o.0! RB all the way. I do like GH 3 and will get it for my Xbox 360. Pinball Wizard ?!?!?! *drools*

Rather than make an all new topic, I'm going to bump this with my comparison of the two now that they're both out.

**Any instrument-related sections are going by my own Rock Band 2 stuff and what others have posted on multiple forums about the GHWT stuff. I only own Rock Band 2 instruments

Rock Band 2
*Great out-of-the-box instruments. The drums are much more quiet, stable and responsive than the old ones. The guitar keeps the RB1 Strat feel, but is more solid in strums, which gives classic Guitar Hero gamers what they need.
*Pretty dang good setlist. Really diverse, and I found that there were a handful of commercial songs I'd either forgotten about or learned to love. The bonus tunes for the most part are decent.
*DLC, DLC, DLC. If it's all about the sheer number of songs to choose from, you absolutely need to pick Rock Band 2 no matter what. Weekly DLC (at least 3 songs per week), 20 free songs, plus the ability to export all but 3 of the Rock Band 1 tracks. Yeah, it's awesome.
*Simple, easy to use character creator. Not very powerful, but then again I'm not a guy who wants to spend 5 hours getting their character "just right"
*Wii users: it's still unknown whether GH3/GHWT instruments will work on Rock Band 2, or whether they will work in GHWT. It's also not known whether you'll get all the features of next-gen systems, and whether the DLC will be easy to use.

Guitar Hero: World Tour
*Crappy out-of-the-box instruments. The guitar has been reported (multiple times at scorehero.com) to have fret buttons or parts of the touch pad die completely, and that the strum bar is really squeaky. Having played the guitar in a kiosk, the slider/touch pad feels gimmicky and useless. The drums have been reported to have velocity-sensitive issues, dropping notes. The cool thing is that the drums are programmable, which means that Activision sends you a Windows-based programming kit, which is simple and easy to use. Smart.
*Real, live people. Billy Corgan, Jimi Hendrix, Ted Nugent, Ozzy, etc are playable. Cool idea, but the Rock Band fanboy in me feels like they did it solely as a way to 1-up RB and not to enhance gameplay.
*All previous Guitar Hero characters return, which is awesome because I missed Pandora, Eddie Knox and Clive Winston. There's a few new faces in there as well.
*Crazy in-depth character creator. Definitely more robust than Rock Band's. Cool if you like that sort of thing, but in the end I couldn't spend more than 10 minutes in it, like I noted above.
*Guitar/Instrument creator. Another cool idea, especially when everyone wants customization these days. Still, I miss my Fender from Rock Band 2.
*The setlist. I wouldn't call it better or worse than RB2, it's just different. I still found right around the same amount of songs I liked and hated.
*Wii users have the Mii feature. Don't have a Wii, so I don't really care, but supposedly you play the instruments with your Mii characters.
*The Wii version is 100% known to actually allow all features that other consoles do. The only 100% known thing about RB2 is that it will have DLC. It's unknown whether they'll be a character creator, etc.
*I HATE GHWT's advertising. It's annoying, and it's everywhere. A KFC Guitar Hero meal? 1-Come On! A Meal?? and 2-It's huge, meaning "Here fatty McFatpants, eat this and then sit on your butt and play our guitar!" (I can say that cuz I'm still kindof a big guy) That and the whole re-use of the Risky Business-esque commercial, which has been beat to death in 1000 other commercials. --Plus they already used it for Guitar Hero 3!
*Song creator is awful. It's convoluted, and the end result doesn't sound anything like what the real world counterpart would sound like (and I've been playing guitar for 15 years). Sounds like a crappy ringtone in the end.
*Just overall not as polished. Neversoft has a history of doing this with the Tony Hawk games due to being forced to churn one out each year. Looks like GHWT suffered from the same fate.


