The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Konami’s newly announced musical game, “Rock Revolution,” were the stars of the show at the publisher’s recent media event.

But Konami also announced versions for the Wii and Nintendo DS.

I figured they weren’t showing those at the event until I accidentally bumped into the DS one. Tucked away in a corner — it was literally next to a closet and the assistant producer on the console version didn’t realize it was there — was a touch-screen “Rock Revolution.”Having seen “Guitar Hero: On Tour“ in action, I was anxious to compare.“Rock Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” take very different approaches to translating what’s essentially the same mechanic to Nintendo’s handheld. Whereas “On Tour” developer Vicarious Visions worked with Nintendo to develop a hardware add-on, Konami’s team worked within the established constructs of the DS hardware.

The result is…interesting. There were only a handful of songs available in the demo; I decided on Blink 182’s “All The Small Things” because of its simplistic chord structure, as I hadn’t used the interface before. As it turns out, though, chord structure matters little to how the gameplay pans out. The bottom screen is where the action’s at. Four guitar chords are spread out on the screen and directional notes (not unlike those found in Konami’s own “Dance Dance Revolution”) scroll from left to right. You flick the stylus over the arrow in the instructed direction as it crosses a designated circle on the right hand of the screen. It only took me a few seconds to fail out completely.

My second go-round, I made it to the end of the song, but not without plenty of screwing up along the way. The touch screen did not appear particularly responsive to my stylus movements, and that issue flared most when there were a series of fast notes on the screen. The cause seemed to be a simple case of tiny hit detection. Hopefully, future builds will be a little more forgiving with that.

I didn’t have any headphones on me, nor were any provided at the event, so I can’t speak to the quality of the music in portable “Rock Revolution.” I am, however, told the DS version has a singing mechanic, encouraging gamers to sing while playing on the touch screen. That might be difficult without lyrics on either screen but it’s a novel idea.

The folks behind “Guitar Hero” said they once prototyped a touch screen-only version of their game, but decided to scrap it. “Rock Revolution” is too far along for that to happen, which means we can try out both methods this fall.