To rip off and horribly change up a famous Beatles line: “I’ve got cramping in my hands!”

Why you ask? Because I just spent the last four or so hours strumming away at my Nintendo DS, unable to put down the highly enjoyable “Guitar Hero On Tour.” And sure, as a fan of the series I was super skeptical of the wacky peripheral used to play the game, but you know what, it not only works well, it’s flippin’ awesome.

 To play GHOT, you take the included plug-in notes and put them in the extension slot on the DS. Holding the system vertically, the DS now becomes a Guitar Hero concert with the notes streaming on the left screen and the strumming being done with a guitar pick-shaped stylus on the right touch screen. No need to fret (bad guitar pun intended!), but you lefties out there can flip the screen and rock to your heart’s desire.

I played the game straight through on hard (all 25 songs) and only a few of them gave me real trouble. There are plenty of times where you don’t need to strum each note, and simply need to hold down the buttons to keep the music coming. If there is one complaint with this game, it’s that playing said notes can become complicated because the notes are too close together to play separately on the button peripheral and because the strumming doesn’t pick up sometimes, resulting in many a missed note and some lower scores that would have been higher if the song was played on the console version with the standard toy guitar.

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