Review: Guitar Hero On Tour, Part Two

If you can stand the pain your hands are in for trying to play your DS like a fretboard the size of a small book, Guitar Hero On Tour is the closest you'll get to swinging a plastic axe on the go. The bigger issue than finding a painless grip, though, is the game's criminal pithiness. It's entirely possible to blaze through On Tour (playing on "hard" without repeats) in three, maybe four hours. Add another three or four for the guitar duels which repeat the song lists and you're still talking a ridiculously short game. Factor in the four-button limit (the home console versions have five) and it's just not challenging enough to keep you coming back for more.

Here's what you get:

- The Guitar Grip, stylus pick, two pages of stickers.

- 26 tracks, 20 exclusive to On Tour, six performed by cover bands.

- A single-player career mode plus two-player cooperative and competitive play modes.

- Six playable characters (two new, four from prior GH games) plus the usual assortment of clothing and instrument upgrades.

Now if you crank the difficulty up to "extreme," you're in for a challenge. In part because you'll have to perform hammer-ons and pull-offs at blistering velocities, but also because there's a whole-lotta-shakin-goin'-on. You're whopping the heck out of your DS with both hands, after all, making the screens juke and jive and frenetic passages that much more frenzied. You can compensate somewhat by tensing up your grip, but then you're exacerbating the wrist pain issue.

I'm aware the DS has a much broader, younger, casual-oriented audience. I have to imagine a lot of DS owners have never played a Guitar Hero. For that group, On Tour captures most of the Guitar Hero experience and should be challenging as well as novel enough to rate buyable. Once you've worked out how all the finger tricks work and played through "easy" and "medium" modes there's always the first-timer thrill of going back and beating your own high scores, or daring finger-breakers like Lynyrd Skynyrd's "I Know a Little" on "expert" to take yourself down a peg or two. The DS competitive two-player mode can be reasonably entertaining, too, since it includes distractions that riff off the unique aspects of the DS, like forcing the other player to autograph his or her name, flipping the screens, or setting your opponent's guitar on fire (you have to blow vigorously into the DS's mic to put it out).

For GH vets, however, On Tour feels like a very clever toy with a much less shred-tastic set list. It reasonably novel for the first set or two, but after that, it starts to feel too easy, too short, a little too pop-centric, and much too ergonomically awkward for extended play. Especially after you've experienced the freedom to be had posing in front of a big screen and hammering away on a comparably lithe plastic electric.

Which isn't to say it couldn't be polished up and ergonomically improved in time for a sequel. If, perhaps more importantly, someone can get around the DS's cartridge constraints. IBM was making gigabyte disks the size of quarter back in 2001, after all.

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