Guitar Hero 5 Updated Hands-On
Importing songs from previous games and exploring an easier, deeper music studio are the focus of our latest look at Guitar Hero 5.
Generally speaking, the last piece of news leading up to the release of a high-profile rhythm game is the announcement of a complete songlist. So when Activision unveiled the last batch of songs from Guitar Hero 5 a couple of weeks ago, you'd be forgiven for thinking there wasn't much left to show in this latest installment of the seminal rhythm franchise. More to the point: You'd be forgiven, but you'd also be wrong. A few days ago, Activision held an event here in San Francisco to show off some of the big new features it has been keeping under wraps these past few months.
The big news of the night was the announcement of forward compatibility with previous Guitar Hero games. If you take a look at your copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour or the more recently released Smash Hits, you'll see an ID code printed on the back of the manual. You can take that code, enter it into the Guitar Hero 5 Import Songs menu, and download an unspecified number of songs from that game after paying what Activision calls a "nominal relicensing fee" (don't get too worked up; Rock Band 2 made users pay $5 to import songs from the original game). So far, only World Tour and Smash Hits are confirmed, but it looks like other games from the Guitar Hero library will probably be supported as well. This feature is said to work the same in Band Hero and Guitar Hero 5.
The compatibility also extends to downloadable content originally released for Guitar Hero: World Tour. Activision says 152 of the 158 World Tour DLC songs will be supported in Guitar Hero 5. What you'll need to do is download a free update, which adds on new features, such as band moments and vocal star power, that weren't present in World Tour. These songs will then be playable in all the major game modes in Guitar Hero 5, including Career mode and the new Party Play mode that we detailed in our last look at the game.
Another big focus for the evening was the unveiling of modifications made to the music studio that debuted in World Tour, which allows players to create their own songs for the first time in the series. It has been heavily revamped in a number of ways, starting with GH Mix 2.0. Neversoft wanted to take the original studio and make it more accessible from a usability and interface standpoint while adding even more depth for advanced users. In terms of making the system easier to use, all major functions (like record) have been mapped to the five colored fret buttons, which means there's a lot less scrolling around to highlight the option you want to select. You can also rewind and fast-forward through your song using the whammy bar, going slowly by pressing lightly or speeding through the song by holding it all the way down. Additionally, you can go into the new Pattern mode to swap around giant chunks of your song, moving entire verses, choruses, and bridges as easily as you would move colored blocks on the screen.
Neversoft has also devoted a lot of attention to making sure the instruments have a more authentic sound when you're recording songs. As an example, guitar work is now velocity sensitive, which means the studio can tell the difference between a light and heavy strum, reflecting that in your ability to record quiet, subdued parts versus louder parts. You can also add note expressions to guitar riffs, such as bends, slides, and vibrato. If you don't like a particular note, you can edit each specific note with a variety of parameters without rerecording that entire riff. Professional instrument samples have been added to every instrument as well, creating a much more realistic tone than the one offered in World Tour.
If GH Mix 2.0 is for advanced users, then GH Jam is for casual ones. In this mode, you can select a musical style, then jump right in and either play with a complete band made up of your friends or by yourself with automated instrument backing parts provided by the game. You can choose from 14 musical styles that influence the sound of the instruments, including punk, classic rock, heavy metal, and even NES-style chip tunes. You'll get a visualizer on the screen that matches your musical style as you play, including psychedelic colors for classic rock and 8-bit sprites for chip tunes.
Some of the other enhancements you'll find in the studio have to do with the way sharing songs work in GH Tunes. The system of ranking and finding songs other users have uploaded works very similarly to how it did in World Tour, but the big difference now is in how much you can share. The song time limit has been extended from three minutes to 10 minutes, while the maximum number of songs you can upload has gone from five to 50. If there's one bit of bad news, it's that you can't edit songs created in World Tour's music studio and use all the new effects and options, but certainly, the improvements look like they should outweigh the bad. You can start recordings songs on your own when Guitar Hero 5 arrives on September 1.
Dirt 2 Updated Hands-on
We got ourselves filthy battling to X-Games success, then jumped online for some multiplayer action.
