Activision and Vicarious Vision’s Guitar Hero: On Tour, the first portable iteration of the massively popular rhythm/music title for home consoles, was first officially announced back in March of this year. Little was given away about the game back then, but following Nintendo’s Media Summit in San Francisco last week, we now learn a few precious nuggets of information - as well as being treated to a selection of new screenshots.

The premise behind Guitar Hero: On Tour is to deliver very much the same experience as its home console big brother, challenging players to play along to a variety of rock songs, making use of the Guitar Grip, the special accessory that plugs into the Game Boy Advance port of the handheld, and which the game relies on to provide its fret-tappin’ action. The unique piece of kit, Vicarious Visions reveals, will include a removable faceplate, allowing gamers to customise it somewhat.

As we learned before, the Guitar Grip only comes housed with four fret buttons (instead of the Guitar Hero standard of five), while a Stylus Pick, used by sliding across the notes on the touch screen, is housed within the unit itself. To those worried about the lack of a whammy bar, fear not - “wiggling” the Pick while its still resting on the touch screen performs that function.

As you can well imagine, multiplayer is going to be a big part of Guitar Hero: On Tour’s appeal, and in that respect it’s said to be shaping up well. Attacks include setting opponent’s instruments on fire (extinguished by blowing into the portable’s microphone); forcing other players to sign autographs to continue jamming; temporarily obscuring another performer’s view with the beaming light of a camera flashbulb; Amp Overload which cuts all audio, and another which snaps the guitar’s strings, forcing the player to ‘restring’ their instrument by drawing on the touch screen.

We don’t know about you, but the multiplayer mode is already sounding like enough fun to pacify any reservations we might have had about Guitar Hero: On Tour so far. That, in addition to supposedly decent sound quality and a “really frickin’ hard” Hard Mode, and we’re very much looking forward to its release - which as it stands is June 22 for North America.

[Source: IGN]