Guitar Hero World Tour for PlayStation 2

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great song titles. Wonderful play value.

Cons: Will not work on PlayStation 2 model 75001. Customer support nightmare.

The Bottom Line: 
I loved the product once I got a system that would read it. Low marks for customer service. Would recommend with caution.

Author's Review
Guitar Hero World Tour promised a lot for the PS 2. This is the latest Guitar Hero Game for the PlayStation 2 and the latest installment in the Guitar Hero series. The game is wonderful. It offers more options than the previous Guitar Hero games.

All previous Guitar Hero guitars will work with Guitar Hero World Tour. In addition, if you do not want to purchase the full band kit or you already have Rock Band, the drums to Rock Band will work with Guitar Hero World Tour. The guitars from Rock Band or Rock Band 2 will not.
The game offers you the ability to play with 2 guitars, 1 microphone, and a drum set. I loved this feature as I have 3 kids. Everyone can play at once. The song list includes a lot of popular rock titles. I am impressed with the game.

There are some issues that you need to be aware of. If you have a PlayStation 2 with the model number 75001, this game will not work on your system. You will get a “cannot read disc” error. Calls to Sony and to Activision will walk you through how to clean your disc, how to power your system on and off, and how to run the PlayStation in diagnostic mode. None of these will help. Sony and Activision have yet to formally acknowledge this issue. It appears to be a common problem mentioned in the PlayStation and Activision forums. There is no work around for this, the software will not work on these PlayStation 2 models. The problem has to do with the way the laser reads the disk.

I went through a nightmare with Sony and Activision in the attempt to get this to work. At first I thought it was a bad disc, so I exchanged it for a second one. Second disc I had the same error. The chances of getting 2 bad game discs in a row are not good. I cleaned the unit and the disc and tried again. Same issue. Sony told me my unit was bad and needed repair. That would have been fine, however all other games load and run fine. Finally I became aware that the 75001 model number of PlayStations have issues with loading and running certain games. These games will not load. There is a list on Sony’s PlayStation website that details games known to not load correctly on the 75001 models. Guitar Hero World
Tour is not listed there, however it should be.

Finally to appease my kids I purchased a second PlayStation 2 and the games works fine. They love it. I highly recommend this game. It delivered what it promised.