Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
TUAW at E3: Guitar Rock Tour 2 and DJ Mix Tour
While we really liked Gameloft's Castle of Magic at E3, these two music games in their lineup didn't impress nearly as much. Guitar Rock Tour 2 is a sequel to Guitar Rock Tour, and as you can tell from the picture at right, it's more or less a Guitar Hero knock-off: hit the notes as they pass the line at the bottom, and you'll hear whatever song you choose to play. At this point, gameplay on all of these games is more or less the same, so song selection makes the difference, and that's where Guitar Rock Tour 2 falls short: the game contains only four original tracks, and fifteen covers. While they do lay claim to tracks by Judas Priest, Panic at the Disco, Wolfmother, Placebo and Twisted Sister, Tapulous pretty much has the market covered in terms of getting great music playable on the iPhone, and we didn't see anything during our hands on that would attract us away from Tap Tap Revenge and its various forms.DJ Mix Tour is the other music game they showed us -- this one had a club feel and had you pressing notes on a turntable rather than guitar frets. There were some interesting choices in that game -- we saw some covers of Britney Spears club mixes, as well as Lady Gaga and Darude's famous Sandstorm tune, so if you're a die-hard techno fan, there might be some new tunes in there for you among the sixteen total songs. But again, Tap Tap Revenge is so polished after all their updates, and already has such a great selection of tunes that it's hard to recommend Gameloft's versions.
Both will be available for $5.99 in the App Store sometime this month.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rafinha_martini said 4:39PM on 6-18-2009
I get really annoyed with such a lack of criativity in music games.... It's always the same screen "three or four bottons, tap when the colorfull circle get down"...
There's one thing I wanna say: The problem is not the "end of ideas"...
Take a look at this game that I bough for Iphone this week on app store: Drums Challenge. That's a exemple of a game with the same old style, but with new things that call the consumer... First, you can play with a drum, not the same guitar as always. Second, you don't "follow the colorfull circle", you need to play the drum by tapping in the same timming of your opponent... and there's also a freestyle, where I can play with many new drum parts that I conquer by winning the opponents of the game....The game really worth it, I recommend
If the game industry can create different "old style" games like Drums Challenge, I don't know why they waste time insisting on create games that has no changes at all....
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Mary said 2:59PM on 6-23-2009
I bought Drums Challenge these week I totally agree with rafinha_martini. The game has new things that won my attention, like play drums instead of play guitar.
I think it offers me a big challenge and I have the possibility to play different music styles and this free style mode.
And other thing that I noticed is that in all these known music games I hear the same music even if I miss a button or a important movement in the game and in Drums Challenge the music changes when something like that happens, I mean, it warns me about the errors or hits that I made.
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