Guitar Hero World Tour: The Best, The Worst, and Everything in Between

In The Studio: Creating Music

This was another place Neversoft had an opportunity to make something really beyond anything else. It's a cool idea and you can definitely build songs with it. But it's tedious and you really need to care about building songs with it to enjoy this aspect of the game. There are a lot of options for types of sounds and it's actually pretty flexible as far as building and editing songs goes. It's no Pro Tools, but it's workable.

For us, there is a bit of a fatal flaw: lag. You know that stuff you calibrate out when setting up the game? Well, it's a little different when you are actually trying to play something. Here's the deal. The lag (in ms) you calibrate out is the time it takes between when the game generates the audio and visual cues for you to hit a note and when it actually receives the input that says you hit that note. That's why you calibrate by pressing a button when you hear something or see something: the game can figure out how much delay is between the song being played and shown and your senses.

In this above explanation, it is implicit that there /is/ delay between the gamer and the game. Thus, when generating music, the same is true. You play something and it takes whatever that delay time is for you to hear it or see it as something having been played. Some setups will be worse, but there will always be some delay. You just can't get around it.

What's the big deal? Well, it makes it tough to play, especially with a metronome. So imagine this. The metronome clicks, then you hear it, then you play, then you hear what you played. Instead of being close enough together so as not to matter, it's all spread apart. For me, when I tried playing a beat with the metronome and heard the beat later my brain wanted to adjust to play so that the beat I heard myself play was on beat with the metronome. Which meant playing before the click. Which I couldn't do because my brain wouldn't let me do because I knew when the click was going to happen and I had to play on the beat. But I couldn't ... so ... you get the idea.

My head essentially exploded into a feedback loop and I had to huddle in a corner and cry for a while till the frustration subsided.

Now, this is worse when using a receiver, but it is still there even when just using and HDMI cable straight into a TV with no effects enabled, though some people may notice it less and not really care. It's still very possible to do things with this feature, but this problem just adds to the tediousness of it. The ability to upload and download created songs is also really cool, and we hope that there are people out there with more patience than we have for making great music with GHWT.

But this feature isn't a reason to buy the game. If you were really excited about the studio, you might have the patience to use it, but it's not up to par this time around. For those who aren't already really into this idea, this isn't the game that will turn you on to creating your own music with a video game.