Vicarious Visions strikes a minor chord against Guitar Hero DS criticisms

Guitar Hero: On Tour - Decades turns you into a solo sensation, but it took a group to make it happen. Teams coordinating between publisher Activision and developer Vicarious Visions have been fiddling with the game over the last several months, aiming to enhance the wildly popular On Tour experience for an expanded audience this November. To understand the decisions surrounding the game's tune-up we spoke with several key members of the development team.

For the creators at Vicarious Visions who have been working on DS titles since the handheld's launch, Decades represents a new approach. Instead of crafting a game from scratch, it has been a chance for the team to tweak what has already proven to be a successful formula. "The DS is a great system to work with; the platform is quite capable," says Producer Jesse Booth, clearly happy to be working on the title.

The game obviously sticks to the structure of the first game, yet adds a number of new features and songs to an already packed cartridge. "Song length is something we've have to consider due to limited space, but at the same time we are focused on providing exclusive songs," Booth explains.

Headlining a shortlist of changes made to the single player experience, Decades introduces a three-pronged single player career featuring guitar, rhythm/bass, and dueling tracks. The expansion of the game beyond guitar could be a precursor to further experimentation with different instruments in the future. After all, Konami's Rock Revolution on DS boasts a vocal track and Guitar Hero: World Tour for consoles supports a full band. "It's an interesting suggestion," the group coyly chimes.

Potential certainly exists for expanding the realm of handheld music-making now that the platform is in place. "We spent over a year, maybe a year and a half, just getting On Tour up and running," admits Lead Engineer Greg Oberg. Much of what's being packed into Decades has its origins in the conceptual period preceding On Tour. "We had the song sharing idea on the first game," he says.

That idea, in fact, enabled the development team to preemptively build-in the feature to work once Decades was finished. "The foundation in the first game allowed us to connect the two games together," explains Oberg.

Beyond song sharing, Decades brings a number of other improvements that Executive Producer David Nathanielsz is eager to point out. "Our engineers have been squeezing those last few drops from the system," he says. "The visual fidelity is greatly improved, our touchscreen mechanics are significantly better."

Nathanielsz adds, "We're pretty ambitious and we want to do a lot more than we really need to." Decades could easily have been tackled as a song pack, yet there was a pointed effort by the team to enhance the overall experience.

For all that's new in Decades, there are just as many elements that remain the same. No changes have been made to the guitar fret peripheral, of which we've been fairly critical. Nathanielsz feels complaints have largely been unfair and that there are ways of getting around discomfort in using the device. "I believe a lot of the criticism can be resolved by experimenting with the grip," he argues. "There are a lot of different methods of holding the peripheral and unless you have monster hands, you should be able to find something that works for you."

Ultimately, it's a question of entertainment value. "The biggest factor is playability - is this fun to play?" asks Nathanielsz. "We think it is, and when players get their hands on it, they'll agree." Huge sales numbers for the original game seem to counter criticism of the peripheral. The impact won't fully be felt until Decades hits store in early November.

Until then, check out our hands-on preview of Guitar Hero: On Tour - Decades.