E3: Guitar Hero 5

Moving away from the line-up experimentation, the new RockFest mode offers a competitive take on multiplayer (supporting four local players and eight online) with five different challenges. The examples we're shown are Momentum, a kind of musical snakes-and-ladders score rush which sees players moving up a difficulty level every time they get a twenty-note streak and falling back down every time they miss three; Elimination, a jangly spin on the Burnout favourite which sees the lowest scorer eliminated with every minute that passes until the winner is going solo (think of it as a kind of Destiny's Child simulator); and Streakers, where players only score points once a streak has started, which means the fat-fingered and uber-clutzish are going to get to the end of a round looking very silly indeed. The final two modes are apparently Do-or-Die, which kicks you out briefly whenever you bodge a note, and Perfectionist, where you only pick up points on the trickier sections of a song.

In motion, RockFest seems surprisingly well-balanced in its ability to keep the top spot moving between a handful of players, and since Momentum at least hinges on the concept of adaptive difficulty, weaker participants will always have a chance to get back into the game no matter how badly they mangled their last chorus.

Guitar Hero 5 will ship with "over 85 tracks" - I'm guessing this means it will have 86? - on the disk, and a further 175 available from World Tour's music store on day one, with Neversoft apparently investigating the possibility of making World Tour's bundled songs available too. The new line-up isn't looking bad, either, with Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" adding a touch of rumble-voiced class to proceedings, while Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower", The Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", and "Sex on Fire" from Kings of Leon stand out as the main highlights beyond that. Other artists announced include Stevie Wonder, Vampire Weekend, The White Stripes, The Beastie Boys and, er...Santana. In keeping with the shift from competitive to more social play, all the songs will be unlocked at the start of the game, too.