Review: Guitar Hero On Tour, Part One

It's saying something when the worst you can yammer about a virtually intact mobile version of Guitar Hero is that you'll have to give your string-strummin' hand a breather every five songs or so. I've been playing Vicarious Visions' improbably-in-existence-at-all handheld rhythm game, and yes, it feels easier, yes it's less comfortable, yes it's way too short, and no it's definitely not as cool as swinging a plastic axe and pretending to shake a headful of sweaty hair-extensions. But what seemed utterly preposterous, nigh absurd to me a month ago, turns out to be pretty darned habit-forming.

On Tour costs $50 and comes with a plastic Guitar Grip that plugs into your DS Lite's Game Boy Advance slot (if you're gaming on an original DS, On Tour includes a simple plastic adapter). Sliding your left hand (or right -- there's a "lefty flip" mode) into the adjustable wrist strap, you curl your fingers around the grip, let them rest on the grip's four colored fret buttons, open the DS sideways so the top-bottom screens run left-right, and cradle it like a tiny book. Using a stylus shaped like a guitar pick with a slight tip on the tapered end, you strum a picture of a guitar on the right screen as colored markers scroll down the note highway. When you want to whammy, you rub the pick back and forth quickly on the screen, and when you want to trigger score-multiplying modifiers like "star power," you simply click a button, tap the Star Meter on the touchscreen, or with perilous social abandon (if you're playing in public, like I was when I tested this earlier) yell "Rock Out!" into the DS's mic.

Just like the actual plastic axe-picker with lots of goofy little DS perks, in other words. The only thing that's missing is the fifth button, and I'm guessing it wasn't including because the screen simply wasn't wide enough to squeeze in a fifth string without making it hard to see. The grip certainly seems like it could have fit a fifth button, though the one-size-fits-all strap can feel cramping if you have it "secure" like the manual suggests.

Secure to me means snug. Not tight, but touching all around. And that's where On Tour gets into trouble. First, the Guitar Grip itself sits a bit too loosely in the Game Boy Advance slot. By loose, I mean it tends to bend out slightly from the back of the DS (a good hard pull could easily wreck the slot for good) and has a tendency to want to push slightly out of the GBA slot as you play. It's not a serious problem, but I wish they could have come up with a means to secure it more rigidly somehow. Can't see how they could've, so I guess this is as good as it gets after a reported 20 prototypes to get things just right.

The other issue's that the guitar strap has to cinch up around the tendons just behind your knuckles. Tighten it even a little and you compromise your finger dexterity (I have medium length fine-boned piano-player's fingers, if that's any sort of reference point). I ended up pulling the strap off altogether, at which point everything felt just right. Even then, you'll want to rest your hand after a five-song set. My hands are in pretty good musical shape from daily Hanon drills (mind-numbingly repetitive piano exercises) and my left note-tapping hand was feeling the strain after about 20-30 minutes of sustained jamming.

A minor aside would be that the headphones jack is technically above the GBA slot, and can get tangled in your fingers if you don't find some means of securing it out of the way (if the strap doesn't bother you, you can accomplish this by tethering it to the strap's velcro clasp). The audio quality through the DS's speaker is predictably poor, while the headphones get you much closer to tune-age that sounds like a slightly lower than 128 kbps quality MP3.

That's the ergonomic skinny. I'd give Vicarious Visions an A+ for effort and maybe an A-minus/B-plus for execution. And I'll be back tomorrow with part two of the review covering the ins and outs of the gameplay itself, once I polish the whole thing off (I'm about halfway through the venues and duels playing on "hard" after only a couple hours).

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