With several years now under our belt since the release of the first few Guitar Hero titles, we now know that everything since Guitar Hero III was unfortunately a downhill slide, starting with this title. Don’t be confused, though, as any game compared to Guitar Hero III’s sales will look paltry in comparison. Guitar Hero World Tour still generated massive sales, handily eclipsing Rock Band 2′s sales, which was only released domestically and on a staggered scale across the consoles, in 2008.

Released in fall of 2008, Guitar Hero World Tour expanded upon the previous title, with Neversoft continuing their development of the franchise. The game was released on the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii and PC & Mac, with the porting of each handled by Activision-owned studios Budcat Creations, Vicarious Visions and independent studio Aspyr Media. The formula of this title borrowed liberally from Rock Band by adding in vocals and drums, and cemented bass as a standard chart in each song. Despite mostly positive critic reviews, many pointed out that Rock Band’s latest iteration included a layer of polish that provided a more engaging and fun experience.

The title retained the core gameplay established in previous titles, as well as inclusion of famous musicians such as Hayley Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, Zakk Wylde, Billy Corgan, Sting, Ted Nugent, and Travis Barker. However, the game wasn’t content with simply adding a few new instruments charts.

A Beginner difficulty was added to supplement the Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert levels, which allowed players to strum any note, hit any drum pad, and sing any note for successful completion on the songs’ simplified charts. Also new was the Create-A-Rocker module, that allowed players to customize both their players and their instruments, instead of just using the stock characters from previous games in the franchise. Wii players were also given the option of importing their Mii character for use in the game. The most significant addition was the inclusion of “GHTunes,” a “music studio” interface which let players create and share their own music in the game.

The peripherals for the game also had some features different from their competitor franchise. The new guitar included a “touchpad” across the neck for sliding during fast solos on “Slider Gems.” The drums literally one-upped Rock Band by including five pads and a kick pedal, improving on Rock Band’s four drum pads. The World Tour drumkit also had a MIDI input port on the back, allowing users to connect a MIDI-capable drum kit for use.

Guitar Hero World Tour came with a massive setlist of 86 songs, with no cover songs, unlike previous titles. Two of the songs (Motorhead – Overkill and The Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant) were re-records of previous studio versions. Similar to Guitar Hero III, songs were specifically written and recorded for the game’s boss battles by Zakk Wylde and Ted Nugent.

The game was released just over a month after the Xbox 360 release of the second Rock Band game, and as such the two titles shared FOURTEEN songs, not including previously released Rock Band DLC:

• The Allman Brothers Band – Ramblin’ Man
• Blondie – One Way or Another
• Bon Jovi – Livin’ on a Prayer
• Dinosaur Jr. – Feel the Pain
• Fleetwood Mac – Go Your Own Way
• Foo Fighters – Everlong
• The Guess Who – American Woman
• Jane’s Addiction – Mountain Song
• Jimmy Eat World – The Middle
• Lacuna Coil – Our Truth
• Modest Mouse – Float On
• Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye
• Smashing Pumpkins – Today
• Survivor – Eye of the Tiger

As noted in previous Setlist Checklist posts (and all future posts, as well), Rock Band 3′s setlist creation tool allows us to create, save, and share setlists, so we have included a Rock Band 3 setlist below that you can save to your profile if you would like to check out any or all of the songs! And as the holes are continually filled in by Rock Band’s weekly DLC releases, we will update this post, and keep it linked in the FAQ page above, for future reference.

The setlist for Guitar Hero World Tour contained a wider range of music than in previous titles, particularly to emphasize the new instruments added to the franchise, however critics found that the setlist contained very few standout hits, and that the inclusion of a number of foreign-language and difficult-to-recognize songs weakened the overall list.  There was no segregation between main setlist songs and “bonus songs” as seen in previous titles.

Of the 84-song setlist (though ignoring the two boss battles), 44 are currently available in Rock Band, which is roughly 52%, higher than Guitar Hero III’s record previous record of 45%, making Guitar Hero World Tour have more songs featured than any Guitar Hero game covered thus far in the Setlist Checklist feature.

We’ve included the full list after the jump (it’s a LONG list)…

* Denotes a studio version of the track in Rock Band.

Guitar Hero World Tour Main Setlist for Rock Band 3

We typically include a playlist of all the songs, but the services that allow embeddable full song playlists are missing several of the tracks, probably due to copyright issues (Grooveshark, Playlist, etc). We thought about including a playlist from Amazon, but the songs are capped at 30 seconds. If you know of a full song embeddable playlist option, let us know in the comments and we’ll try to include it.

68 Responses to “Setlist Checklist: Guitar Hero World Tour”