Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades is Nintendo DS game and the sequel to Guitar Hero: On Tour developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision on July 15, 2008.
It requires the Guitar Grip attachment that is bundled with it to play it on a Nintendo DS or Nintendo DS Lite. Guitar Hero: On Tour's Guitar Grip from its bundle also works.
Overview[]
Career mode features a path through time, offering five songs for each decade. The game includes many differences from Guitar Hero: On Tour, such as new venues, songs, and returning characters, Midori and Clive Winston. Venues change the way you play the game. For example, for the '00s stage, players play on New Year's Eve in NYC, playing songs by bands like Linkin Park and Jimmy Eat World. All songs in this game are—like Guitar Hero World Tour—master recordings; no covers. The game will also automatically unlock the career difficulty below the one that you're working on.
In other words, if you start with Hard and complete a song, you'll also be credited with the Easy and Medium difficulty levels of that song as well. Before heading into venues, you have to choose the three different storylines in your career path: lead guitar, bass/rhythm, and guitar duels. The two-player Duel mode returns, and you can play against any DS version of Guitar Hero, and, using wireless communications, you can transfer songs and play multiplayer on that song—but as far as Vicarious Visions is concerned, you can't keep that song for Quickplay.
Gameplay[]
Expert Guitar gameplay of "Dirty Little Secret", the first song and an exclusive song in the North American version of Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades.
The gameplay in Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades remains primarily unchanged from the first On Tour game. The core game is a score attack music game, in which the player must attempt the notes of a guitar track of various rock songs. The game uses a "Guitar Grip", either as bundled with the game or from On Tour, that is inserted into the Game Boy Advance slot of a Nintendo DS or DS Lite; the peripheral is incompatible with all Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS models. The Grip provides four GRYB-colored buttons, and the player "strums" by using a guitar pick-shaped stylus, a regular stylus, or the player's thumb on the touchscreen. The strumming detection has been improved in response to complaints from the first game.
On Tour: Decades provides an improved career mode that a player can follow for either lead guitar or bass/rhythm guitar, as well as a "Guitar Duel" career mode. Both careers will present songs in reverse chronological order, starting with modern hits and ending with classic rock songs.
On Tour: Decades can be played with another player over the DS's local wireless capabilities. Additionally, a Decades player can play with another player using On Tour, allowing any song from either setlist to be selected.
Characters[]
Returning characters are Pandora, Axel Steel, Judy Nails, Johnny Napalm, and Midori from Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock along with two new characters from Guitar Hero: On Tour, Gunner Jaxon and Memphis Rose.
There are also few non-playable characters appearing during scenes in Career between venues. Sal is your band manager in the Guitar Career. Other characters appearing during the Guitar Career's story are Chad, Michelle, and Ron. Characters that appear during Guitar Duel Career's story are Sal (Modern venue), Marcus (2000s venue), Zach (1990s venue), Michelle (1980s venue), and Ron.
Soundtrack[]
- Main article: Setlist in Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades
As the title suggests, Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades sorts songs into decades, starting with the newer songs and going down towards the tougher, older songs.
There are three regional releases of Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades each feature their own setlist of songs with exclusive songs. Each region has a total of 28 songs, 25 songs in the main setlist plus 3 bonus songs, each arranged per region.
- Songs exclusive in the North American release (American English and French languages supported based on Nintendo DS's system language setting), include "Dirty Little Secret", "Remedy", "Volcano Girls", "I Can't Drive 55", and "Smooth Criminal".
- Songs exclusive in the non-English European release (Spanish, French, German, and Italian languages supported based on Nintendo DS's system language setting) include "Diventerai Una Star", "Estrella Polar", and "You Can't Stop Me".
- The United Kingdom/Netherland/Australian release (British English) features a mix of songs from both the North American and European versions. Songs featured in this release and in the North American release are "Crushcrushcrush", "Any Way You Want It", and "Rock and Roll Band". Songs featured in this release and in the European release are "Ready, Set, Go!", "Some Might Say", "Eye Of The Tiger", and "Everything is Everything".
Many songs in this game also appeared in Guitar Hero World Tour including "La Bamba", "The One I Love", "One Way or Another", "The Middle", "Satch Boogie", "Sweet Home Alabama" (Live), and more including those that were also downloadable content for World Tour. Some songs featured in this game also previously appeared as downloadable content for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock such as "Any Way You Want It" and "The Pretender" and some songs appeared in later titles like "You Give Love a Bad Name" later appears in Guitar Hero 5 and the GHTV game mode of Guitar Hero Live.
Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades also features its own theme song playing in the main menus. However, the main menu theme is not playable and has not been added as downloadable content for any other Guitar Hero video game while the following sequel, Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, had its theme song by ProtoShredanoid available as downloadable content for Guitar Hero World Tour and newer titles.
Venues[]
There are five venues in Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades and there are five songs in each venue plus three bonus songs in their own bonus "Victory Songs" tier.
- Modern
- 2000s
- 1990s
- 1980s
- 1970s
Trivia[]
- Like the first Guitar Hero: On Tour game, the player will receive an error message when trying to play this game without the Guitar Grip peripheral or pulling the peripheral out. However, cheating devices like Action Replay can bypass these messages and change controls.
- As the setlist is arranged differently for each region, some songs that appear in each region may have a different note charts to adjust to the difficulty level of the tier/venue they are on. The most infamous example is "Satch Boogie".
- "Satch Boogie" in the English versions of the game is a bonus song and will have a more difficult Expert difficulty level Guitar chart than the European version's 4th tier (1970s) encore version of the song. The European version replaced the trills with a stream of strum notes and reduced the number of notes during the last solo, along with other minor changes.