Guitar Hero World Tour: Previewing the Game Series' Fourth Installment

At this point, nearly everybody, gamer or not, has heard of Guitar Hero. With three hit games, a number of cheap spin-offs and a sister competitor, Rock Band, it has surely taken the industry by storm. So how can they top all of that? That's what the world was wondering until we got hold of a juicy press release from Activision on May 22.

One of the big pieces of news to hit is certainly its expansion into the world of drums and vocals. After the mass success of Rock Band, which already included these features, it came as no surprise that Guitar Hero would make such a move. A company needs to make its money, though, which means (unfortunately for us gamers) that Rock Band's drum pad won't be compatible with Guitar HeroWorld Tour. Whereas Rock Band uses 4 drum pads and one bass pedal, Guitar Hero has one-upped them with 3 drum pads (red, blue and green), one bass pedal and two cymbal pads (yellow and orange).

Topping that announcement is the debut of the new "Music Studio" that allows you to create your own music and share it with the world. It wasn't specified if you create songs for scratch or are actually able to upload your own music and set beats to it, but either way, it's definitely a welcome addition to the rhythm-music genre.

Taking another cue from Rock Band and other popular music games, Guitar Hero World Tour will let you create and customize your own character, band and album, right down to a logo and album covers. With this band you can play both offline and online using any of the multiplayer options introduced in the previous Guitar Hero game, as well as a new "Battle of the Bands" play style for 8 players online.

On top of these, there were also a number of other morsels of information released:

- All controllers will be wireless for all next-gen systems

- First game in the Guitar Hero franchise to offer downloadable content to the Wii

- Will feature the largest song list in the entire rhythm-music genre.

- Has songs by bands such as Linkin Park, Sublime, The Eagles, Van Halen and more.

All of this sounds great, but what about the price? Guitar Hero World Tour will retail at $189.99 for all next-gen bundles (which are said to include the game, drum pad, guitar and microphone). The PS2 version is a bit cheaper, sitting at $179.99, while still being $10 more expensive than the Rock Band bundle. If you're just interested in the Guitar and game, you'll be set back $99.99, and just the game will go for the normal $49.99/$59.99 respectively. Guitar Hero World Tour goes on sale in Fall of 2008.