When we first saw Dirt 2 properly before E3, we were impressed with how the gameplay was shaping up, new events on show, and the new engine present in all its muddy glory. Since then, we recently got a chance to sit down and play with a near-final build of the game that showed all the race types, how the single-player mode will work, and some multiplayer action.
The marquee events in the single-player tour are the three X-games-branded tournaments, which you open up at regular intervals after achieving a certain amount of success in the standard tour. There are three available--Europe, Asia, and America--which are of increasing difficulty. You can expect to be able to enter the European leg after an hour or so of gameplay.
The X-Games are mixed-discipline three-race events: a quarterfinal, a semifinal and a final. If you finish in the top four in the first two, you make it to the final where you get to go for a podium finish or even an X-Games gold medal. The three events are scattered across the continent in question; in Europe you have a Raid in Croatia--a mix of trucks and buggies charging across a point-to-point course; in Morocco, you have a good old-fashioned Rally; and in London, you have a Rally Cross final around one of the Battersea Power Station tracks.
The second X-games event, in Asia, has a very similar setup, with a Raid event followed by a Trailblazer race--similar to a Rally, but with other cars on the course, thanks to close but staggered starts--and another Rally Cross final. The setup to the stadium rally cross finals is a good one; when you're battling out for first place against some of the game's biggest names--Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, and Ken Block feature in Asia, for instance--it really is satisfying to be able to dump your rivals into a wall before taking gold.
These events with their tightly packed Rally Cross finales do act as great highlights in the career season; the finals themselves tend to be packed out with the game's more vocal characters you'll have raced against repeatedly getting to the X-Games and involve lots of radio chatter, as well as personal rivalries being played out on the track. While this is hardly a new feature for racing games, it is nice to see it being implemented well and giving you a sense of personal satisfaction for beating particular opponents.
Your reward for winning an X-Games event is a brand-new branded car and a shedload of both cash and experience points, edging you closer to the next level of events. Dirt 2's Career mode is driven by both and doesn't attempt to thread a story through it--all you need to pay attention to is the amount of money you have in the bank, what events you're eligible for, what your rivals think of you.
The game is looking better and better--as mentioned previously, the way that mud spatters up off the track is impressively realistic, with some of the messier tracks leaving your previously logo-covered car a uniform shade of brown by the end, especially if you happen to roll yourself through a puddle. We also got our first proper taste of the game's soundtrack when taking a look at the extended single-player campaign, and there's a good mix of upbeat pop from the likes of Ladyhawke to indie rock from Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand, as well as other more generic fare that fits well with the game's corporate extreme sports lifestyle atmosphere.
After cutting our teeth in the single-player races to drag ourselves up to and through the X-games, we got the chance to indulge in a spot of multiplayer racing, which turned out to be equally satisfying.
The multiplayer systems we got to test out involved making playlists for events and vehicle types and then racing them, logically enough. You can mix and match event types in a playlist at will and--this is where it gets silly--you can also mix and match vehicle types, throwing together combinations that you'd never see in the main Career mode. Racing down point-to-point gravel courses intended for hardcore rallying in speedy rally cross cars or racing lumbering trucks through courses packed with narrow hairpins can lead to much silliness. Thankfully, the game will tell you when you make choices that are out of line with the recommendations for the track in question, and you can lock your options so that you only get shown appropriate vehicles for any given track selection.
You can also lock options in so that racers are all in manual cars and can't tune their cars before the race. Normally, you can tweak everything from ride height to shift times and brake balance to speed things up as you go along.
Even standard point-to-point rallies work well in this mode, as you see the ghost of whomever you're racing against live on your screen. So you can see just how well you're doing without having to actually worry about your opponent's track position. The rough-and-tumble rally cross events are really good fun, with all the tracks we played on featuring lots of overtaking opportunities due to the width of many of the corners and the ability to find extra room on much of the course to nip around your opponents.
