitarhero.com stats are accurate, which I think is pretty reasonable over four months (or perhaps more accurately “mental”, according to Mentat in IRC). As a result I’m getting a bit tried of the GH3 songs, but not to worry! Exciting plastic-instrument-related news about the European release of Rock Band (available in the US since the early 16th century) finally arrived!

The good news is Rock Band is coming to the UK, for a while it seemed like they were just going to flick V-signs across the Atlantic while rocking out over there. The bad, if not entirely surprising, news is the only confirmed date is for the XBox 360 version (May 23rd), with PlayStation 2 and 3 versions in “the summer”, and the Wii version “when the still sea conspires an armour and her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters”, according to spokesperson Geoff Madeupquotes.

On the plus side, rather than the naff plastic instruments in the US bundle, the UK will be getting titanium drum kits, solid silver guitars with inlaid emeralds and diamond microphones with strontium edging. Either that or we’re going to get stiffed on the price, with it being £130 for the instruments and £50 for the game, so £180 for the lot compared to the US bundle price of $170.

Hrm. I was already wavering over the Wii version, lacking DLC as it does. At £130 I doubt I’ll bother with the instruments; I would’ve picked up the game alone, just for another 50+ songs to guitar along to, but with Neversoft and Harmonix (or more likely Activision and EA) getting stroppy with each other it doesn’t look like a Wii Guitar Hero controller will work with Rock Band, so… bah.

To get a rock fix until Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is released, I’ll have another crack at getting the Wii guitar going with Frets on Fire. I sort-of more-or-less had it running, but the bluetooth stack seemed a bit flaky (least, that’s my excuse for only hitting half the notes), I’ll give it a bit more of a poke.