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Guitar Hero 2


Labeled With  guitar hero 2 xbox360 red octane
Written by DM on Thursday, May 03 2007

If you have been hiding under a rock for the last three years, or just do not take notice of specialty games, then you may have missed out on the whole Guitar Hero phenomenon when it originally hit the Playstation 2. You may have even missed the craze when the sequel was released. Well, now that the game has gone next-gen, it is time to stop and take a look. I can tell you this though, most of the time when a game includes its own specialized peripheral, it is a safe bet that it will sell well enough to break even, at the very least. In fact, games with their own specialized controllers almost always have above average game play, as well. Games like Samba de Amigo, Duck Hunt, and Dance Dance Revolution come to mind, and those titles are all big hits. This leaves Guitar Hero 2 with pretty big shoes to fill. Well, Guitar Hero 2 is not only “above average,” but the words “average” and “Guitar Hero” don’t frequently collide in the same sentence. It is hard to open this review without giving away my opinion of the game ahead of time, but GH literally rocks, and you will rock while playing it, and maybe a bit longer even after you put it down.

For those of you who played the game on the Playstation 2, let me stop you before you ask. All of the songs, sights, and sounds from the PS2 version of GH have been included in the Xbox360 edition. That is to say, they all made it but not in-tact. Every song has undergone a facelift of sorts, with the sights beefed up to next-gen level, and the sound turned digital.

While most developers who port games to the next-gen are usually just looking for a quick buck, it seems the coders at Red Octane and Harmonix actually took their time and did things right. Firstly, like I mentioned, the graphics have been cranked up significantly. Textures have been high-ressed and cleaned up, character and object models have added detail, and the whole shebang has been pumped up to HD resolution. Details that were previously hard to see or non-existent are now plain as day. ON top of that, brand new light effects akin to those seen in real rock concerts have been added. Although keep in mind that all this is hard to see unless you are observing another player rock out, you will be concentrating so hard on hitting the notes that you will likely never actually look anywhere but the note indicator.




The basic game play in Guitar Hero 2 is simple. As you listen to some of your favorite rock, hard rock, classic rock, and glam-rock, songs of all time, you will see before you, on the screen, what looks like the cross-section of a guitar’s neck. As the music plays, icons will slide towards the section of the guitar’s neck that is closest to you on the screen. As soon as the icon passes a certain line, you must press down the corresponding button on the neck of your plastic guitar controller, while also hitting the “strum” toggle switch-bar at the bottom of the guitar controller. It sounds complicated, but after a few minutes, it is not only natural, but extremely addicting. Let me take this opportunity to say that Guitar Hero 2 makes you feel so much like you are you actually playing real notes on a real guitar, that sometimes you downright forget that the notes that are actually playing through your speakers have nothing to do with your finger movements. Yes, you literally forget that all you are responsible for is making sure that the buttons are depressed at the right time in order to keep a certain part of the song playing. The guitar controller has six buttons on the neck, and it even includes a whammy bar, which is placed strategically next to the strum toggle switch-bar. One of the hardest things to do in GH2 is to leave the damn whammy bar alone when you start really getting into a song. Most times it will just make you screw up a perfect streak of notes.

The game has four levels of difficulty, easy, medium, hard, and expert. Easy uses three neck buttons on the guitar controller, medium uses four neck buttons, and hard and expect both use all five neck buttons. You may think that this makes for easy pickens, but I am here to tell you that if you complete the game on medium, consider yourself lucky. Each song gives you a rating from one to five stars, and if you can beat any significant number of songs with all five stars on the medium setting then you are a true GH virtuoso. Hard, which is not even the most difficult setting, will have you pulling your hair out before you even finish the first set of songs.

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Guitar Hero II


 
 
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