Guitar Hero II
April 9,2007 - The Guitar Hero franchise, for the uninitiated, is a game built upon the dream of picking up an axe and shredding in front of thousands. Certainly the axe you’ll be holding is a plastic one and the audience watching reduced to those sitting around your living room, but the shredding lingers on. The reason you’ll want to own this game is for the moment when you know a song so well that the on-screen notes flow through your tired nubs and all you hear is well-timed rock perfection. And damn is it addictive.

The basic gameplay in Guitar Hero isn’t so complicated. You have a guitar shaped controller with which you play notes that scroll from the middle of the screen and down a fret board. These notes correspond to the five colored fret buttons on your controller. You simply hold the fret button down and strum the note as it’s reaching the marker at the bottom of the screen. Those who have never played the games will find that the difficulty here ramps up rather quickly, though. The original Guitar Hero had a smooth and gradual curve that helped players graduate from basement wannabe to rock star. In Guitar Hero II, that curve is instead a wall, which will be hit by many at high speeds when entering the Hard setting. It’s possible to get over it with lots of practice time and effort, but it will definitely turn some players off.

What you get in the Xbox 360 version is essentially the same game that appeared on the PS2, only with a few additions. The game has a Career and Quick Play modes for Single Player, as well as a Practice mode to hone your shredding skills. If you want to jam out with your friends you’ll actually have to invite them over to play, as the game only features split screen co-operative and versus play. There are no online multiplayer co-op or versus modes, but there are online leaderboards that keep track of high scores for every song, as well as a global career score that adds the scores of all of the songs you’ve played together. It’s nice to finally be able to compare your scores to other players and not have to worry too much that their scores may be falsified. Let’s hope this will lead to a decline in amateur YouTube videos, as well. Harmonix, in their infinite wisdom, has also added the ability to download content for the game. At the moment there’s nothing there, but hopefully soon there will be more songs, themes, and pictures to download.

The Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II gets an all new guitar controller. It’s based on the Gibson X-plorer guitar. With its sharp angles it’s definitely a stark contrast to the rounded body of the old SG controller. The differences aren’t purely cosmetic though. The X-plorer guitar is a little bit lighter than the SG controller, but it has a much more solid feel to it. The neck is sturdier and the fret buttons are raised a bit higher. The frets are also closer together, so that orange button isn’t such a stretch anymore. The X-plorer’s strap hooks to the back of the guitar body, at the base of the neck. This means that it hangs a bit differently than the SG did. It’s not bad, it’s just different. The big disappointment with the new controller is its lack of wireless functionality. RedOctane may release a wireless version at some point, but for now you’ll have to make due with a potentially too short USB cord. Overall, this is the superior controller, and it’s obvious that the designers listened to the fans. Interestingly, the X-plorer has a jack to accommodate an effects pedal. How exactly this will work isn’t clear yet, but being able to throw in your own effects would be a nice touch.

Everything looks cleaner, sharper, and more detailed in this next-gen version. The game still retains the same overall style that the PS2 version had, but it’s more polished. This having been said, Guitar Hero II isn’t really taxing the 360’s graphics processor, and that’s fine, because you really won’t have all that much time to pay attention to the background when you’re trying to melt faces.

Like the graphics, the audio quality has been mastered. Things like the distortion effects and amp hisses are easier to hear now, whereas on the PS2 version they were more or less lost. The song selection is really very strong. All of the songs from the PS2 version are here along with ten new songs that are exclusive to the Xbox 360 version of the game. As with any rhythm game, the songs will only rock as hard as you let them, and there are a fair number of duds and obscure tracks. Most of the memorable tracks are well-done covers of the originals, and aside from a few like the Rage Against the Machine track, they’re not bad. Still, this is hopefully going to change with future installments. The more original songs they can include, the more authentic the game.

If you own the PS2 version of Guitar Hero II the ten extra songs and the downloadable content are still reason enough to look into the 360 version. The new guitar controller is also definitely worth owning. There’s also a lack of sufficient online play, a controller with a chord to tangle, and that icky feeling that comes with any great game that isn’t yet a sequel. For the most part, the new additions outweigh all of that, and for many, this is a game well worth the ninety dollar loss.

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