Rock Out With Your... Well, You Know... - Guitar Hero 2

It hurts me to admit, but I completely missed out on the original Guitar Hero era back in the day (2005). GH is basically the rocker man’s Dance Dance Revolution. All the Friday nights of rocking out with my trusty Six String Air Guitar in whitie tighties were fun, but now you can do it with a cooler and more solid controller that’s shaped like an actual guitar (only not as big). Harmonix has been able to create a music game that’s even more addicting than DDR, where you can literally shred to tons of favorite tunes, and never have to take a guitar lesson to do it.

You Really Got Me Baby…
I always remembered trying to play the original GH at the Best Buy and Wal-Mart displays anytime that I’d pass through, but I’ve always felt stupid at store demo stations so I never really understood how it was so fun until Guitar Hero 2 came out in November 2006. I didn’t really get excited for GH2 until a certain group was announced to have a song included in the new song list. That’s when I counted down the days to jam out to Avenged Sevenfold’s Beast and the Harlot from their 2005 hit album City of Evil, my favorite album of that year. When the first Guitar Hero came out, a lot of artists that people wanted in the game seemed skeptic about the success of the game. It didn’t stop Joan Jett, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Incubus, and others from making the track list on the first GH, but with the success it had, there are even more favorites on GH2. Guitar Hero 2 has more than 50 new tracks with song favorites by Black Sabbath, The Police, Cheap Trick, Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Avenged Sevenfold, Rush, Butthole Surfers, Lamb of God, Anthrax, and a lot more.

How Do They Do THAT!?
There are three game modes where an even amount of your shredding time will be spent in. In the Career mode, you pick the name of your band, one of several characters, and what guitar to play before picking a difficulty setting and going out on tour with your band. There are four modes in GH2: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert. On the controller, there are five fret buttons and the strum bar, plus the whammy bar. Only four fret buttons are used on the Easy and Medium settings, while Hard and Expect will test your coordination and speed using all five frets. Using the controller is easy, but mastering every song is anything but. There is a board on the screen where the color coordinated fret buttons scroll down. In order to hit the chord, you hold the button down that’s falling on the screen, and as it comes to the five empty circles of the same color at the bottom, hit the strum bar. You’ll learn that as you start in the Hard and Expert difficulties, you won’t even pay attention to the open circles, as you’ll be able to feel when to hit each fret.

As if it were any secret, you're trying to hit as many of the right notes in a row as you can. So hit every note perfectly and you played a perfect song. Every note and chord you hit gives you a certain amount of points, and for every 10 notes in a row, you get a x2 multiplier. Hit 10 notes in a row two more times and you'll have a score multiplier of x4. Instead of just trying to get five stars on every song, getting the highest score possible is more challenging as there are different ways of increasing your final point score every time. On the right side of the fret board is the Rock meter. As you hit notes the meter will go up. So every time that you mess up the rock meter goes down, and mess up enough times and it'll hit zero and you'll fail the song and have to start over again. There are certain parts of each song where the fret circles are shaped in a star. Hit all of the star frets in a row without missing a note and your star power meter will rise, which is right above the rock meter. Once your star power is halfway filled or more, tilt the controller up a little bit and the motion sensor will trigger your star power, highlighting all of the notes and doubling your score multiplier up to x8 as long as you don't miss any notes for a short amount of time. It's kind of funny triggering star power on Hard and Expert modes when I confuse my colors and their buttons and mess up really bad.

In the Medium, Hard, and Expert difficulties, there are four songs plus an encore per venue to beat. After every show, you earn a cut of the profits after damages and stuff are taken out and you can buy new characters, guitars, and songs at the music store. You’re rated on each song, and are given a recap at the end of the song that shows how good you played with a percentage and a star rank. It will also give a percentage of how well each section of the song was played and how many notes were hit out of the total notes. If you get stuck on a song on a certain difficulty, go back and get five stars on every song in other difficulties to unlock hidden guitars.

Even better than playing by your self, you can play different guitar tracks in multiplayer. So while you’re knocking out that killer solo on the guitar, you can have a friend playing the bass line or rhythm. I haven’t had a chance to play out multiplayer for very long, but what is there is fun. There are songs in GH2 that will drive you to break your guitar in half because you can’t nail a certain solo, or even the first few frets in the song (most of the time on Expert). That’s where the Training mode comes in. The first GH didn’t have it, and I’d probably had broken three or four controllers if I’d owned the first. You can play certain parts of every song, and slow them down to three different speeds. Now if there are some tricky sections you can’t get past or a solo that’s eating you up, you can take a break and practice it so when your friends come over to play multiplayer you can make them cry.

Rock Out With Your… Well, You know…
If you haven’t gotten a chance to play Guitar Hero 2 and you want to, quit goofing around and get it. GH2 is as addicting, if not more, than Dance Dance Revolution, without as much perspiration. If you don’t play guitar or have no intention or motivation of playing the guitar, how else are you going to rock out to some of the best rock tunes around? If you don’t have a PS2 anymore, GH2 is going to be released on Xbox 360 sometime soon with some added songs (Dead! off of My Chemical Romance’s new album is one of them), as well as downloadable songs.

happy gaming