Most Guitar Hero fans I know who have yet to pick up World Tour have said their reason for holding off is the drums. They don't want to shell out the cash, especially if they already own Rock Band drums.

It looks like they will beat Rock Band's release date in Europe, which should make a difference in sales over here. I know I am buying the first plastic drum game that comes out here (excluding the original Rock Band with its ridiculous price and delay)

For me it's about expectation. When I first heard about Rock Band I was excited because in a past life I was a musician, going so far as going to a music school. I kept hearing that at expert level Rock Band drums were just like playing the song on real drums and I thought wow, that's cool, and I forked over my money.

I don't know who said that, but they obviously never played drums. I got on and set the thing to expert. It's a good thing I’m good at reading percussion lines because the actual musicality and feel is NOTHING like playing real drums. Ok, I told myself, the guitar isn't really anything like playing guitar either, so I plugged on.

I had previously owned Guitar Hero III and discovered with Rock Band that playing amounted to mostly button smashing eighth-notes ad nausea and lacked the musicality of GHIII. In other words, while GHIII really wasn't like playing a REAL guitar, it was still fun and captured enough of the feel that it created an illusion between the faux-guitar-wanna-be and the music. One could get liquored up, pop in GHIII, and feel a little bit cool (until the first person walks in on you--one more thing better done in private).

Rock Band just made me feel like a poser banging eighth notes which could belong to any song. It made me NOT like the songs, where GHIII made me a fan of the songs. And so I returned to the position that those drums really sucked. No velocity sensitivity which is critical to drumming. But the most nerve racking aspect was Rock Band's insistence on changing which pad makes what sound in the middle of a song, especially during the "solo" sections where the whole "kit" all of a sudden changes. No consistency.

And let’s not forget all those many times in every song where the drum part seems to be following something other than the drum part. I can't count the number of times I exclaimed, "What the hell is this?"

And what is with the mix? The unique aspect of playing drums is that they resonate through you like no other instrument. There is a physicality that doesn't exist anywhere else. When you hit a drum, you feel it. In Rock Band the drum track is often lost in the mix. When I crank my sound system, I should feel them. At the very least they should allow the user to control the volume level of each instrument.

I'm a big fan of GHIII, not so much GHIII:Aerosmith where I realized while I like Aerosmith, not quite that much. Rock Band was a disappointment-it sucked. I even had to haul my real drums out of the closet in order to get that dirty feeling off of me. Between GHIII:Aerosmith and Rock Band I, I've become jaded. I have no problem spending money, and my interest was peaked at reading the word MIDI associated to the GHIV drums. Yet fool me once...and you can't fool me, wait.

I’m thinking my money may be better spent just buying a nice MIDI drum kit and playing along with songs on ear phones.