Guitar Hero World Tour For The Win (in the fight against Rock Band)

So today started out like any other Irish boy's morning. Waking up at 12.30pm, I heard the weather before I saw it...

I made myself some lunch, having officially missed breakfast now. Over-roasted chicken goujons and grilled bacon, as part of my recent protein-rich diet. After that, I got into contact with Rory and Brian, where we eventually decided to book Guitar Hero: World Tour in squareyes for two hours.

When we arrived, my initial expectations weren't so high, considering the bashing everyone seems to be giving it lately. Added to the fact that squareyes don't yet have the official Guitar Hero drums yet, so we had to suffice with the Rock Band ones (which are still perfectly adequate for the job at hand).

Initial expectations = Erased from existence. As soon as I picked up the new guitar I knew it was going to be awesome. Since Activision's contract with Gibson had expired, many feared that the new in-house guitars would be worse. The fact of the matter is, they are so much better it's not even a debatable subject. The new whammy bar is the same length as the Rock Band one, but in the same position as the GH3 one and just as stiff. The strum bar is an improvement over the GH3 one, as they've decided to add the RB-esque "bump" to the tip of the 'bar to make your thumb slip less easily. The 'bar is the same stiffness as the GH3 one and has that trademark "click click" noise we all loved so much about the Guitar Hero guitars. The bridge position Star Power button is awesome, so natural. The buttons aren't slippery like the RB guitar. The touch pad will be great once I figure out how to use the damn thing!

In-game gameplay is just as functional. The fact that if one band member fails, the whole band fails is a bit of a bummer, but it's far harder to fail the GH:WT than in Rock Band, so it's not actually that much of a problem. I definitely don't like the pooled Star Power (Rory kept stealing my hard-earned power!), but I'll get over it. Naturally, the whole game has a more "badass" theme to it than the more glamorous Rock Band, but that was always the GH-way. I like the way there's more of an emphasis on snare/tom-tom layout than the RB layout of cymbals and high-hats. As Brian said, there tends to more of an emphasis on the right-hand side of the drums in GH:WT than in RB, mainly due to one of the toms being over there (compared to the crash cymbal in RB). Two cans of Rockstar/Monster each and two hours later we parted ways. Well actually, we got the same bus home so we parted ways after the bus dropped Brian and I in Newcastle. Poor Rory was left to fend for himself in the dark.

When I got home, I was in for a nice surprise. My uncle gave me an old acoustic guitar he didn't want, so now I have a little side project. The guitar is in reasonably good condition, but needs some new strings, some dusting-down, polishing and a truss-rod adjustment, which isn't going to be easy since there's a superglued crack along the base of the neck. Apparently it was played by some famous Irish musician by the name of Mick Moloney, by whom it accidentally fell off stage during a gig and the neck snapped, where it was picked up by said uncle.

I was feeling bored so I went up to visit James, Eoghan and Andrew (who doesn't want me to mention him in my blog *middle finger*).

And now I'm writing to my blog.