Last night I was lucky enough to get a chance to play the new Guitar Hero: World Tour live on stage as part of the London Games Festival.
So the night before, I was quite happy just sitting on my PC checking up on gaming news, when a friend IM’d on MSN telling me about this Guitar Hero World Tour tournament taking place in London. The prize was a copy of the game and guitar plus tickets to the launch event on Nov 6th which had a free bar! After much discussion we managed to form a band and we attended the event!
Me sporting the ‘Slash’ hair!
We arrived at The Rigg, London South Bank University Student Union, signed up, and chose to play The Middle by Jimmy Eat World. We got a chance to have a practice run, but we weren’t allowed to play the song we had chosen to use in the competition. So we chose Beat It by Michael Jackson.
I was on guitar and chose to do it on expert. I used the brand new World Tour guitar, which at first, was very strange to use. It was obviously new because the buttons were very stiff and I had to press down on them with a lot of force, and I found the strum bar very difficult to get used to. The new guitar’s strum bar has a ‘bobble’ on the end which makes sure your fingers don’t slide off. Problem is, I always slide my fingers off the strum bar, I find it helps me keep rhythm easier. The strum bar also seems to have some sort of silencer and you don’t really feel the bar clicking when you strum, but I got over all this half way into the song. Unfortunately I didn’t use the new touch sensitive slider because I wasn’t familiar with it, although looking back I really should have given it a try in the practice run. All together though the guitar feels very nice, it’s quite heavy and is a lot fun to use, and the new star power button near the strum bar is very accessible and great to use.
The Barrel Rolls!
So our time came to perform, unfortunately we got chosen to go up first which may have affected our performance slightly. We discovered that the competition was being judged on the percentage of notes hit, so we decided to go one difficulty below our normal level, so that we felt comfortable. So I was on Hard Guitar, Chelsey was on Hard Bass, Dave was on Medium Vocals, and Richard was on Medium Drums! Together we formed the first toy band of the night.. THE BARREL ROLLS
You can see how we performed in this video:
Up on stage, playing with plastic guitars, in front of an audience, was the most surreal experience ever. I’m used to playing GH at home, on my own, or occasionally at a party, but this took things to the extreme. It was awesome!
We came off stage and it went over the the three judges, who scored us 7, 7, and 6 out of 10. These were definately not the worst scores of the night, but we deserved a lot better. As the night went on, one of the judges pulled us aside and apologized for the scores, he explained that because we were first of the night he didn’t know what to expect and therefore gave us the mediocre scores.
After the judging we were then approached by a member of the press and he asked us to to a video interview. We obviously agreed, wrapped our arms around each other and started answering his question. Which ranged from ‘Do you play real instruments’ and ‘Can you see this kind of event taking off in the future’.
The night went on and we watched as people played the game on stage and then get grilled by the judges. We had a few drinks and really enjoyed the night. Until a band called ‘Imperial 9000′ took to the stage and blew everyone away. They were showboating and didn’t miss a note on expert difficulty! It was then revealed that they were representing the UK in some sort of tournament. They completely demolished our chances of winning. They obviously already had the game, they were hitting notes without looking at the screens and the guitarist was using the touch slider like it was no big deal and it had been there all his life!
It was no surprise that at the end of the night Imperial 9000 won, but we did all get a Guitar Hero t-shirt each which made up for it!
It was a fantastic night and a once-in-a-life-time experience. The most fun i’ve had in a long time!
You can find more videos HERE
