New Guitar Hero unveiled, takes on Rock Band

Hope you got good seats, because the club is about to get a lot more crowded.

Activision, publisher of the popular Guitar Hero franchise, released their debut trailer for Guitar Hero: World Tour this week. The fourth official Guitar Hero game will become the first in the series to stray from the fold by featuring guitars, bass, vocals and a wicked-looking drum kit, turning their one-trick virtuoso into a four-piece band simulator.

It won't be the first game, however, to offer gamers the complete band experience. That honor goes to MTV's Rock Band, which dropped its own drum kit in living rooms around the world last holiday season. Gamers responded by downloading over 10 million playable songs, making it a lucrative new platform for digital distribution and the first viable competitor to Guitar Hero.

Accordingly, Guitar Hero: World Tour is taking aim at the same audience by releasing its very own custom-built drum set, which features five pads compared to Rock Band's four. The setup is a bit different as well, with two of the pads shaped like cymbals instead of the conventional circular design. In the words of Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, this kit goes to eleven, though in the words of lead designer Alan Flores, it's just more true to life.

"We really wanted a more realistic drumming experience," he explained in a brief phone chat. "The red pad is the snare drum, the yellow pad is the hi-hat -- it's not sometimes a tom tom. You can play like a real drummer, not a video game drummer."

WATCH TRAILER VIEW SCREENSHOTS

But does the striking similarity in drum design make Guitar Hero: World Tour just another cover band? Not exactly. Rock Band was actually built by Massachusetts-based developer Harmonix -- the very same team responsible for putting Guitar Hero on the map back in 2005 -- and has itself been labeled something of a knock-off. And it's not like Guitar Hero is particularly worried about losing too much market share, as the series was the overall best-selling franchise of 2007.

Still, it's clear that the development of World Tour was influenced by MTV's rocker. The drums and new guitars (the specific model hasn't been announced yet) are fully wireless for every platform, trumping Rock Band's somewhat irritating Xbox 360 USB dongle requirement. Activision also announced that the game's initial song list will be the largest ever on disc, though only a handful of bands have been announced, including Linkin Park, The Eagles, Sublime and, in a move seemingly geared to make me the happiest person alive, Van Halen (please let it be pre-Hagar).

While the gameplay gist will likely be largely the same -- strum along to colored notes -- World Tour hopes to capitalize on the dreams of millions of fake rock stars by including the ability to actually record your own song, edit it up and upload it for the rest of the world to download and play using the game's new Music Studio mode. It's an innovative idea that meshes well with the world's obsession with user-generated content --- think Youtube meets Guitar Hero, minus lonelygirl15 -- but exactly how one makes a string-less plastic guitar sound like a real one remains to be seen (or heard.) At least turning the fake drums into a useful electronic kit makes sense.

Of course, hordes of other questions remain. How will it handle downloadable content? Will Guitar Hero and Rock Band's gear be compatible? If not, which company will foot the bill for renovating my living room to hold all this plastic stuff? We'll hopefully get some answers before the game ships later this year.

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