The one problem with multiplayer is the lack of options for AI opponents in rally cross or raid events. When you're system linking to get two-player local multiplayer, many of the courses can seem empty, and you may be used to bombing around the tracks in question with seven other racers. The lack of other local multiplayer is hardly a surprise in this day and age, but it's still a shame not to have the option for split-screen fun.
Dirt 2 is shaping up to build really well on the good work put down in opening up the Colin McRae franchise beyond the pure rallying world in the first Dirt game. While we still have yet to be convinced that the expansion of the "action sports lifestyle" isn't just an excuse to shoehorn in even more in-game advertising--hearing the event DJs talk about DC Shoes or catching sight of cans of branded energy drinks in your RV add nothing to the game--the gameplay currently looks to be both solid and very good fun indeed. Dirt 2 is unlikely to be a racing game to please the purists, but it could well be a whole hell of a lot of fun.
Superstar V8 racing
Have a good news for every gamer. Eurogamer has released a bunch new preview shot of most exciting racing game "Superstar V8" showing several cars on a bunch of a track. The shot included BMW,JAGUAR, CADDILAC & Many new model racing cars.
Officially licensed by the European Superstars Championship, the title will include all cars and tracks of the Italian series. That includes popular race cars like the Audi RS4, the BMW M5 and other V8-powered machinery that races on Italian tracks as well as at Portimao and Kyalami.
Superstar V8 will released for PC, Xbox 360 & PS3 in 2009. So wait for this exciting game.These are some screenshot.
UFC Undisputed 2009
While Brian was off shredding his skin against the other GameSpot editors in the interest of proving his office-wide MMA dominance, here in the Aussie office we decided to go for a more subtle approach.
Previously, we've tackled (pun intended) UFC Undisputed 2009's multiplayer gameplay, sized up the fighting controls, and taken the more than 80-character-strong rosters to the mat. Although the multiplayer stands out as a particular strong point, it's hard not to act on the appeal of the single-player Career cage fighting when there's no physical risks associated to you the player. We got our hands on an almost-finished build of the
The first thing you'll do when you decide you want to sign away your natural good looks and symmetrical facial-bone structure for a mouth guard and legions of roaring fans is to customise the way that you appear onscreen. UFC 2009 offers plenty of choice here, and you're able to either pick from a selection of premade character types or build one from the ground up. Our version included 13 different torso appearances, ranging from stomachs with chiselled washboard abs to the less-physically-defined beer gut. Although the templates are a good way to jump straight into the gameplay, if you want to take the time to play god and craft your perfect physical specimen, the customisation options are certainly available to you. There's even an entire subset of menus dedicated to naming your character, choosing a nickname that the announcers will call you by, your hometown, your fighting location, and your character's age. These are all purely cosmetic decisions, so making a character the maximum 45 years of age has no impact on your stamina or strength once you start doing matches.
Proportional height and weight sliders mean that you can choose a behemoth hulking around the ring or a nimble character with a lower centre of gravity, though our brief amount of time with the code means that we're still unsure if your size and martial-arts style are linked, such as picking a smaller-stature body type and specialising in ground grappling. Skin tone, hair type, head and brow size, eyes and nose, cheeks, and mouth can all be tweaked and prodded until you're happy, and there are separate menus to pick your tattoos, clothing style (including yellow form-fitting short-shorts if you so desire), and branded outfits as you unlock them through the Career mode.
The Bigs 2 First Look
We wind it up and take it over the fence with our exclusive first look at 2K Sports' upcoming arcade baseball sequel. In the real world, Major League Baseball pitchers do their best to avoid directly challenging a batter. They'll keep balls on the outside edges of the strike zone, change up speeds, and basically do anything else they can think of to get a batter to go after a bad pitch. That works pretty well in baseball video games too, unless you're talking about 2K Sports' upcoming The Bigs 2. A sequel to 2007's original arcade baseball game, The Bigs 2 will be hitting store shelves in just a few months. Last week, we had a chance to see the game for the first time and check out a motion capture event event with The Bigs 2 cover star Prince Fielder. While the sequel is very much following up on the successful ideas of the first game, some new ideas have been added to the mix to help change things up. Flash Player 9 is required to watch this video. Among those new ideas ...
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