How To Play Guitar Hero On Ds Without The Grip

Guitar Hero: On Tour uses a special attachment to turn your DS into a makeshift guitar neck. A valiant effort, but there's just nothing like  the real ... er ... plastic guitar. Red Octane/Activision

Guitar Hero isn't selling music, it's selling fantasy. By placing a plastic guitar in your hand and offering a set list of rock anthems, Guitar Hero temporarily transforms you into a stage-commanding idol.

This affordable make-believe has caught fire on almost every console imaginable, and now Activision hopes it can turn the Nintendo DS into a vessel for rock n' roll dreams. But without the actual guitar as a conduit, Guitar Hero: On Tour is the equivalent of a cover band.

Nintendo Ds Lite

In lieu of the guitar controller, Guitar Hero: On Tour ships with a four-button grip that snaps into the Game Boy Advance cartridge slot on the bottom half of the DS. You cup your hand under the DS, slip your palm through a strap and then press the colored buttons in a similar fashion to the frets at the top of a guitar. While pressing colored buttons that correspond to on-screen notes, you strum the bottom screen of the DS with a guitar-pick-like stylus that also comes in the box. To use the whammy bar, just rub back and forth while still touching the screen. To utilize star power, a score multiplier earned by hitting perfect riffs, you must make noise into the DS microphone.

Does it work? Technically, yes. But there are a literal handful of drawbacks that keep On Tour from truly wowing. Although the strap is adjustable for comfort, using the buttons aren’t terribly comfortable for an extended gaming session — especially if you play On Tour either sitting on the couch or lying in bed.

The game is actually better suited for standing up, which leads you to wonder why you don't just play the real-deal Guitar Hero on a console, particularly because the Guitar Hero guitar controllers are incredibly comfortable — more so than the guitar that shipped with Guitar Hero rival, Rock Band. Without the fifth fret, good players will breeze through Guitar Hero: On Tour in record time, too.

Guitar Hero On Tour Decades Ds

Although the songs included in Guitar Hero: On Tour sound good coming out of the DS speakers, there are just too few of them. With only 25 songs and no means of downloading more, you will see and hear everything from On Tour sooner than expected. (Of course, a potential hand cramp could add some longevity to the game as you put it down and rest.)

The set list for On Tour veers wildly, sometimes offering a great guitar-driven song like Twisted Sister's classic We're Not Gonna Take It and Black Magic Woman by Santana, but also grabbing at radio-friendly hits to cater to the assumed younger audience for the DS. There is nothing heroic about playing a Stray Cats or Smashmouth tune.

Guitar Hero: On Tour offers a two-player duel mode, pitting gamers against each other in competitive guitar riffs. As you tear through songs, you toss power-ups back and forth to thwart the other player's note streak. For example, you can set your opponent's guitar on fire, forcing them to blow into the DS microphone to put out the flames.

How To Add Custom Songs To Guitar Hero World Tour Without Buying The Song Export Feature

If cooperative play is more amenable to your tastes, you can also jam with a friend through the game's entire catalog. The multiplayer stuff is quite easy to set up and if the guitar grip had been more comfortable, this would have been a winning feature as this wave of music games — Guitar Hero and Rock Band — are always more fun with a crowd.

Vicarious Visions is an accomplished DS developer, and it shows in the look and atmosphere of On Tour. The game is a very accurate visual facsimile of the console game, right down to good-looking in-game guitarists and backdrops for your various gigs.

But a reasonable facsimile is just not enough here, especially when On Tour costs $20 more than the average DS game and just isn’t comfortable enough to play in anything but short bursts.

Guitar Hero: On Tour And 'guitar Grip' Ds Peripheral Revealed

If you already have Guitar Hero for a console, you are better off downloading additional songs for it or looking into the new Aerosmith edition of Guitar Hero.” And if you are completely new to Guitar Hero, pay the extra for the real deal on one of the consoles. Just like in rock 'n roll, authenticity matters.A few months ago, Activision did the seemingly impossible and brought Guitar Hero to the Nintendo DS. With its unique Guitar Grip peripheral and touch-screen strumming, Guitar Hero: On Tour was a competent representation of the fretting and picking experience found on the consoles. However, mechanical and ergonomic issues hampered the game from being as fun as it could have been. Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades, the newest Guitar Hero game for the Nintendo DS, adds song sharing in multiplayer mode--but ultimately leads to the same disappointing, hand-crippling experience as before.

For anyone who isn't familiar with how the portable Guitar Hero games are played, the DS is held like a book, with your strumming area and interface items (star power, score, note streak) on the touch screen and the note highways up top. The Guitar Grip peripheral slides into the Game Boy Advance port of the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo DS Lite. It features four fret buttons, down from the console's five, and you'll wrap your left hand (or right hand for Lefty Flip players) around the back so that your fingertips press the buttons. To strum, you use the included pick-shaped stylus to swipe anywhere on the touch screen. As with other Guitar Hero games, you play notes by strumming while holding down the correct fret button as the scrolling notes come in contact with the fret icons at the bottom of the screen.

It's still impressive that the fretting and strumming experience is able to mimic the console guitar experience, and when it works, pulling off crazy solos feels really good. Several annoyances conspire to make sure that it doesn't always work, though, and for On Tour veterans it wouldn't be the first time. The peripheral hasn't been improved with any type of anchor and remains prone to sliding out of the DS midsong, prompting a reboot. Rapid strumming still doesn’t always register properly, and the included pick slides around in your hand and ultimately isn’t as good to play with as the regular stylus. Anyone who experienced discomfort with the Guitar Grip the first time around can expect continued discomfort here, and if you're new to the franchise on a handheld, be prepared for forearm tightness or hope that you're one of the lucky ones who don't experience the pain.

Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades Review

Should you adapt to its ergonomic and mechanical issues, On Tour: Decades at least provides original versions of each of its songs, with no covers whatsoever. The tracklist spans five decades of music from the '70s up until today, with several songs taken from the recently released console version of Guitar Hero: World Tour. The songs are charted fairly well and can be fun to play, from the deliciously '80s Any Way You Want It by Journey to the intense triplets in Tarantula by the Smashing Pumpkins. On Expert, the satisfying, finger-twisting solos from Lynyrd Skynyrd's live version of Sweet Home Alabama are as faithful as they can be to World Tour's version. As with On Tour, there is some pop rock present, with such songs as Paramore's Crushcrushcrush, The All-American Rejects' Dirty Little Secret, and Jimmy Eat World's The Middle representing the more modern decades.

Even with the variety of songs and the fact that they're all original versions, you can still expect the same crackly audio quality that plagued On Tour's set list. It's not entirely surprising, and not every song sounds as bad as those in the previous game. But it's still a downer when almost every song lyric that starts with an s comes out fuzzy, and distorted guitars sound a just little too distorted.

On Tour: Decades, then, feels more like an expansion pack. The issues from the previous game remain, and the same career mode and (admittedly impressive) duel mode are present. It's not as if the game is completely devoid of improvement, however, as it adds both a bass/rhythm career path as well as song sharing with the original On Tour. Many of the bass and rhythm note charts tend to be a bit boring, and so song sharing is the more intriguing improvement. If you play with someone who owns On Tour but not On Tour: Decades, the song lists from both games open up for you. This is a nice touch that at least saves you the aggravation of having to switch out games to play the full list of portable Guitar Hero songs, and it also gives owners of only one of the games a taste of what the other has to offer.

I Just Found The Game And Attachment To Play Guitar Hero On My Ds, Any Tricks To Make The Grip Easier To Use/hold Tho?

The simple truth is that Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades doesn't do enough to improve the flawed

Posted by zodaries14

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