The Guitar Hero franchise is a phenomenon. But as the saying goes, you’re only as good as your last game. In the console realm, Activision’s Guitar Hero lost the last round to EA’s Rock Band, which upped the guitar-strumming ante with drums, bass, and singing.

World Tour is Activision’s response, ported to the Mac by Aspyr, and in most respects, it rocks. You can play lead guitar, plus lay down bass grooves, pound on the drums, or steal all the glory as the lead singer. Unfortunately, you’ve got to bring your own USB instruments--but we’ll get to that a little later.

The best part of World Tour is its soundtrack. More than 80 songs span 40 years of quality rock and rolling. Highlights are too numerous to mention, but let’s just say anyone who doesn’t get excited about playing “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” “Living on a Prayer,” and “Eye of the Tiger” must be dead inside.

Four-player action requires you to track down the drum and mic controllers from another system.

The recording studio feature is an appealing addition--you can bring up a blank musical sheet and lay down notation for guitar and percussion, gradually building an original composition, which you can then play in the game. It’s probably more enticing for console gamers, since the composing process is awkward, especially for GarageBand-savvy Mac users. But adding extra songs to the game’s soundtrack is a cool novelty.

World Tour’s glaring problem on the Mac is its lack of hardware. Aspyr is selling this one as the game only--no bundles that include all the instruments, or even just the guitar. Unless you’re happy playing with your Mac’s keyboard, you’ll need to use USB instruments from another system’s version of Guitar Hero World Tour or Rock Band. These bundles are around $90 (for the Xbox 360 version) on Amazon. But at that point, you have to ask yourself why you’d buy the Mac version of a game that’s already been perfectly well implemented on those other systems.