Gamespot has a Guitar Hero 5 first look. There's a few interesting tidbits:
- Party Play mode, which is a jukebox mode that just randomly plays songs without any instruments. Then, if you want to jump in mid-song, you can. You can pick any combination of instruments and difficulties, and just play without worrying about failing out. Sounds great for parties.
- Your band can be made up of any combination of instruments in career mode. You want 4 singers? You got 4 singers.
- There's a slew of new multiplayer modes:
- Momentum mode, where the difficulty adjusts depending on how well you're playing. Probably good for people who sit in between medium and hard, which is just about everyone that I know.
- Elimination mode, where the worst performing player is dropped periodically. This was always a good mode in racing games. I'd be interested to see how it translates.
- Perfectionist, where you're judged on how well you do during specific portions of a song. No idea how this works.
- Do-or-Die where you have to sit out a section of the song if you're not doing well. Interesting idea, but if you're not keeping up then won't this just make you lose that much worse?
- Streakers, where you are rewarded for longer and longer note strings. It'd be cool if there's a risk-to-reward feature where you can "cash in" your notestreak by activating star power, so you can decide whether to take smaller rewards more often versus risking a super-long notestreak to get a monster reward.
- Band Moments. If your band members all hit a set of flaming notes, then the score is tripled for a short time. Similar idea to Rock Band, with a different payoff.
- Revival Meter. If a player fails out, then the band has to play well for a short span to bring them back in. No one person can save a band member.
- Adding to the existing list of artists (The Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, The White Stripes, Santana, Vampire Weekend, and Kings of Leon) is Blink-182, Blur, Bush, Darkest Hour, Iron Maiden, KISS, and Wild Cherry.
All in all, there are a lot of smart improvements in the Party Play mode that address my biggest complaint about GH:WT. Namely, that it wasn't party friendly. GHWT seemed geared more to those who want to play seriously, but it doesn't work so well in a more social setting - like those with alcohol. It's also nice to see that you can save out your bandmates during career mode. I have the same complaint about Rock Band, to a lesser extent, and I hope that Harmonix is paying attention so that they can make their future Rock Band titles easier to pick up and play without having to have someone coach the rest of the players through all of the menus and options and instruments. The other multiplayer stuff looks unnecessary, but it's not like you have to play it if you don't want. And I suspect that a lot of people won't want to.
Oh, and all songs are unlocked for quickplay from the very beginning. Please, please, please let Harmonix copy that idea!
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