Short end of it: If you have a Wii you'll probably want to buy Guitar Hero World Tour + Instruments. 360/PS3 users buy Rock Band 2 + Instruments (you can always pick up the GHWT later and use your RB instruments)

So I decided to give GHWT another shot today. A friend rented it, so the three of us set out playing the three instruments. It was not pretty.

The song charts - were awful. If you play an instrument you'll feel like someone is dragging you nails across a chalkboard. If you don't you'll still hate the charts. Tons of extra notes where there shouldn't be, missing notes where there's a note in the song -- yeah it sucks. Did they get some 5 year old to chart them? We played ~40 of the songs. Of those only about 5 were 'good' charts. It really felt like they just grabbed random charts from scorehero.com and put them in-game - not good ones either. Just random ones.

The graphics - are NOT impressive. Eddie Knox, Johnny Napalm and others look terrible, and there's just something about the lighting and texturing of the stages that just felt very "PS2". On the flipside, Ozzy and Jimi Hendrix looks awesome.

Rock Band instrument support - is mediocre at best. The drums are the big culprit here, doing a crappy job of making 5 pads work like 4. I can deal with that though, as you're still able to play it with your RB drums, which is cool.

Playability - is worse than everything else. We played quite a few of the cross-game tracks first in GHWT then in RB. Even with the note charts being different we found a lot of issues with dropping/missing notes in GHWT, where similar runs in RB went smoothly.


Seriously, I was originally thinking that Wii users should get this, but after ~5 hours of playing the game on multiple instruments with friends (one of which doesn't play RB or GH much) we could not stand playing the game any longer. Don't bother getting the game. If you're getting it for the drums, get RB2, then get the cymbal addon for the drum kit.

I'm getting GHWT soon for the Wii, as I am not going to wait god knows how long until Rock Band 2 comes out over here. I played a full band game with some mates yesterday and had lots of fun with it.

It's your waste of money... err choice I guess. Honestly I couldn't stand playing the game as a musician myself. It was beyond terrible. It could have been so much more, but they just didn't follow thru with it.

Tean I like alot of your points and alot are very true. I was one of the lucky ones (wii) where the guitar works fine except the whammy bar is already drupping. Drums are like 85% working. still have to fine tune it. Mic, is well, a mic.

I can't say which setlist is better too. Both cater to different rockers. RB2 I feel is more balanced than GHWT. GHWT is like GH3, more of the same kind of rock, while like the first RB, RB2 has more color in it.

DLC. well of course RB hands down wins, but on 360/PS3. I still don't trust HMX with DLC on the wii and if we want to play the first we have to have the first disc and the songs on the 2 track packs won't be DLC and I want like 3 out of the 20 songs. But this is what happens when you have a system with a 512mb flash mem.

If I was in a store and some one wasn't sure which game to get, I'd tell them RB1/2. GHWT did a good 1st attempt, so they'll learn come next time. But there's like no point in arguing RB1/2 wins, especially on 360/PS3. I'm not a musican so I don't know the charts/system, but at times I have noticed things weren't right. Ex Today by Smashing Pumpkins. when it goes to the long notes (orange in GHWT) you have to strum a blue and hammer on to orange when you don't have to do that in real life and in RB2. So WTF.

Music studio. yyyyeeeeeaaaahhhh.....yeah...that's all i have to say.

If i didn't have a wii i'd have RB1/2. But since I have wii I got GHWT since it looked like the better candidate than RB. Also the fact that a majority of my friends have RB1/2, so to change things up i went with GHWT.

RB1/2 wins, but NeverActiVision did a good first attempt.

Moving_Target wrote:RB1/2 wins, but NeverActiVision did a good first attempt.

True. They did a good first run. The game is pretty solid, and if Rock Band didn't exist I'd say it'd get much better marks, but it just doesn't stack up. The thing that really kills it though are the horrid note charts. They added some really cool unique features like the open note for bass, but there's something about it just doesn't feel right. Hopefully GHWT2 will be better.

