14 DAY TRIAL // In the battle of the music simulator sequels, Guitar Hero: World Tour, aka Guitar Hero IV, might be gaining a bit of advantage on its newly announced rival, Rock Band 2. The advantage stems from certain comments made by Alex Rigopulos, one of the co-founders of Harmonix, the company which initially created Guitar Hero and is now developing Rock Band.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Rigopulos stated quite clearly that "We really felt like we wanted to do it right. We're taking a radically different approach to that problem. It's something we wanted to take more time to do it right. It's actually something we're not focused on in Rock Band 2. We're really focused on other areas related to the music and bringing the community together".
In other words, you won't get the chance to create your own music track for all the instruments because Harmonix thinks that the main attraction of a music sim game is not making music, but playing the beautiful and amazing tracks that other people have created. Rock Band 2 will be constructed around better band integration and performance with the instruments.
Rigopulos stated that playing songs like "Give It Away" from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and "Ace of Spades" as performed by Motorhead will be more interesting to gamers than creating limited personal compositions, because playing important tracks from the history of rock music will offer a complete experience.
Guitar Hero: World Tour is scheduled to be released by the end of 2008 and will directly threaten the market share of Rock Band because it introduces multiple instruments for the first time in the history of the franchise. Guitar Hero is also scheduled to release a Nintendo DS version of the game and a Metallica themed standalone game based on the World Tour engine.