After months of financial statement teases and the initial reveal in an issue of Game Informer, Activision has officially released the first details of Guitar Hero 4, now known as Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will be available this Fall on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360. The same development teams that created Guitar Hero III are back on board with the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions being developed by Neversoft, while Vicarious Visions is creating the Wii version and Budcat is bringing it to the PS2.
Guitar Hero: World Tour looks to be the beginning of a completely era for the Guitar Hero series. As was revealed by Game Informer, World Tour will feature a drumkit and microphone along with the Music Studio track editor and an eight-player Battle of the Bands mode. Any song created in the Music Studio can be shared with other gamers through the game’s online database GHTunes.
Other gameplay options will include a four-player “full band” mode (that can be played both online and locally) and singleplayer Career mode that can be played with any instrument. ..
Activision is saying that World Tour will feature the largest number of tracks in a music game ever. As of now, four bands have been confirmed to have a place in World Tour: Van Halen, Linkin Park, The Eagles and Sublime. And all of the songs will be master tracks; there will be no covers on Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will also offer “significantly more localized downloadable music than ever before on all of the next-generation consoles.” So while it’s vaguely worded, it sounds like downloadable tracks are coming to the Wii as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Finally, Activision has announced that the guitar controller will once again be redesigned, this time becoming “slick” and “more responsive.”
In a single word, bitchin’.
While universities have been cranking out supercomputers and research clusters for some time, an associate professor at NC State is utilizing IBM’s highly-touted Cell processor in a slightly different form to craft his own farm. Similar to the Xbox Linux cluster from years past, this concoction consists of eight PlayStation 3 consoles networked together and powered via Linux in order to handle ridiculous amounts of number crunching. Dubbed the “world’s first†PS3-based academic cluster, the creation boasts the ability to utilize “64 logical processors,†and is set to be used to handle various research tasks when sly CSC students aren’t firing up a round of Ridge Racer 7 after hours. Nevertheless, Dr. Frank Mueller noted that the biggest limitation in its current state is the “512MB RAM constraint,†but did insinuate that he might try retrofitting additional memory if future tasks deemed it necessary. Still, we can’t help but wonder how many spots the Pack could jump in the RIAA’s Most Wanted list if this thing became a dedicated torrent server.