Great games both ways, but unfortunately it's just a must to compare GHWT to RB1/2, and when you do that it just doesn't come close to stacking up.

Theres no official release date for RB2 over here so I may just stick with World Tour for now, thanks for the input though and I agree with some of those points.

After playing Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour at a few friends' houses I decided to buy GHWT for Wii.

Out of the box the yellow cymbal wasn't working properly - It would drop many notes and fail to register frequently.

I filled out the MIDI cable request form and RedOctane shipped me a free MIDI cable a week later. I downloaded the Drum Tuning Software and upped the sensitivity on the Yellow Pad and haven't had any problems since then

The GHWT drums, although slightly more difficult, offer a much more realistic experience than those of Rock Band.

The GHWT guitar has performed excellently for me so far, although I still prefer the good old PS2 Cherry Red Gibson Controller best of all. I absolutely HATED the original Rock Band guitar, and have not had an opportunity to try the new one, although from what I've heard it is still difficult to tell when you have strummed (lack of the small click sound).

I prefer the vocals in Rock Band mostly because of the font, the one used in GHWT is difficult to read on my tv.

I like a huge variety of music, so I'm pretty happy with the set list of both games. GHWT's all master tracks are plentiful enough to keep me occupied for hours, and Rock Band has tons too.

As for DLC, I have purchased one song so far, "Rock and Roll Band" by Boston, and I was able to download it directly to my SD card. It worked great I have also downloaded a few custom GHTunes user created songs, such as "The Lost Woods Rock" and "Banjo Kazooie Theme" and had some fun with those. I'm looking forward to The Killers track pack coming out soon.

If you own a Wii, GHWT beats Rock Band 2 hands down. On other systems, I'd say it is a toss up. If you played Rock Band 1 you will probably prefer Rock Band 2, but if you were an old Guitar Hero II and III fan like me you'll enjoy GHWT.

If you have any problems with your drum kit, just request the free cable, tuning it fixes everything

Online is great, I've signed up for the Thanksgiving Tournament and placed 8th in Round 1. Hopefully I'll make it all the way to the end and win some $200 guitar pick ups :p

Lastly, add me, my Wii Friend Code is 3351 7340 0723

theITfactor wrote:If you own a Wii, GHWT beats Rock Band 2 hands down. On other systems, I'd say it is a toss up. If you played Rock Band 1 you will probably prefer Rock Band 2, but if you were an old Guitar Hero II and III fan like me you'll enjoy GHWT.

Rock Band > GHWT on the 360. I'll give you the Wii version, but having been an avid GH player since the release of GH1 I can easily say that if you were to throw these two up on my console GHWT would lose. And the thing is GHWT isn't a bad game, it's just horridly charted.

Speaking of terrible charts, has anyone played Weapon of Choice? God that's a terrible charting for both realistic and gameplay wise. green yellow to red. I have a terrible time playing it. I fail like all the time unless in band mode. But it's good song, and I want to play it, but i can't. Anyone else agree?

Heh, that's actually a great example of my point of the chart not matching the song. Lots of really weird notes. I'd never heard the song before, so I Youtube'd it and the first video I found had really quiet sound -- I was like "That looks fun!". Then I found one with sound and realized that the classic Neversoft mis/overcharting blunder strikes again.

On a semi-related note I've seen a few user-made customs from the song maker that looked fun. I wasn't overly impressed with the song maker, but I really do think they did a good job making it as powerful as possible while keeping the whole thing in the game. What they need to do (for either Rock Band or GHWT) is to make a PC-based editor so that you can import from tools you're familiar with, and actually import real audio. That way you can upload your own band's stuff. -- but anyways, I'm just curious if anyone found any fun customs on GHtunes.

Well on the Wii Mario Madness is well done. and the artist GHTunes is a master. He/She has a ton of great songs. Those are the ones i can remember. O and pokemon battle, cerulan and celedon city.