all the big bands they've announced so far i have no interest in whatsoever. linkin park? please

The Van Halen song they choose better be something good, like "Eruption", "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love" or "Everybody Wants Some!"

You know it's going to be "Hot For Teacher".

As long as it's not "Jump". I wouldn't mind HFT actually, especially if drums are going to be involved in this game.

The drums will be the SOLE reason for including this song. I say sign me up!

Any idea if it will be out for PS2? I am not ready to spend money on a new system.

Yes, it will.

I'm pumped for this because the Wii version will feature all of the modes and features that the 360 and PS3 versions do. Plus it looks like they have learned what didn't work for Rock Band and made it better.

After an explosively successful holiday season for rhythm games, it seems only three types of gamers remain: those who own Rock Band, those who own Guitar Hero III, and those who own both. So you'd be forgiven for feeling like you don't need any more plastic instruments clogging up your shelves. Though as lukewarm as we've been about the prospect of a fourth installment in the Guitar Hero franchise, we walked away from a recent press demonstration of World Tour feeling far more excited than we ever thought we'd be. Longtime Tony Hawk developer Neversoft did an excellent job of taking the GH reins from Harmonix (who went off to make Rock Band) with GH3, and World Tour is anything but a sophomore slump; it's a reinvigoration of the brand, an innovative music-creation and online-sharing tool, and a ballsy direct shot at the competition.

If you've played Rock Band -- yes, Rock Band -- you'll have a good idea of what to expect. World Tour has gone multi-instrumental, with a badass set of drums and a microphone for vocals (alongside a new guitar). For better or for worse, the onscreen note-chart layout is identical to Rock Band's -- a scrolling drum track in the middle of the screen, bass and guitar on either side, and the vocal track up top. The characters themselves, though slightly more realistic-looking, are still cartoonishly ugly and hypersexualized, a criticism of GH3 that unfortunately still hasn't been addressed.

Let's start with the drums -- because as much fun as Rock Band's drums are, and as much as they add to the experience, World Tour's setup is better. The hardware itself is a huge improvement: two adjustable silicon cymbals to hit (that have just enough floppiness in their construction to provide the "give" that makes them feel just right), three drums between them (also silicon for quieter feedback), and a foot pedal that matches up to a horizontal bar onscreen, just like -- you guessed it -- Rock Band. All of the pads are velocity-sensitive, so lightly rapping on a cymbal produces quieter splashes while whaling on it provides a satisfying crash (it's all wireless and sturdy to boot). Though Neversoft hasn't fully figured it out yet, you'll be able to execute drum fills anywhere in a song, not just in predefined areas (you currently activate them by hitting both cymbals at once).

The new, not-yet-unveiled guitar holds a few secrets, though -- and the developers used GH3 axes during the demo to avoid unwittingly spilling any details. We did see a few sections of a new type of note scroll by, which will apparently have something to do with some new functionality/input of the guitar; in other sections, you'll be able to simply tap the buttons and not worry about the strum bar.

It seems likely that any new input methods would be in service of the new studio modes, where, for the first time in either rock 'n' roll series, you'll be able to create actual songs -- from scratch! -- with your various instruments. We don't know enough about the technical side of music to understand -- never mind communicate -- all of the options we saw, but that alone should help give you an idea of the toolset's depth. Once in the virtual studio, you can lay down tunes in a four-track, choosing and customizing your scales and assigning different sound sets to both the drums and guitar (from the pedestrian crunchy or clean guitar to crazy 8-bit bleeps and potentially disturbing Speak and Spell sets). You can change the octave by tilting the guitar (neat!), assign different samples to the drums for hitting them either soft or hard, and add a melody track for vocalists to sing along with. We watched in awe as our Neversoft hosts played an impressively accurate rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- simply because they knew how, not because they were following any predefined notation.

If you really want to be ambitious, you can delve into the GH Mix mode, a sequencer that allows you to do note-by-note step recording on the actual note chart. And for those with no music knowledge and no desire to get into the thick of it, there's a pick-up-and-play drum-machine arpeggiator, where you're simply activating and deactivating different looping samples by pressing buttons and hitting pads. Combining "hip-hop" drums and "indie rock" guitar, our hosts casually turned out a minute or two of the most interesting music we've heard recently anywhere. Incredibly easy and cool.

Once you create music in any of these modes, you can save your songs and share them online. You'll be able to search and filter the created songs by various criteria -- genre, rating, etc. -- and the most highly rated songs will even autoplay in the background while you browse.

Yes, on the one hand, World Tour comes across as an unapologetic Rock Band impersonator (despite the fact that it's been worked on for years, starting out life as the long-rumored Drum Villain). But it offers far more to do out of the box and a more customized experience for various levels of music enthusiasts: Creative folk can go nuts with the creation tools and populate the community with a stream of new content for everyone to enjoy. If Neversoft's plans for downloadable content turn out to be near as excellent as Rock Band's, World Tour just may have it all. That is, until the inevitable Rock Band 2 makes its debut, and the battle for rhythm-genre supremacy begins all over again.

If you tire of World Tour's cast of rock superfreaks, you can create your own characters to precise specifications with a crazy number of sliders and options. You can age them, mess with their bone structure, and even adjust the tips of their ears. Using most any color you can come up with and a powerful layered illustration tool, you can also create custom designs to be used as makeup, a tattoo, a drum head -- even an album cover for when you start sharing songs online. You can also create your own in-game instruments now, customizing a guitar or bass down to the strings, highways, and fret inlays, and busting out a hilariously massive drum kit for your drummer (or even a mic and mic stand).

Though it may not sound exciting, World Tour's career structure has quite a few changes, and it improves on several of Rock Band's niggling faults. Firstly, you can switch difficulties midcareer if things get too tough for you. Secondly, you can change instruments at any time between songs, so if something is too tough on bass, you can hop over to drums and give it a shot. Also, you now share Star Power in a pool anyone can use, though it's better to activate it together.

World Tour's career structure casts you as a musician for hire, and you'll browse bulletin boards for gigs, playing three to six songs at each stop. On the multiplayer side, you can hop online with three other people to play as a band -- if you can't get the necessary bodies locally -- and battle other four-man bands. You can even split up the eight players into any combination of local and online, so four different households with two rockers each can still form teams, or eight players can play from their own houses.

World Tour will come with 90-plus songs out of the box, and all of them will be master tracks (no more shoddy covers). And though we saw quite a bit of the massive list, we're only allowed to tell you that Van Halen, the Eagles, Linkin Park, and Sublime will be in the game. This is frustrating because we saw some stuff that we've been waiting ever so long for. You'll also be playing in a handful of new venues, including a goth club, an aircraft carrier, and a state fair. As for what you'll be playing long after release...it's yet to be determined. Neversoft has big plans for downloadable content and all the ambition of weekly songs and full albums, but they've got nothing specific to announce quite yet.

They should just call it Guitar Hero: Rock Band Edition.

Rock Band >>>>> Guitar Hero III