In addition to sackings at Neversoft and Lexoflux, Kotaku has learned today that publisher Activision has also laid off employees at RedOctane and internal studio Underground Development.
Guitar Hero 5′s tracklist water torture continues today, with Activision announcing 24 more tracks for the game, along with shots of the game’s new drum kit.
Activision and RedOctane has been working furiously to deal with issues Guitar Hero World Tour players have been having with their over and under-sensitive drum kits, and to that end they’ve released a Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Tuning Kit, as promised back on Tuesday. The kit takes the form of a 10MB PC application, which features a simple interface that allows you to assign a sensitivity level from 1-20 for each pad and the pedal.
No official pricing info was included in the voluminous news release, but the Band Kit for Guitar Hero World Tour has been priced on Gamestop, which is (of course) also accepting pre-orders.
RedOctane would like to clarify something. When they said the Wii version of Guitar Hero III had its online balls in a vice, they were talking about downloadable content. Not online multiplayer, which is all ready and is looking good to go. So online play, yes, downloadable stuff, no. At least, that’s a no until Nintendo get around to announcing some kind of Wii storage device. Then I’d imagine it’d be on for all and sundry. Red Octane says Wii will have GHIII online play, no DLC initially [Joystiq]
Wasn’t too long ago we were told that the Wii’s Guitar Hero would feature online. Both online play and downloadable content. In fact, it was April. Now, in August, things aren’t looking so set in stone. RedOctane’s Bryan Lam has told BBPS that, uh, maybe they needed to see how much of a dog’s breakfast the Wii’s online setup was before making promises: …we’re working closely with Nintendo for an online solution, though at the moment we’re unable to confirm the status of the online multi-player.
Following up with Lam, BBPS reports that this also applies to downloadable content. Shame. That doesn’t sound promising at all, and would leave the Wii version looking more than a little gimped. Guitar Hero III may be online, but will it be “Nintendo” online? [BBPS]
The fantastic Guitar Hero DS concept is, sadly, merely an artist’s impression. We don’t yet know what the DS version of the game will look like. We do know some things, however, thanks to an interview with RedOctane co-founder Charles Huang. And it all sounds good. We’re exploring a lot of things. We’re hoping to really bring the experience to the DS and to do some very, very different approaches. We’re working through a lot of engineering issues with Nintendo. I actually came from a set of meetings with them last week about this. While the technical path hasn’t been set yet, we intend for this to be a very unique experience just like Guitar Hero was on consoles. This will play probably unlike any other DS game that has come out, and at this stage, that’s all I’m afraid we can talk about until we have the engineering paths laid out with Nintendo.
