Stage Tour Is More Than Just A Guitar Hero Throwback

There are some games that you hope will demonstrate how much muscle memory can survive years of neglect. Hand me a plastic guitar, put a rhythm game in front of me, and apparently my brain still thinks it knows what it's doing. Having not touched a guitar controller since around 2009, when Guitar Hero 5 was released, my hands-on time with Stage Tour at Gamescom went a little differently than I'd hoped. Getting to grips with the new rhythm game from RedOctane Games, I opted for guitar, naturally. If you're going to spend time with a game that is openly positioning itself as a spiritual successor to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, it feels obligatory to pick up that instrument. Rather than making the spectacularly poor decision of attempting Expert difficulty and embarrassing myself, I settled on Medium, and was promptly reminded that remembering how rhythm games work and actually being good at them are two very different things. https://youtu.be/xU-qK6FyUoM The first few notes went pretty well, but things quickly began to unravel. "Here's my guitar solo," I announced, with considerably more confidence than my mediocre gameplay warranted. Fortunately, the developers behind…